Bastian Bergmann: Helping Organizations to Identify, Understand, and Engage their Ideal Audience

Bastian Bergmann is a co-founder of Solsten, a deep tech company that uses psychology and AI to help businesses create human-centric experiences. Bastian began his professional career with Boston Consulting Group, where he advised Fortune 1000 companies globally on their digital transformation and strategies. However, Bastian always wanted to have a more direct impact, so he moved to Berlin and founded his first company, WATTx, an AI and Machine Learning startup incubator.

At WATTx, Bastian collaborated with longtime friend Joe Schaeppi, an expert in psychology and UX. They employed psychometric testing to gain insights into creating the most effective sub-teams, resulting in a massive 300% increase in team performance. This accomplishment made it clear that leveraging psychometrics could have a profound business impact.

Bastian and Joe founded Solsten in 2018 to address the deficit in the level of human understanding that is incorporated into digital products. By combining AI with highly valid psychological assessment data, Solsten aims to make more engaging, healthier, and sustainable experiences a reality for more than 3 billion people who play video games daily.

“Solsten is very closely connected to the journey of my co-founder Joe. His life-long pursuit of understanding what experiences allow people to unlock their highest potential and achieve a better version of themselves led to Solsten’s inception and initial focus on video games,”- reflects Bastian.

They strategically started in gaming because of the fundamental role “play” has on the human species. Play facilitates learning, minimizes inhibitions, and increases neuroplasticity, and video games are the only digital medium in which comprehensive cognitive assessment is possible.

Empowering Clients

Solsten empowers its clients to identify, understand, and engage their ideal audience for any experiences they want to create or improve. By using Solsten’s deep audience intelligence products, marketing teams now have a shared north star of who their actual target consumers are and how to provide the most resonating experiences to them. For instance, Mobilityware turned to Solsten’s product, Navigator, early in the game development process for their new puzzle title, Candy Harvest. Before writing a single line of code, the game team sought to understand the market potential and prospective audience who would be interested in this concept. Powered by Navigator’s insights, the game team was able to accelerate the game development process dramatically. Instead of a typical 2-3 year schedule, Candy Harvest was launched in just 8 months.

Taking a Different Approach

Bastian and Solsten are taking a different approach in a world where consumer data is king. Solsten’s platform enables companies to understand consumers as actual human beings instead of viewing them as numbers. They help companies globally that provide a consumer experience to deeply understand their audience’s innate drivers, motivations, needs, or values. Bastian believes that creating resonating experiences is paramount in this experience economy, where people value experiences over goods and services.

“Ultimately, the goal is to make experiences more resonating, and thereby healthier and regenerative, for human beings – meaning for each and every one of us as daily consumers of digital experiences and content.”

Tackling Major Challenges

Bastian believes that gaming has become increasingly difficult, with a plethora of options available to consumers and players, making the competition for their attention more intense than ever before. Building a game is a costly endeavor, and success is not guaranteed. Furthermore, marketing expenses to attract users have skyrocketed following Apple and Google’s privacy changes.

The Pandemic

Unlike other industries, gaming saw minimal downside from Covid-19. On the contrary, people playing video games increased by up to 30% during this period. However, the more significant challenge for game developers and publishers is now. A looming recession is putting pressure on consumers’ discretionary spending, which in turn puts pressure on the financial viability of the individual business. In addition, the battle for consumers’ attention is at an all-time high, and companies are faced with a challenging dichotomy: the desire to cut spending to preserve cash and the need to invest to remain competitive.

In this market environment, Solsten is like an insurance policy for companies. It’s the go-to company for those who want to provide meaningful experiences to their users, customers, and employees. Bastian and his team have incorporated a high level of human understanding into

digital products, resulting in optimal experiences for users and companies.

 The Future

Solsten has already expanded beyond gaming, with a focus on brands as well as healthcare in the next five years.

“Specifically, you will see real video games be administered in the context of mental health, powered by Solsten, to deliver patients the care they need while meeting them where they are at,”– explains Bastian.

Solsten is now establishing itself as the system of record for audience intelligence, propelling customer engagement and growth to new levels by ushering in an era of fully adaptive, truly personalized experiences that are sustainable for businesses and healthy for customers.