An Interview With TNT Dom - SDCC 2025

This interview has been minimally edited and condensed for clarity.

Dom's Role as CEO

JN: Can you tell us a little bit about your typical day as CEO, or if you don't have a typical day, your typical week? What do you consider your main responsibilities? What are you spending your time on?

Dom: I think a typical week always starts with planning first. On Monday mornings is where I have a little bit more time to myself, do a little bit more deep, strategic thinking. I'll plan out the week and list out all the things I want to get done for the week. Monday is always having a lot of catch-ups with different teams, trying to set goals and making sure I can be as helpful as possible and solve any issues that we're facing, which as you know, always comes up. There's always a lot of different problems and challenges, big and small. So I think my role has always been helping the team get through those.

I take a lot of meetings at night since we have a globally distributed team and I'm based in Hong Kong. I start with the North America team in the U.S. and Canada, so most of the time, I do late night calls around 9pm to midnight. And then during the daytime is where I do work like replying to emails. Chief Email Officer, as we like to call it! I do spend a lot of time doing emails.

Personally, I do a lot of business development myself, focusing on getting new partners to work with Neopets so we can expand storytelling into other brands. I'm not a guy with tech background, but I'm trying my best to join some of the product meetings when I can, to understand more of a good infrastructure; that's one of our biggest challenges with reviving Neopets. So I step in an area where I need to grow more. I've been trying to invest more of my time to at least join a meeting to know more of the ins and outs of what's happening behind the scenes.

JN: How much is you being hands-on versus you relying on C-suite and other deputies? What would you say the mix is?

Dom: Well, I guess a product like Neopets, you have to be a lot more hands-on to understand all the nuances, especially with having a young and dedicated team that we're having now. We're all very passionate and we're all growing as a team, and we're still trying to figure out what's the best structure, what are the best processes. As you know, the Neopets team has been kind of understaffed for the past many years, until the past two years we have been more expanding the team, optimizing the processes. We're still learning a lot internally and externally how to make sure that we can have better communications, better prioritizations on what we do. So, that's why I think it's very important for me to be very hands-on so that we can continue to improve, and hopefully we can deliver more to the updates and the revival.

JN: Has your family been supportive of the late night schedule?

Dom: Yeah, very supportive, very understanding. I mean, even before Neopets I've kind of been been dealing with more global initiatives. So taking late night calls has been part of my routine work hours already. That's not so much a change. It's just that frequency has increased.

Neopets Revenue + Costs

JN: You mentioned in the May update that Neopets is "still a loss-making company." Imagining the revenue sources on the balance sheet, we think of "site," "mobile apps," "merch," maybe there's other line items there. What do you see as your biggest potential for not being loss-making?

Dom: Okay, so first of all, I want to clarify that we have closed the gap by a lot since two years ago, when we spun off as an independent studio. So there's nothing to worry about in terms of financial stability. I want to make sure that we clear the Elephante in the room!

We have good traction in terms of how we want to grow our revenue base. The biggest potential in the near term for the coming year, I would say, would be licensing and merch. We've spent quite a lot of time and effort trying to build that out and developing. Merch actually takes a lot of time, and it's not something that we have been doing internally as much in the past like five, six years. So ramping that up, learning all the tricks and all the skills that was needed, took a little bit more time. And then developing a program on the retail side and the licensing side typically needs at least like six to twelve months. So for the past year or two, I've been a lot more involved in that.

More recently, we have signed up with a licensing agency that has been helping us out on that front. Which we're getting a lot of interest and partnership requests. So we will be reaping a lot of these fruits hopefully by the end of this year, and a lot more in 2026. So those are great, near term upside that I see. I'm very hopeful that those can really help Neopets to create a marketing "flywheel" leveraging our licensees' reach and exposure, and getting a lot of our lapsed users to come back.

JN: And then, similarly, what are your biggest cost pressures in the near term?

Dom: I would say cost-wise it has been pretty stable. It has been normalized in a way that every month there's no surprises. I mean some of the times when we go to our conferences, where we do our marketing events, that's when normally there's some spikes. But apart than that, the majority of the costs are actually very stable and recurring.

JN: So the challenge is really just about increasing revenue?

Dom: Yeah, that has been the focus for the past two years. We've been focusing on growing the top line of revenue side. On a cost side, I don't see much pressure. It has been on track in terms of our projection and everything.

JN: Can you give us a rough distribution of how much the site, the mobile apps, and merch each contributes to your revenue?

Dom: Yeah, sure. So the classic site as a core experience, it still contributes I would say more than half of our revenue. That's Neocash revenue, premium revenue, and also advertisement revenues. And then mobile has been catching up a lot actually in the past six months. So around like 10-20% comes from mobile. And then on the merch and licensing side, we make up for the rest of the situation. So that's a rough breakdown of our main revenue streams.

JN: As part of the "New Era" announcement a couple years ago, you mentioned there were external investors in Neopets now. Who are they?

Dom: So external investors includes the management team. It was a management buyout, so the management team is basically the majority owners. So that's why it was structured as a spinoff, because team members came together, we wanted to rebuild, revive this IP, kind of like with NetDragon's support. And NetDragon actually still has a minority stake, and then provided some of the funding to kickstart to make sure that this spinoff works. And we definitely have NetDragon's blessing as well. So that's mainly the funding. We've also had what we would call a friends and family round, where there's a lot of individuals who believe in Neopets, or understand what Neopets is about, or they want to bet on the management team, or they are part of like friendly investors of NetDragon. So that's a different group.

JN: Do the the primary investors of the now-defunct Neopets Metaverse project, such as Avalanche, still have a financial interest?

Dom: No, so on the Web3 side of things, those investors are all in the Web3 project. So all those projects happened before the spinoff. So it's actually pretty clean cut on how things are working out. I'm not sure if they would be interested in the future, but it's not an active investor right now.

Reflections on the New Era

JN: It has been about two years—it was just before San Diego Comic-Con 2023—since you announced the "New Era." We'd like to reflect a little bit on that. What would you say has been your biggest success in these last two years?

Dom: Well, we definitely want to celebrate every small win. I would say there's still a long way for us to go. There's still a lot of work coming up for us. I think some of the successes that we want to celebrate as team is how we've been able to get through this whole transition. We have done a lot of foundational updates and upgrades to the internal systems. As you may know, when we spun off as an independent studio, it's actually basically merging three or four teams together. So bring three or four teams of people who worked on Neopets, under different capacity and under different business—

JN: —within the NetDragon umbrella?

Dom: Yeah, within the NetDragon umbrella. People that used to be at JumpStart, people on the Neopets team, people that were JumpStart but supporting the Neopets team, outsourced teams working with JumpStart on Neopets, and the NetDragon team.

JN: So it really wasn't a clean break.

Dom: I mean, it was a clean break.

JN: Well, in terms of work streams.

Dom: Yeah. In terms of work streams, it's a merge of like three different team cultures, but that also led to why we have a globally distributed team structure. We're trying to make sure we have the right talent that can take over all of the key pillars of Neopets, and make sure that transition is smooth. So, I feel like the biggest success has been actually the team coming together, and then setting our vision and priorities right. It took a little bit longer than I wanted to really get a lot of these things cleared out. And then what happened is, it's really having the right internal communication structure and then the processes. Because different teams used to have their own culture or processes they prefer, or even channels of communication. So it's a lot of behind-the-scenes work of how we can bring it all together. And then that also leads to the challenge of how we maintain team culture, the right communication, and there's so many time zones for us, but those are some challenges that we're still facing. And might always face, and that's why I always still have late night calls into midnight almost every day, just to help smooth in these communications.

JN: Conversely, what would you say is your biggest regret, one thing you wish you could do differently with the hindsight you have now?

Dom: There's definitely a lot of areas we have learned that could be improved in the future. I wouldn't say there's any regret. Some things, if we hadn't tried it out, if we didn't have the hypothesis, we wouldn't know.

What we're trying to do is bring in a more of a startup culture to the Neopets team. As this spinoff, independent studio now, we're trying to iterate faster, we want to try out more things. We understand that there's pillars through the whole Neopets revival, and at the core is the revival of "Neopets Classic," which is the 25-year-old game we're all playing. But how to revive it, how to prioritize different initiatives and the many, many things on the to-do list?

I think there has been shifting focus on what needs to be done to have a better balance between what the core users want and how do we make sure we just let everyone stay engaged. How do we have a better way to fight a lot of the internal challenges in terms of game balances, inflation problems, all the bugs out there, mobile conversion. I mean, every page on Neopets, there's some problem that's tied to it. So, how to prioritize what to fix. And then that also comes with a lot of learnings. Every time we do something, we reveal more things that are tied to that.

And I think one of the things that we've learned to do—we need to learn to do better—is to have better understanding that when we want to chase something, what's the impact? I think now after two years, we have a lot better understanding, but if not for a lot of the initiatives that we've tried, we probably wouldn't know. So some of the things we delivered might not be as fast as we wanted it. But every time we change something, we don't want to just patch it up. We see that if there's some infrastructure update or foundational update to the database or codebase, it needs to happen so that we can gain more efficiency in the long run. So we have been making a lot of kind of like "investments," but sometimes it might not be seen by our community or from an output perspective. But I would say a lot of the foundational structure has been upgraded or built from the ground up already. I think what we've learned from the past, that when we just try to patch it up, it will be similar to what has been happening on Neopets the past 10 years, just lead us to much bigger problems. Instead, bite that bullet.

JN: How would you say your vision for Neopets has changed from when you announced the "New Era" to where it is today?

Dom: I think a few years ago, something that changed is we naively believed that we could expand into new form factors sooner.

JN: What do you mean, like mobile apps?

Dom: Yeah, mobile apps, launching new games. I mean, the things that we've launched is like the games that we have in the peripheral in the past already. And then back then, we thought: just launch those so that we would have that. That returning users coming back to Classic, they wouldn't want to play Classic because of the reasons they graduated from it in the first place. Playing our mobile games would be a way for them to experience Neopets in a more modernized way, at least for the mobile-first generation.

But we realized that what most of our users care most about: it's still Classic. There's a nostalgia, they want to come back. I mean, that strategy with mobile games, it still works, but when they come back and then play a mobile game that's not completely related to Classic, sometimes it's not exactly why they come back. That's why I focus on Classic and making it easier for returning users to kind of get a glimpse back into their childhood. Uncovering their childhood accounts, and they can say hi to their childhood pets, and continue their journey in Neopets, it has been a much bigger focus for us now. We're definitely doubling down and allocating more resources there.

I think we started some initiatives on the adjacencies a little bit too soon. That's been part of the learning, that we should dedicate more resources in reviving the core. In the beginning, we didn't know that the core is actually so...rotten, as far as like, it's gonna take a lot more effort to fix it first. At first, we thought was like, okay, the floor is ready, it's just a little bit unstable, while we try to build more on top. Okay, no, we have to fix the structural issues first before we can build it on top. That's what leads to NeoPass, leads to other things now connecting different parts of Neopets, and I think that's a longer term strategy to Neopets, like a fuller offering in the future.

Content Updates

JN: We've been noticing at Jellyneo that Tales of Dacardia and Faerie Fragments have been on a cycle of events for a while, and there hasn't been too many of what we might call "permanent updates." Is that an intentional strategy, or what's the plan there?

Dom: That's kind of related to what I was mentioning just now. We've been allocating more resources and shifting to focusing on fixing the floor first, which is the classic game. In hindsight, it's kind of like business 101. But when we took over two years ago, we had a slightly different hypothesis. But now that we've learned more, we realize we need to fix more of the foundational stuff before we can work on things like Tales of Dacardia and Faerie Fragments.

So we have been focusing more on live operations and event cycles. But we are trying to introduce more game features slowly; we don't want to end up in content wheel-chasing, and then we're not improving the gameplay when we're just chasing new content for the next chapter, especially for big updates. It requires a lot of development power, but it doesn't really add that much depth to the gameplay. So we're like, okay, there's a gazillion things that could be fixed on Classic, which our community cares most about, let's focus on those first and make sure that our core userbase is as engaged.

We want to make Neopets as fun and as engaging as possible. What's the best way to do it? Before, we thought maybe introducing a new mobile game as a standalone game could be part of that. But now we also realize that there's so much that could be done for the classic site, that can also achieve the same, but will be appreciated by probably more of the community. So we've been trying out different things to see what helps Neopets to rebuild our brand, to revive, reconnect, build a better bridge so that we can revive the whole Neopets brand together.

JN: The Void Within plot is resuming next week. What can you tell us? What's changed?

Dom: So we took in a lot of feedback. When we first launched the plot, it's something that the team hasn't done in a long time. So it's definitely a huge undertaking. And then some of the initial feedback we heard is the plot is a bit too grindy, that we don't want to be grinding so hard for some of the experiences. So we made better balances for, for example, the Hospital shifts to make it easier and less grinding. And, I'll say, make it more palatable for the community to experience the plot at their own pace, so it doesn't have to feel as pressured. So I think that's the main feedback that we wanted to do.

And we also wanted to make it not overlap with too many major events, so that it doesn't feel like there's too many things happening at the same time and that it's actually diluting on both sides. August is not a traditional Neopets event season for us, so that's why we decided to relaunch in August. There was also some delays and postponement, but it's also, like, how we can deliver a plot in a more efficient manner but also not make players feel like they need to grind through it. That's one of the biggest things we want to deliver in this upcoming chapter.

JN: What's your current stance on or relationship with neo_truths?

Dom: To be honest, internally even in the team, we have a lot of active discussions on what should the stance be. On one hand, on one of the camps, maybe we can work more closely with this person or this group on turning their efforts into being an official hacker helping us to improve the security and the backend. On the other hand, we also know that there's a lot of leaks of information we might want to shut down.

But I would say it's actually a balance, because we could get a lot of tips. And this helps us with the botting problem, and to close some security loopholes as neo_truths reports them to us. We have actually fixed a lot of things with some internal investigations with the leads from certain leaks. That actually helped us fix a lot of those. So on a security level we're definitely less worried now. I think there has been less leaks and less sensitive stuff that we used to not know why things are happening than three years, four years ago, but now we have a pretty good grasp of a lot of things. So we've been able to patch up a lot of those, make a lot of improvements. But whether we want to work more closely with neo_truths or what...

JN: So there's no active conversation? It's just sometimes you receive reports? Is that a fair characterization?

Dom: We do have exchanges. Actually, I think it has been more collaborative in the past year. I think in the past, the teams are very reluctant in mentioning or even dealing with this. But, just like with our whole community, we are trying to be more transparent. We try to be more direct and build a bridge. And from the way I see it, neo_truths is part of the community, probably a very passionate fan or could be former TNT member, and so forth. There's a lot of theories out there, but it doesn't matter. neo_truths is, like, very passionate, cares a lot about Neopets. In a different way, I would say, from the mainstream way of showing passion. But I would say that neo_truths involvement has helped us in many different ways. I will say it has been more collaborative. We do have follow-ups as well where we do certain investigations and try to fix more of it. And then during those fixes, neo_truths actually will have less access to certain parts, and it seems like it's moving in the right direction.

JN: Do you know how neo_truths has access? Or does someone on your team know how they have access?

Dom: This is quite technical. I would say that the team is not too worried, because more sensitive and live things are not accessible. But, I don't really know how. It's too technical.

Closing Thoughts

JN: Any other comments you'd like to go on the record?

Dom: I think these are great questions. We are planning to announce more of a two-year reflection. What we're trying to do is communicate more roadmaps and what we're planning to do for the coming years. And then we want to commit to things that we will fix. I think in the past, there has been some delays in our promises. There are some overpromising and underdelivering. We're trying to fix those issues. It ties to what I'm saying earlier. I mean, I think a lot of the over promises have been an oversight from how we evaluate the situation, how much effort a lot of these fixes or initiatives would take. But I think after like two years, the team has much better grasp of the intricacies. And now that with a lot of the foundational updates and changes to our public communication, to the system, to the codes, we have been having much better ways to evaluate and estimate the workload of initiatives that's outcoming. So I think we'll be on track and I'm trying to get the team to commit to delivering a more practical roadmap so that our community can understand what we're working on.

And then we're committing to having more transparent updates, when things are happening, when things are going great, but also when things are going south and want to let the community know why we make certain decisions. If we're shifting priorities, what they are. I think what we want to let everyone know is that the team at Neopets are very, very passionate, and we all want the site to be much better. And we all know that there's still a lot of work to be done. So definitely step by step, sprint by sprint, feature by feature, we're trying our very best. Sometimes, it might not be as obvious from a gamer point of view, or from a community point of view. But we hope that the past two years of effort will start to reap the benefits, and it will be more obvious in these upcoming updates. So we're very, I mean, I'm personally very optimistic about it, but hopefully we can rebuild that trust with the community. We can't do this alone.

We have been mentioning that we want to commit to more frequent updates, either in AMA format, blog update format, we're trying different things to see what's the most efficient and what's easiest to digest and also what's best for the transparency. It's also a cultural change, getting team members to be transparent. As a part of the leadership team, we want to own the mistakes that we have as well. We want to be critical, but also constructive on how we can help the team grow and also help communication process to be more seamless.

JN: Thank you, Dom!

Dom: Awesome. No problem. Thanks for having me today.