Gamers Grid

Technical co-founder stepped down, no investor was willing to give us runway until we got the new version of the app out and our debt we were no longer able to pay our bills.
Looking back on things, the following would've helped our business sustain longer:

1. Start generating revenue sooner, cash is the blood of a business and if small revenue will stretch out your runway
2. Don't hire a dev shop for MVP, the fact that we couldn't update the front end of our app was a major kill
3. Don't spend investment money until it clears your back account

After fundraising for a few months the majority of response from investors have been: you're too early or Consumer is too hard. There have been a few times when people have asked, what else can you match people with besides gamers, so we're think of doing just that, white-labeling our software to companies to help them match consumers with their services or teams.

I have a meeting with an instructor at Orange Theory next week so we'll see where this goes

After weeks of hearing excuses from our supposed investor, we realized we weren't going to see one penny. We lost our first hire and were looking at a mountain of credit card debt, we were running on fumes.

Luckily my uncle (who previously invested) agreed to fund us $20k which was enough to manage the CC and pay for the graphic design contractor we hired.

I kept working full time on the company and trying to raise capital to finish building the V1 but my Technical co-founder went back to working a job

The past months had been spent fundraising, we were looking for capital so that we can work on this full time and get out a V1 (We tried and tried again but the Indian company built an app that was highly flawed, don't hire Mobisoft).

We had an angel investor agree to fund our seed round which would give us enough runway for 12+ months, we were expecting to have the cash wired to us on March 18 but the investor said she would need a couple more weeks to figure out some banking issue but we were eager so quit our jobs, hired an engineer and a designer on contract and got to working on the V1

The majority of 2017 was spent trying to turn the MVP into a V1 and attempting to grow the platform's userbase numbers. What finally ended up working was reaching out to a YouTube content creator called Th3Jez and getting him on board to promote our app in his videos. This created a couple viral moments where we saw huge spikes in sign up, so much so that it crashed the app on 3 separate occasions. We now had a couple of thousand users signed up but the UI glitches got worse and we had to water down the matching algorithm just to keep the app running.

My friend introduced me to Gary in the summer of 2016 while the MVP was under development but it wasn't until January that Gary was able to join Gamers Grid as a Technical Co-Founder. This came at a perfect time because the MVP was falling apart, the Indian company wasn't really thrilled about fixing a product they paid for although performance was sub-par and users were often complaining about UI glitches

I officially formed the company 6 months before and after raising $25k from family I was able to hire a development company based in India to build out an MVP for iOS and Android. We released the MVP right on time at TwitchCon and were able to show off our app to thousands of gamers. The best thing about launching at TwitchCon is that we were able to validate the hypothesis, gamers playing all genres indeed find it hard to find the right people to play with and a lot of them don't even touch new games unless they have they friends already playing it

I was playing Battlefield Hardline but just wasn't enjoying it anymore after my friends stop playing, so I looked online for teammates but nothing, same happened for Star Wars: Battlefront then Project C.A.R.S. so I decided this wasn't an isolated problem and I knew I wasn't alone. I asked my friends what they thought of an app built like OkCupid but to help gamers find teammates and they agreed it could be a good idea. I designed a wireframe on an iPad and kept refining from there