Mobo Games

I’ve been working on Mobo Games steadily for the past 4 years. It actually started as a side project to learn a new tech stack, but it evolved into a fleshed out business idea as I got more into the indie-hacking mindset.

I drew my original inspiration for Mobo Games from playing Jackbox games. When I first discovered one of their games (Drawful), I thought their use of phones as “controllers” for their games was such an innovative and creative idea. I also loved how easy it was for anyone (even non-gamers) to pick up and have fun playing their games.

There were two things that I found lacking in Jackbox games:

1. Lack of portability - Jackbox games work great in your living room, but they are difficult to play in other settings.
2. Deeper gameplay - Most Jackbox games are more on the simple side - which is great for larger groups of mostly casual gamers, but tends to limit the replay value for some of their games.

I made the goal to build out a collection of games and follow through with launching this as my first true indie hacker business. I have really enjoyed the creative process of designing new games and also developing a business strategy for these games, but I’d be lying if I said it was all easy. There have been many weeks of either beating myself up for not getting as much done over a weekend or just feeling super burnt out after a stressful day at my full-time job followed by even more coding on the side project.

I have leaned on the Indie Hackers community as a constant source of inspiration to keep me going. Seeing so many others working to achieve similar goals has been key to pushing me towards this milestone.

And as much as I have enjoyed getting to this launch milestone, I have tried to make it a priority to make sure I was enjoying the journey as well. I love wearing multiple hats and having sound understanding of both the business and technical sides of building and running an internet business. All of the small wins and learning along the way have been extremely rewarding on their own. Deploying my application in AWS for the first time, playtesting my game with friends, or even just shipping incremental features have all be smaller steps of the journey that made the next steps easier to push towards.

So far the launch has been pretty successful, we were able to get nearly 300 signups mostly from a single post to a small (12k member) community on Reddit. Our next steps will be to roll out our next games to our beat and then to start taking pre-orders for our games.

So I guess this post is really just a brief recap of my journey up to this point, and also it's really a thank you to this community for being the biggest external push for me to get to this beta launch milestone.

Want a beta invite?
Join our beta list at https://gomobo.app
or
Message me directly on Indie Hackers
or
Email me at [email protected]

Mobo Games was officially born (or whatever I was calling it at the time). My code repository is actually "board-free-games" which I thought was a clever name at the time...

This all started as a side project that met the following guidelines:

1. Help give me a place to learn some new technologies

2. Potentially turn into a viable business (my previous projects were fun and had users, but no path to meaningful revenue)