Urban Hunt

After going full time on Urban Hunt, the more hours I put in to improving the product and accepting corporate partnerships, the more anxiety built up as I began to realise how bloated and complicated the app had become in such a short space of time.

As a developer, each day felt more agonising as I added more code to my already messy and bloated web app, fearing a day I would ran into a huge bug during a 100+ person scavenger hunt event and ruin my brand for future events.

Luckily, although many bugs came and went, the app never collapsed. It was proving too stressful though and my motivation to build new features was suffering.

I decided in May 2019 to start rebuilding the app from the ground up. As it had previously been a side project, I had botched it together to work on top of the Facebook API, making it difficult to organise my code the way I wanted.

While the re-build caused our growth to slow (but not dip) considerably, we were able to survive on what we had for a good 9 months. We even managed to pull off our biggest corporate deal ever for Marks & Spencer (a custom event for over 60 of their graduates) on the old app! Maybe there is a lesson there?

Thankfully, the day finally arrived when I was happy with our new version. It's been 1 month since our launch and sales have been better than ever. I re-vamped the sign up process, took the focus away from Facebook and am now working on ways to play our trails via other means such as SMS and Whatsapp! With the new app this is taking me a matter of days instead of the months it would have taken previously for each medium.

I'm also finally finding time to work on our trail creator program soo that others can use our system to make tails (and money) too!

I've learned that, although it may seem scary, a rebuild can be a delight. As long as you can sustain a long period of stagnant growth (likely if you are a small team and your efforts are not focused on growth), you will find that the outcome (as well as the process) is both refreshing and rewarding!

I no longer have the fear that my codebase sits on a weak foundation. I have renewed confidence to pitch to large corporates and propose huge 200+ team-bonding, brand marketing or graduate training events!

I'm super excited about this year for Urban Hunt and while the app is still a long way from where I want it, my mind and motivation are in a completely different place 😊