After two years of development, my team recently launched the RewardMob app on Google Play and the Appstore. I am so thankful to all of awesome people that joined me on this journey and my wife who encouraged me pursue my dream!

Along the way, I learned a few very valuable lessons that I would like to share. Some lessons I had to learn the hard way, but others could have been avoided had I been less stubborn and listened to the experiences shared by entrepreneurs in the past. RewardMob has been the most challenging startup that I have ever taken part in, but it has also been the most fun and an incredibly rewarding personal experience.

A little background first! I am not the technical guy in the operation. I do believe, however, that it is important to surround yourself with experts.

What is RewardMob?

RewardMob is a tournament based reward platform for mobile games. We can turn any mobile game into a free casual eSport where players compete in tournaments for cash and prizes.

Two years ago, the concept was very different and a lot less polished. When I first came up with the original idea, I bounced it around with some of my friends and they all thought it sounded pretty cool! I decided I would build it, how hard could it be! I contacted a few local development studios and was blown away by the cost. I thought I would outsmart them and do it myself by hiring an off shore development team in India. We negotiated a price that could be paid weekly and we were on our way. Outsourcing seemed perfect!

After the first 3 months of working very early mornings and very late nights, I realised that outsourcing wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. At this point, I was still running my other business which was very demanding and I was starting to get burnt out!

Maybe all of the books and articles that I read were right! You really do need a technical co-founder to in order to run a successful tech start up! Thankfully I listened.

Lesson 1 — If you are a non-technical co-founder: YOU NEED A TECHNICAL CO-FOUNDER!

I met with 9 different developers from various backgrounds and I thought I had finally found my guy. He had just exited a successful start up and was sitting on a nice chunk of cash! I just killed two birds with one stone! This almost seamed too good to be true. We started working together, formed a new company, and we were ready to roll. However, he came to me one day shortly after and said he had some serious personal issues and we could no longer work together. This meant I was now stuck with the legal bills from creating the company and had also wasted two months of effort trying to structure everything properly so we were both happy. It took me a week to regroup, but I decided the idea was too great to turn back now. I started searching again for the elusive technical co-founder. On the bright side, I had my expert off-shore team on the job, so everything would be just fine!

Lesson 2 — You are going to hit walls. Lots of them. View each one as an opportunity to improve. Every time we hit a wall it made us stronger. If it wasn’t for my bad math skills, we wouldn’t be in the place we are today. Inside joke for another post.

Out of the blue one day, I got a call from a proper sounding English guy asking if I was still looking for a Technical Co-Founder. He sounded pretty cool, so I asked him to come in for an interview. I met Colin and we instantly hit it off. On top of being an easy guy to get along with, he had a very impressive background and was working at a job that wasn’t satisfying his creative juices or his bank account. Little did he know at the time, start ups don’t exactly come flush with cash. However, we decided to join forces and he started working part time on the project with me.

I was very proud to let Colin know that the project was well on its way and, with a little guidance on his part, our top team of out-sourcing professionals would have our app out the door in no time!

Obviously, the first thing Colin did was take a look at the code and database structures that had been built. Before the end of the day, he came to me with some grim news: I was the proud owner of a pig with lipstick. No matter how pretty you dress it up, it’s still a pig. The result turned out to be total garbage — full of security vulnerabilities, slow and non-scalable. We tried to salvage what we had, but we soon decided it was better to scrap the entire thing and start from scratch. Yep! All that time and money wasted and all because I didn’t find my Technical Co-Founder first!

Lesson 3 — No matter how good of an idea outsourcing seems, refer to lesson number 1.

Not long after we fired our outsourcing team, Colin called me and said “I quit.”

My heart literally stopped. I thought “oh my God, not again.”

After a brief pause, I said “You’re kidding, right?”

“No, Mate. I can’t handle it anymore. So, I quit my job today so we can do this full time.”

For a brief second, it seemed like the end of the world! However, it turned out to be the most important decision Colin made, as it was that day that he took a leap of faith.

After that, we went out and raised enough money to get things off the ground. We hired a full-time front-end developer and started building again in-house. The way it should be done!

Lesson 4 — The leap of faith. At some point, you just have to go for it. Nothing is more motivational for two guys in their 40’s with families to feed, than not having a safety net anymore.

By now, we had our new plan all figured out! Our app had every bell and whistle imaginable and we were going to conquer the world. Then we launched the app and learned an entirely new lesson.

Lesson 5 — Until you test your project, everything you thought was correct is just an assumption.

Your clients/users are the only people that will be able to tell you if your assumptions are correct or not.

You have probably heard of MVP or Minimum Viable Product before. That’s not just a suggestion. You need to build the absolute minimum working prototype and test it as soon as possible. Continue to iterate and test over and over again. If the results are favorable, continue to develop. If not, then cut your losses quickly.

From our first launch, we realised we had two problems: Our original branding didn’t work and we really didn’t understand what our users wanted.

In early 2017, we re-branded to RewardMob and created a new core loop. After several months of successful testing, we launched our app on the Appstore and Google Playstore in August.

We have now given out over $17,000 dollars in cash and prizes and the company has grown to seven Employees. We are running tournaments weekly and working on adding more new games every week.

I hope my article inspires you in some way to follow your dreams in your quest to achieve success, but first — find yourself a Technical Co-Founder!

Cheers,



Todd