• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to footer

BobbyVoicu.com

Curious about stuff

  • Home
  • About Me
  • Blog / Archive

Entrepreneurship

Basecamp as Villains and an Email Subscription Form

April 28, 2021 By Bobby Voicu

Basecamp changed some rules about workplace politics discussions, forbidding specific subjects in their main channel in the company. Here’s a quote from Jason Fried’s blog post:

1. No more societal and political discussions on our company Basecamp account. Today’s social and political waters are especially choppy. Sensitivities are at 11, and every discussion remotely related to politics, advocacy, or society at large quickly spins away from pleasant. You shouldn’t have to wonder if staying out of it means you’re complicit, or wading into it means you’re a target. These are difficult enough waters to navigate in life, but significantly more so at work. It’s become too much. It’s a major distraction. It saps our energy, and redirects our dialog towards dark places. It’s not healthy, it hasn’t served us well. And we’re done with it on our company Basecamp account where the work happens. People can take the conversations with willing co-workers to Signal, Whatsapp, or even a personal Basecamp account, but it can’t happen where the work happens anymore.

DHH also follows with the message they sent internally, to try to explain the decision even more. Here’s New York Times’s take on it, as well.

Truth is every company gets to a point where some things need to be removed. I remember during the MavenHut days that we had a saying: “That’s why we can’t have nice things!”. There’s always someone trying to game the system and triggering a more strict rule, spoiling the fun for everyone. I assume this is what happened there, as well. Someone kept pushing politics, activism and the likes to everyone in the company and kept doing it even after being asked not to.

What makes Basecamp different is that they were always a champion of the people, of their epmployees. They were seen as the solution to the corporation machine. And I still think they are. But Twitter disagrees.

Other than that, have you seen the subscription form on their HEY World blogs? It’s only slightly skewed, not straight, to drive you crazy and get you to focus on the form. And, possibly, subscribe.

Feeling like in a movie

April 27, 2021 By Bobby Voicu

Sunday. London. Rain. Bar on the street level. Sitting at a table next to the window, with hot tea in front of me. Looking outside to people walking. Next to me, Cambridge Theater, with a big billboard presenting Chicago – The Musical. Music in the bar: John Lennon – Imagine.

I feel like I am in a movie. What’s next?

2021 update: I wrote the text above in 2008 to the day (Apr 27th, 2008). It was my first time in London and, since then, I visited the city often enough to develop a love/hate relationship with it. But in 2008 it genuinely felt like I was in a movie and that big things were waiting to happen. And they were. I was there for my training with Yahoo!, the company that employed me as their representative for Romania for a year. And it was my first job in a corporation, so I genuinely didn;t know what to expect.

I miss that feeling. One of the places I always felt like being in a movie and waiting for things to happen was a hotel pub in Dublin. Ireland. I went there often during my MavenHut years and I loved the feeling I had in the afternoon or evening when I could relax and enjoy a soup or a hot tea and people watch. And think of the big things that were to come.

Why I miss it? Of course, I miss travel. I miss seeing different people and hearing different languages. And I also miss thinking about the big things to happen, in a bar, at the street level, with a hot tea in front of me.

Oh, and the hotel in Dublin? Grand Canal. The pub: Gasworks Bar. Nothing amazing. But it didn’t matter for me. And their soup with soda bread was amazing.

photo credit, under licence, with no modifications

How People Get Rich in 2021

April 18, 2021 By Bobby Voicu

The best way to build wealth from scratch right now is building a company. So what are you waiting for?

In 1982 the most common source of wealth was inheritance. Of the 100 richest people, 60 inherited from an ancestor. There were 10 du Pont heirs alone. By 2020 the number of heirs had been cut in half, accounting for only 27 of the biggest 100 fortunes.

Why would the percentage of heirs decrease? Not because inheritance taxes increased. In fact, they decreased significantly during this period. The reason the percentage of heirs has decreased is not that fewer people are inheriting great fortunes, but that more people are making them.

How are people making these new fortunes? Roughly 3/4 by starting companies and 1/4 by investing. Of the 73 new fortunes in 2020, 56 derive from founders’ or early employees’ equity (52 founders, 2 early employees, and 2 wives of founders), and 17 from managing investment funds.

From here: How People Get Rich Now.

The first 18 months of a startup

April 14, 2021 By Bobby Voicu

This is a good Twitter thread to remind you what the first stage of your startup is about.

The full thread is here, on Twitter, from @Suhail. I’ve also saved it completely below, so I can go back to it when I forget.

1/ The first 18 months of a startup:
After starting my 2nd company in 2019, I decided I would write down useful lessons I learned or re-learned along the way. Some were hard-earned & others required steady focus. A thread that I hope may help other founders starting out

2/ Clarifying your plans: the first thing I did was write down a 7-page Elon Musk- style master plan. Write down what problem you plan to solve, how you’ll solve it, and why it’s important. Then have your smart friends critique it. Let no valid question go unanswered.

3/ End every conversation with an expert about your industry with: “Why do you think I am going to fail?” to lean into brutally understanding what you need to de- risk.

4/ Think of a way to make your users have some skin in the game enough to yell at you to make your product better. Charge or trade for it early on. Waiting for your product to be “good enough” reduces the amount you’ll learn each day. The first set of users paid me $20 on Venmo!

5/ Occasionally someone you respect will give you unsolicited advice that may cut you down. First, absorb it. Later, try to put their advice in a way you would’ve wanted to give yourself. This removes the hurtful part allowing you to hear it in a way you can benefit from.

6/ Rolling out of bed in my pajamas and getting back to work with things precisely as I left them was the most underestimated superpower that brought me joy, focus, and speed—I had forgotten how much goes into getting ready for work.

7/ Learning from users is a practiced skill just like programming. If you don’t have experience, make a plan. Start with simple questions, then go deep.
Here was mine going into early customer interviews:
👇

8/ Be married to the problem, not the technology. If you’re married to technology, you might easily give up due to stress induced by setbacks or boredom. Being married to the problem will motivate you to have the perseverance to continue through hard times or tedious work.

9/ As your relationship with your co-founder changes, there will be times of tension. Confront issues early. Be explicit about how you will divide & conquer. Lean on each other’s passions. Don’t confuse working style differences with how the company ought to work. Get a coach.

10/ I think startups often take half pivots early on. Mine did. The 1st idea might be wrong but if you stick w/ it a bit longer, you’ll often discover a deep problem people care about. All that’s stopping you is if you want to run that company to achieve that particular mission.

11/ Sometimes smart people didn’t like my idea. You don’t need to persuade everyone! Instead, I used it as an opportunity to understand their opposition & worked hard to see the truth of their opinions. I used it as a moment to strengthen my understanding from a smart critic.

12/ During the first 6 mo of my startup, I largely focused on the eradication of risk: Will people want this? Will people pay? Can this make a profit? Can it scale one day? Will the tech work? All in the pursuit of what will kill me? You just need to know there’s a solution.

13/ If you’re worried about something that will cause your inevitable demise, use my patented Threshold of Worry ™:
1. Set a quantitative value for the worrisome issue.
2. If it’s above the value, worry!
3. If it’s below the value, focus on the next risk & ignore

14/ Every month I ran my current goals/plans by another founder outside of the company. I found it better to assume my current thinking had a subtle fatal flaw I couldn’t see. That will often save you time or make you think differently enough to break out of a local maxima.

15/ Early on, each hire should be a little anti-sold before they join vs only passionately persuaded. Every startup has setbacks, makes mistakes, might pivot, and must overcome unforeseen obstacles. The early team must be sufficiently optimistic & capable of rapid recovery.

16/ Momentum is oxygen for a startup. Without momentum, you let fear, uncertainty, and doubt cause your demise.

17/ When building a startup:
If you have fear, de-risk by talking to users.
If you have uncertainty, build a prototype to rapidly rebuild your conviction. If you have sudden doubt, sleep. Try again tomorrow.

18/ The first goal I set for our company was narrow: make 10 happy users use our product. A happy user uses it, pays for it, and organically praises it. Focusing on a few wonderfully happy users is a better recipe for great retention. Then go from 10 → 100 → 1K → 10K → 100K.

19/ I was ruthless about ensuring I had as much deep work time as possible. Live somewhere boring. Eliminate meetings. Don’t meet investors if you’re not raising. Build a rhythm each day that enables the largest chunk of hours to get great work done. Users will notice your pace.

20/ If you’re a 2nd-time founder, resist the urge to button everything up. It’s a trap that makes you think you’re doing meaningful work. The first time around this blissful ignorance helped me focus on what mattered most: making a great product. It’s okay for things to be messy

21/ Your company culture doesn’t need to be set & written in a handbook on day one. I think culture is best formed organically & needs time to bake with a small team. From there, you can discover what works & what breaks. The values of a company need not be preserved, they evolve

22/ Last but not least: talk to users. talk to users. talk to users. talk to users. talk to users. talk to users. talk to users. talk to users. talk to users. talk to users. talk to users. talk to users. talk to users. talk to users. talk to users. talk to users. talk to users.

I’ve put the list of twits together using ThreadReaderApp, a really good service for something like this.

Creators and Freelancers are Taking Over the World

April 7, 2021 By Bobby Voicu

Patreon just announced they raised a new round of investment at at $4B valuation ($155M in the round). If you’re asking yourself why, here are some interesting numbers about the creator economy and about freelancers.

The growth of freelancing worldwide is staggering. In the US alone, freelancers make up 35% or 55 million workers who collectively earned $1 trillion in 2016. That number is predicted to reach 43% by 2020 with some analysts citing that figure at 80% of the global workforce by 2030.

This is from here (sorry for the Medium link).

And here’s what Patreon were saying in March 2020:

A large number of creators are launching on Patreon. More than 30,000 creators launched in the first 3 weeks of March 2020 alone, and these new creators are acquiring patrons faster than usual.

The COVID pandemic forced some processes to happen earlier than initially thought: it’s obvious that freelancers/creators are on their way to become the main part of workforce earlier than 2030.

I feel that we’ll see a lot of new tools targeting this growing part of the workforce, even more than what we see now.

Image from Canva

The a16z Marketplace 100 report for 2021

March 31, 2021 By Bobby Voicu

Andreessen-Horowitz is, without a doubt, an interesting take on the investment fund paradigm. I have a friend that really wants them to invest in his startup just because of the power network that they created around their startups and founders.

But they are, in my opinion, a really strong media and research company. I feel a lot of the value they provide is through media appearances of their GPs and not only and these reports they provide. I mean, the best book on what it means to build a startup is written by Ben Horowitz: The Hard Thing about Hard Things.

The last report I’ve seen is their report on marketplaces that you can see here. If you are interested in marketplaces, as a founder or an investor, you need to read this.

The past year has been a gut-punch for many marketplace categories. Ticketing marketplaces found their businesses drastically diminished when events were cancelled around the world. As schools were shuttered and many businesses enacted work-from-home policies, childcare marketplaces scrambled to adopt new safety precautions and stay afloat. Even the #1 marketplace last year, Airbnb, grappled with shutdowns, cancellations, and refunds.

As 2020 drew to a close, however, many marketplaces proved to be extraordinarily resilient—a testament to the flexibility of the model. In a year when in-person interactions were heavily restricted and unemployment went through the roof, marketplaces allowed people to access the products and services they needed and, in many cases, monetize their own talents, services, and resources. From food and alcohol delivery to games, online education to outdoor getaways, marketplaces like Instacart, Valve, Outschool, and Hipcamp helped us weather a difficult year.

From here: The a16z Marketplace 100: 2021.

Quick Wins: Keeping You Moving Forward

July 9, 2020 By Bobby Voicu

I was 14 or 15 when, finally, a martial arts club opened in the city I lived in. All of a sudden, we could go and become Bruce Lee or Jackie Chan or Jean Claude Van Damme. Of course, it didn’t work like this, but something stayed with me since then: the belt system. A system of quick (sort of) wins that would keep you on your track of mastering martial arts.

I mean, isn’t it easier when you get a yellow belt after 6-12 months, showing your progress, rather than waiting years without any external sign of improvement?

I always thought quick wins are a cheap trick to keep you motivated. I thought you should be able to find intrinsic motivation in whatever you are doing and you shouldn’t care about anything else.

I still have the same belief: what you do should give you enough intrinsic motivation so that you can do whatever it is you’re doing even when it’s not as easy as you’d like. I changed my mind when it comes to quick wins, though.

You should make getting quick wins part of the process for your work (or any other activity). The quick wins shouldn’t be the purpose, but they DO help in tricking your brain to focus on work when you don’t feel like it.

How I do it?

During my normal work process I use some AGILE principles: I have daily and weekly targets.

What I do a little bit differently is having at least one of the weekly tasks (even daily, if possible) a fun one. Something I truly enjoy, even if it’s not the most effective use of my time.

The purpose of a quick win is not to move things forward, but to keep you moving forward.

Image from Canva

The REAL Reasons Why VCs Won’t Invest in Your Startup

June 22, 2020 By Bobby Voicu

I’ve found yesterday a great Twitter feed on the reasons a VC might pass on investing in your company. I publish the entire thread below, but go to Twitter to see the comments, as well.

Why VC investors pass on startups: a thread.

Alternative title: don’t take it personally.

You’re solving a problem that doesn’t exist.

The problem exists, BUT not for the audience you’re targeting.

The problem exists, you’ve got the right audience, BUT it’s not as painful to them as you think it is.

The problem exists, you’ve got the right audience, they feel a lot of pain, BUT your solution doesn’t really fix that particular problem all that well.

The problem exists, you’ve got the right audience, they feel a lot of pain, your solution is the right one, BUT it’s not a big enough market.

The problem exists, you’ve got the right audience, they feel a lot of pain, your solution is the right one, it’s a huge market, BUT it’s super saturated.

The problem exists, you’ve got the right audience, they feel a lot of pain, your solution is the right one, it’s a huge market, there’s room for new players, BUT your business model won’t scale.

The problem exists, you’ve got the right audience, they feel a lot of pain, your solution is the right one, it’s a huge market, there’s room for new players, your business model scales, BUT you can’t defend against competitors.

The problem exists, you’ve got the right audience, they feel a lot of pain, your solution is the right one, it’s a huge market, there’s room for new players, your business model scales, it’s totally defensible, BUT you’re not pitching it well.

The problem exists, you’ve got the right audience, they feel a lot of pain, your solution is the right one, it’s a huge market, there’s room for new players, your business model scales, it’s totally defensible, you’re acing the pitch, and they still said no. NOW WHAT?

Non-comprehensive list of reasons why VCs might STILL pass:
– Fund is out of cash
– They invested in a competitor
– They don’t invest in your space (and are beholden to their LPs to stick to their thesis)
– They don’t invest at your stage
– etc etc etc

Of course, at any point in this process, the reason they pass might be YOU. The founder & team. Investors may not believe you got it in you. They will rarely own up to this – it’s hard to tell someone you don’t believe in them.

It happens. It sucks. It hurts.

Fundraising is hard. For 1st timers, it’s harder. For outsiders, it’s worse.

Focus on what you can control, build relationships, look for the people who believe in you. You might fail. Most of us fail a LOT.

But if you really want it, don’t let a pass stop you…

Prove them wrong instead.

I’ve found this thread through Dragos Novac’s amazing Sunday CET newsletter (you should subscribe). I used ThreadReaderApp to easily publish this.

Image from Canva

Automation is the Name of the Game

June 4, 2020 By Bobby Voicu

I’ve seen this on TechCrunch today:

Bryter raises $16M for a no-code platform for non-technical people to build enterprise automation apps

2 ideas:

1. I might’ve started too late in life to learn Python to add automations to things in my work life.

Well, what the heck, it’s not like I’ll stop, but it’s good to see no-code platforms growing.

Bryter — a no-code platform based in Berlin that lets workers in departments like accounting, legal, compliance and marketing who do not have any special technical or developer skills build tools like chatbots, trigger automated database and document actions and risk assessors — is today announcing that it has raised $16 million. This is a Series A round and it’s being co-led by Accel and Dawn Capital, with Notion Capital and Chalfen Ventures also participating.

2. Good/Great companies will always find a way to grow/get financing, even during a global pandemic, when people can’t meet face to face.

Michael Grupp, the CEO who co-founded the company with Micha-Manuel Bues and Michael Hübl (pictured below), said that the whole Series A process took no more than a month to initiate and close, an impressive turnaround considering the chilling effect that the COVID-19 health pandemic has had on dealmaking.

You know, when you have a hammer in hand, everything around you is a nail. This is the way I’m seeing automation right now: everywhere I look, there’s some news on automation or something I can automate. I even recommended Zapier as a tool I use in this week’s The CEO Library newsletter.

Image from Canva

How to Validate a Software/App Idea with Less than $200: A Case Study of MavenHut’s Solitaire Arena

May 12, 2020 By Bobby Voicu

Do you really need a product to show when you start a new business?

The truth is you can actually start a business without a product. You need to know if there is a market for your idea, though. How do you do this? Asking friends and family is a dumb idea, in my opinion, so you need to find another option.

Read below how we’ve done it at MavenHut, before writing even one line of code. This happened in 2012, but the tactics and strategies mentioned in the post below are still valid.

A lot of people talk about Dropbox’s launch: they had a video, put it on youtube, got 75,000 people signed-up on the waiting list and so on. Of course, by that time Dropbox was a Y Combinator company, a year old company, for that matter, so this might have helped a little bit (more).

How to Validate a Software/App Idea with Less than $200

Use a mock product site

Here’s how we did it at MavenHut: In February 2012 we’d just gotten accepted into Startup Bootcamp Dublin on the perceived strength of the team, mostly, and not because we had some amazing product (read about MavenHut’s 1st year here). We’ve have had some idea of what we wanted to do, but it was fuzzy, to say the least. So, the first thing to do: we needed to confirm that taking classic games and making them multiplayer was a good thing. Take into consideration that most classic games are single player (Solitaire, Tetris, Minesweeper, Asteroids, Space Invaders aso), so the question we asked ourselves was genuine and needed a real answer.

After some analysis, we decided on Solitaire to be the test game. But we wanted to know if people would actually want to play such a game. And I considered that we needed to have the potential users take some sort of action, not only tell us “Yes, I would play this kind of Solitaire!”. As Ford would put it: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” (though the quote is not sure to be real).

I would rather have some action from potential users, rather than have them tell me what they think they want.

What we did, in short:

I bought a domain name (solitairewithyourfriends.com – not live anymore, but you can see some it on archive.org, here).

I installed WordPress on the domain, using some cheap hosting. I am graphically challenged so I just chose the simplest theme possible and I wrote one post. The text on it was, basically, telling people that we work on a great version of Solitaire, but it’s not available yet, though you can play the old version. Also, we had a Photoshopped screenshot of how it would look (which I didn’t do).

The most important thing in the entire page was the fact that we had a link to an “old version” of the same game. And you “could” play that if you really wanted a multiplayer solitaire. The thing is that game never existed. We lied a little bit, but this way we had people perform an action and that told us that they were interested (or, at least, curious).

On the second page, though, people couldn’t play the early version of the game, since we were “just doing some maintenance on it”, but we asked them to complete some form, to give us some information. We thought nobody would do it, but we were pleasantly surprised (numbers below). In the form, in just 4 questions, we asked some info on multiplayer and classic games.

Finally, after building the site, I’ve deployed some Facebook ads and 3 days and $160 later, we had some answers.

So, this is, in short, the story.

Now, some numbers.

1. You don’t need an expensive site

Building the site, from the moment I bought the domain name to the moment it was live, took me about 4 hours (I am in no way proficient with WordPress or graphics). It cost me $12 in the domain name from NameCheap (today, I recommend Hover.com), and I already had some hosting on BlueHost, but I assume you can use any host. I would suggest, though, one that has any type of quick WordPress installer, since it makes it really simple to install WordPress. You can find hosting packages for about $3/month for monthly payments (and, for a test, you don’t need more than that). As an idea, for The CEO Library I use WPX Hosting, which is the best managed WordPress hosting I’ve used, but it’s a lot more expensive (because of the support it offers, the options and so on). The thing is, for a fast test, you can really use almost any cheap hosting you have access to, like Bluehost.

WordPress is the blogging CMS that’s really easy to install, has lots of features, lots of themes to pick from aso. I used ThemeForest to buy premium themes, so I would suggest them. Still, even better, I would choose a free theme, and you can find plenty on the web, starting with the WordPress themes repository.

2. Make the content on the site interesting and engaging for you target audience

Since we targeted people that played games, I used a more tongue in cheek tone, having fun at our own expense, lowering the initial rejection reaction that people would have for being tricked into getting on a page that promised them an interesting game. Also, a screenshot of what you offer (or promise to offer) them goes a long way, showing that you are actually trying to provide what you said (see the screenshot above with our frontpage). You can make good looking images with Canva, it’s an amazing and fast tool (even I can create them).

On the second page we continued with the same attitude, but this time we had to push the “saying sorry” theme since it was a second time we actually tricked the players. So we used the “can’t resist” eyes of Puss in Boots from Shrek and asked to be forgiven. This allowed us to be more cheeky, actually, and also ask for their help with the form: “Pleeeaseeee?”.

3. Users should take some kind of action

The Click here on the first page was the action we were very interested in. And everything on the page drives people to click that. We thought that if they do click (they do some action), they are really interested or curious about what we want to offer (a multiplayer Solitaire). On the same page, you could also click on the Photoshopped image of how the game would look like.

Moreover, on the second page, since we knew we would lose those users anyway (nothing else to do on the site), we added a Google Form (free with Google Docs, puts results in a sheet, best choice in my opinion for something fast and short). In the form we chose to give them just 4 questions – initially 5, because I wanted the “submit form” button to be visible without scroll. The question can be anything you need, we needed some game ideas suggestions from the potential players.

To give you the context, the first iteration of MavenHut was a platform for real money betting on single player games (hence, the third question, about betting).

Finally, a lot of people asked why we didn’t ask for the email addresses. Well, we wanted as many answers as possible in the shortest amount of time and I’ve found out that people become more evasive once they give any type of identification, even email. Moreover, since it was a small test, the list would be really short. Building an email list is a good thing to do, but not in this particular case.

Actually, why don’t you subscribe The CEO Library’s email list. I’m sending a weekly email with tactics for startup growth, books to read, as well as a list of interesting startup and business articles from around the web.

4. Drive some targeted traffic to the page

This is what a lot of people find difficult.

First of all, you need to decide how much is enough: how many visitors, how many clicks, how many answers. We decided that about 200 visitors should be enough to give us an idea of the appeal of Solitaire multiplayer. More, we were really bootstrapped at that point so we wanted to spend the least amount of money possible.

There are two ways to send traffic: free and paid.

Free traffic means going to sites like HackerNews and use AskHN (I think reddit also has a similar section) if your audience is there, go to forums where your audience stays or, if you can, find a blogger to ask his/her audience. The downside of the free traffic is that it takes time to generate it.

Paid traffic means everything from Google Adwords to Facebook Ads. We chose Facebook Ads because we already knew we would launch the first game on Facebook (my co-founders had a lot of experience on the platform), so Facebook Ads was the choice. Moreover, you could target specific audiences, from location and age to, what mattered most for us, interests.

We’ve got some interesting results:

As audience, we chose Solitaire as interest and US as country.

Finally, we sent these users to our site, but we needed to follow them in the site and extract some info.

5. Metrics: the most important thing

First and foremost, you need to understand what indicators you want to follow. From the start, our KPIs were:

– how many people reach the site from Facebook Ads (is there any interest in this type of games?)
– how many people click on the first link on the site (Click Here and the image) – this would give us information on the level of interest for this kind of game
– how many people complete the form (self-explaining)
– how much time people spent on the site, especially on the second page (it means they were interested enough to read what we wrote)

All these numbers were available through Google Analytics, the free solution from Google, which we happily installed.

The results? Well, above expectations:
228 unique visitors, 517 page views, 386 unique page views, 145 pageviews on the second page (the one with the form), 2:09 minutes on the second page.

The percentage of people visiting the second page is 60% (145 unique pageviews compared to 240). This means 60% of the unique visitors (approximately, since we cannot compare unique visitors on the pages, but we expect people didn’t visit the second-page multiple times) clicked on “Click Here”. So 136 people visited our second page. Out of those, 66 people submitted the form to us. A staggering, for me, 48% of the people that got on the second page (and 29% of the total visitors).

The answers? Well, those are for us to have, aren’t they? :) There are two of them in the screenshot below (the same as the one above).

The results of this experiment gave us the push to start building Solitaire Arena. And it gave us first proof of concept.

I am amazed at how many startup founders don’t do this kind of testing (especially seeing how cheap it can be – it cost us less than $200), but I think most of them don’t do it just because they are afraid of the answers. We were quite ready to change course (which we did, we never built a gambling platform, as we initially intended).

Finally, where does the story end?

Well, we presented some great numbers at the Demo Day of the accelerator: see our Demo Day presentation here.

Solitaire Arena had, a year after launch, 1,500,000 monthly active users, MavenHut has been the recipient of $700,000 in investment and it has outgrown the 3 initial co-founders several times.

In 2015 we sold most of the games to RockYou, an US company. MavenHut’s games were downloaded more than 40,000,000 times across all platforms available. And in 2016 I left the company :)

P.S.: I wrote the first version of the article in 2016. This is an updated version I wrote in 2020.

  • « Go to Previous Page
  • Page 1
  • Page 2
  • Page 3
  • Page 4
  • Page 5
  • Go to Next Page »

Footer

About

I write about things that raise my curiosity. And I’m quite curious about all kinds of things.

For a full “About Me”, go here.

Recent Posts

  • My Bluesky ID: @bobbyvoicu.com
  • Batman is Here, on the Quest – XR Industry News of the Week – Oct. 24
  • XR Industry News of the Week – Oct. 10
  • XR Industry News of the Week – Oct. 4
  • XR News of the Week – September 14th, 2024

Friends

  • Sami the Westie
  • XR Gamer Digest

The CEO Library Collections

  • Best Leadership Books
  • Best Productivity Books
  • Women Entrepreneur Books

Copyright © 2025 · Privacy Policy · Disclaimer

We use cookies to enhance your experience. By clicking "Ok" or by continuing to use the site, you agree to this use of cookies and data. Ok