Co-founded a venture-backed gaming startup. Four years running finances, operations, and team building from zero.
Mega Bad Crew was a game studio working on a project we called “Kitty Arcade”. It was intended to be the world's first competitive video game for cats to play. I co-founded it with 4 friends with backgrounds in software engineering, game design, technical art, and marketing. The vision was millions of kitties playing in live-streamed esports tournaments around the world!
Role
Founder
Company
Mega Bad Crew
Duration
2019 – 2023
Scope
Full Startup Lifecycle
We had this crazy idea that we could design a touch screen game that cats would play. Others have done this already, but we were going to gamify the heck out of it. The technical challenge was in making something that the cats actually wanted to engage with. Our pitch was really compelling. There are millions of cats in the world, and no one is making games for them! Raising money was very smooth. But building and launching the thing, that was the hard part.
Built the initial game prototype to test the core concept.
Playtested with cat experts and animal behaviorists to understand how, when, and why cats play.
Ran playtests at cat cafes and with consumers over the course of a year.
Built working Bluetooth cat toy prototypes to solve the screen engagement problem.
We shut down entirely. I'm very proud of what we built and always excited to talk about it. I still believe in the efficacy of the product. If only we had the AI tools then that we have today! We could have been so much more efficient!