Our Journey On Creating An App

My name is Aj Picard, I’m the founder of GamingU an app that helps gamers not only learn about video games but also discover new titles they might have never heard of before.

Our Goal?

Introduce new games to you and most importantly help you learn about games you’re already looking into.

How did we even get created?

It was fall of 2013 my senior year of college, I was going to pick up the new NBA 2k for my roommates and I (Man that game gets competitive.) I went to check out at the local Gamestop and the employee there asked me if I wanted to reserve “Blah blah blah” thats exactly what it sounded like when he started to talk because I’ve never heard any of those titles he mentioned.

I went on and said,

“How can I keep up with these games coming soon?”

He replied,

“you can subscribe to Gameinformer our magazine (I wasn’t going to wait on a magazine each month), Search on Google (Time consuming), type it in on Youtube (Wasn’t convenient).

I then asked him,

“What if someone created an app that could help you instead?”

His exact words were….

“Well that person would be a genius.”

Lets do this

I was already looking to be an entrepreneur so I decided to strive to make my idea a reality. I went home and I contacted my best friend who was also looking to be an entrepreneur himself. We decided to partner up and tack this thing together. I’m going to get into the mistakes I made at the ned of this article and unfortunately this was one of them.

The Journey

My best friend and I met once a week, talked daily on the phone on what we wanted this app to look like and what kind of content we wanted it to provide. The biggest obstacle was how can we get every video game in our app? We both agreed we would just implement them ourselves one by one once we find a developer that can help create our idea. (We didn’t do this don’t worry, our developer found a better solution for us… thank god)

We then searched online for developers that would be willing to create what we were trying to create. We didn’t even know how much this was going to cost us. My buddy found a website called www.Guru.com where there are companies or free lancers on the site waiting for jobs they can complete. We posted our idea and immediately received hundreds of requests. My friend and I took days and hours weaving the ones we liked and didn’t like, after two week we had our winner.

The company we decide to go with was Intellectsoft LTD. We had them sign an NDA so they couldn’t just take our idea (really not necessary but we were newbies at the time), the next conversation was pricing. They told us it would cost around 20k and that they would be charging hourly for their work. The next problem I hit was where in the hell am I going to get this money?

I reached out to my mother who was willing to invest for a cut of the idea, I accepted. Once we had the funds we met with a lawyer to develop our company name which would protect our personal names in case we ever did get in a lawsuit (This comes later). A & J Apps was created.

We went back to Intellectsoft and development started January 2014. The name I created for my idea was iGames, the concept was you were looking for new video games through your own eye.

Development

The next couple of months had its ups and downs.

Positives.

When intellectsoft developed our logo… man we’re we excited. It fit what we were doing perfectly.

(Old Logo)

Over the next couple of months testing iGames out in beta it made us even more impatient. The feeling I got I can’t even explain. My idea was literally becoming a reality and I couldn’t believe it.

(Old Interface)

A huge problem we ran into was that we couldn’t figure out how to add every game to our app, luckily we found a public video game website that we could link up to and mirror the sites information. Now we have all the info in an app with our custom interface, once we discovered this solution I was even more excited to get this idea out in the gaming world.

Negatives

Since intellectsoft was located in England in order to have meetings with our developer we had to get up at 6 am, after a while it started to become very inconvenient and annoying. We then realized that if we weren’t specific in what we wanted in each contract we were going to have to pay more money. In other words if we didn’t say EXACTLY what we wanted, our developers wouldn’t put that in the app and then we would have to pay him to add it which ended up costing us more money since we had to pay him hourly… stupid I know. This actually hurt us in the end of development because Intellectsoft wanted to chargee us 5k for the rest of their services when we had in the contract this project would cost just a total of 20k. Intellectsoft ended up uploading the app but we cut ties with each other once our app was live. It wasn’t a happy ending.

Shortly after release which was on August 28th 2014 (You will never forget a date like that), iGames was up and running. Man was I F***ing excited, little did I know my partner wasn’t.

He started to give a lot less effort, stopped responding to my texts and stopped doing stuff to promote the app. I was getting so frustrated because of how much I enjoyed working with him. The end of September we decided to go our separate ways and I took on 100% of the company.

Post Release

Let’s be honest, every creator and entrepreneur expects immediate success. I thought I was never going to have to work again, every rich person out there makes what they do look so easy right? The next couple of months I spent hundreds of dollars promoting on social media, submitting to app review websites and I just wasn’t seining the growth. I started to take a break and not put as much effort into the app from early 2015 to late 2015. I also didn’t really know how to build any social media following at the time.

I graduated, and the started training to go overseas to play basketball doing that break in 2015. Once I got back in late 2015 I was all in on my idea and I learned a lot about marketing and social media development. Since I got back we have grown rapidly and we continue to. I’ve found a new free lance developer who is a lot cheaper and a lot easier to communicate with since he lives in the United States. I’ve changed the whole interface of my app, changed the name over the last year from iGames to EyeGames to GamingU.

The reason for the name change is, I was getting sued by a company called iGames who already owned that trademark. I hired a lawyer, paid thousands of dollars in fees to try to keep my name but i Gamed never seemed to budge. They shut down my Twitter, Instagram and Facebook all in which I had to start over. Finally I decided to completely rename my app along with rebrand my brand in other words starting from scratch, again. Lets just say its been a crazy roller coaster ride these past two years.

If I could do it over again.

•Look more into app development cost, my developer could have done my app for A LOT cheaper

•Never go into my idea with my best friend, kind of injured our relationship. You have to come to terms sometimes that your close friend and family won’t love your idea as much as you do

•Do a trademark search on my name when I first created it, That would have saved me thousands of dollars

•Actually learn how to market or use social media. I spent so much money on stupid ads that didn’t help me

•Not take a year off of pushing the app, lost a lot of momentum

•Stay focused

•Stay optimistic

•Keep pushing don’t get discouraged no one out there wants yo uno succeed, it up to you to succeed

The Experience

At the end of the day I have to live with my mistakes that I made and most importantly learn from them. One thing I took from this is that if you think someone hasn’t thought of your idea you’re trying to create, well you’re 100% crazy. There’s 7 billion people in this world, I bet your idea has been thought about by at least 10 other people. The difference between myself and other people that thought of my idea is that I executed and got the job done, which is the hardest part. Look at all the obstacles I had to over come that I’m proud of that I did in order to get where I am today, yes I’ve spent thousands of dollars, but with eSports and video games finally blowing up I couldn’t be at a better place right now. Which means its time to turn my hustle dial ALL THE WAY UP.

My goal is to be the leading resource for gamers to learn about video games and I really do believe we’re on the right track.

The journey has been absolutely insane, but no one said it was going to be easy. That’s the problem now a days, people think they never really put in any work or that people actually just get lucky. No people thats never the case, everyone has to go through the struggle and believe or not everyone usually does. Nothings easy in life and people have to start realizing it, sometimes the easy way out is to give up even when you’re at your lowest point. My suggestion is don’t, I didn’t. I was a college student/grad with no money. I kept pushing and pushing and trust me GamingU will eventually be a very successful app features on Apples yearly keynotes.

I really hope you enjoyed our story. If you have any questions we’re willing to help. Email us business.GamingU@gmail.com.

You can download our app here: it will be ready for Android later this month.

Thank you everyone for reading this article please feel free to like and share this with your friends.

AJ Picard — Founder of GamingU