A Q&A session with founders in the apps & games space

How four successful founders got to where they are today and what inspired them along the way.

To celebrate International Women’s Day, we spoke to four successful founders in the apps and games industry: Prerna Gupta, Sarah Abdullah, María Martina Santoro, and Kim Nay Taylor. They share their stories about how they got to where they are today and what inspired them along the way. Get their apps & games in the dedicated Play Store collection celebrating women who inspire us.

An introduction to the founders

After working in several successful startups in the mobile space, Prerna Gupta came up with the idea and later founded the app Hooked with her husband Parag Chordia, while she was traveling around the world. The app, born from the pair’s love of writing, tells gripping stories as bite-size text message conversations.

In 2015, Sarah Abdullah left her job in advertising to follow her dream to reach kids through interactive technology. She started Makooky World — a learning platform offering Arabic stories, songs, and games to children up to the age of 7.

Based in Buenos Aires, Argentina, María Martina Santoro got into the gaming industry by chance, after studying political sciences and animation. She is now the co-founder and CEO of OKAM Studio, the developer behind games such as Realms of the Void, and The Interactive Adventures of Dog Mendonça & Pizzaboy.

Kim Tay Naylor and her husband Paul had worked in the gaming industry for more than a decade before deciding to launch their own studio LandShark Games. In 2015 they launched Zen Koi, which is a fun, relaxing game where you can grow, breed, and collect Japanese carp as they make their way to mythological dragon form.

How did you get into app/game development?

Prerna: My husband and I co-founded our first tech company in 2005, a year after graduating from Stanford. We launched our first app, LaDiDa, in 2009. LaDiDa was reverse karaoke, a technology my husband developed in his music intelligence lab at Georgia Tech, where he was a professor at the time. I’m an amateur singer, and I had a feeling the technology would be a hit once put into the hands of smartphone users.

Sarah: In 2015, I wanted to start doing what I love most, creating a magical world for kids in Arabic. The idea was born when I mixed my production background, writing skills and the world of technology together. I started working on the app prototype at the beginning of 2015. The best way to reach kids today is through a language they speak and what better language than technology? They love it because it’s interactive, it gives them action and allows them a level of engagement they didn’t have with traditional platforms.

Martina: I love film. I love animation. I love games. What I love the most about games is their ability to inspire change from the outside in whatever level the player is participating and reach anyone anywhere. When we started back in 2010, we started to send our projects to film and TV markets and festivals. We understood it was too expensive and risky to develop a whole show or a film from scratch so we presented our world and characters through different platforms, creating an audience step by step, on a comic book, a series, a game. That’s how we started in this amazing industry; games opened a world of opportunities for us.

Kim: I have a background in Graphic Design, one of my first jobs was designing the graphical user interface for a software company that was developing a media authoring tool. I always felt technology has the ability to give graphical work an added dimension; graphics also has the ability to allow technology to interface with people, to project emotions and naturalistic qualities to people who uses it — this has always fascinated me since I was a child when I first learnt how to write the first line of BASIC.

How did you come up with the idea for the app/game?

Prerna: Parag and I were traveling the world writing a young adult novel together. We kept hearing that “reading is dying”. This made us sad. We didn’t believe that the demand for reading great stories should die. Stories are fundamental to the human experience. But art does not stand still — art always evolves with technology. And we felt strongly that for fiction to survive, the way in which we tell stories must evolve to more accurately reflect the modern mind. We were convinced that we could crack this problem and make reading as engaging for young people as social media.

Sarah: Language is an expression of how we think, feel and act. It’s a reflection of a thought process that we go through so it was very important for me to allow children to be able to use this language to express themselves by creating content that resembles them and their ambitions and aspirations and everyday challenges.

Kim: The koi in Asian culture represents numerous positive qualities related to courage, overcoming adversity, perseverance and strong character. It also looks beautiful with its colours and characteristic movement. That’s what inspired the concept of Zen Koi.

What was the beginning like, when you started your company?

Prerna: Exhilarating, but also extremely challenging. Very few people believed what we were doing had potential, or that anyone would care. But, fortunately, there were a few investors, early employees and authors who were willing to take the plunge with us, and that made all the difference.

Sarah: It was a new world for me because my background is not digital and I needed to learn a completely new medium. The first step for me was to create the characters that will lead the world of Makooky. The second step was to start thinking about the content and where it will live. This was time consuming and of course being on my own meant I had to put in my time and money and work with limited resources in order to produce a demo I can share with investors. The process was challenging and because we couldn’t build the app that fast, because of limitations, we had to do a lot of changes as technology changes all the time. This is when I realized I needed to go with what I have and get investment and hire a full tech team.

Martina: When we started we were an odd team to be working in games: we were film directors, producers, writers, artists, animators, people that have played games but never developed one. We had to learn to tell stories in a different way, stories that were interactive. We had to learn a different way to create content and share it. When you tell a story in film you get to edit and show what you want when you want it to the audience. With games this is completely different; you are not only telling the story of a character, you are also telling the story through your players.

Kim: It was tough — we bootstrapped the company and I was still working as a consultant to pay the bills and we are parents to two young children. We worked from home but that also meant we worked all the time. We ideated and conceptualized our first game — Aviator, prototyped and pre-visualized it, before we sourced for appropriate artists and writers to help us create the content for the complete product. Paul was be the main coder for the game and I was art directing, designing and planning the UX and UI for the game.

Have there been any moments when you wanted to give up your career?

Prerna: Yes, many. The biggest moment was when my first startup failed. It was a social networking site for Indians, which we launched in 2005. We worked on it for 4 years, but ultimately another social network took over India, and we had no chance of competing. When we finally realized we had to shut the site down, I was crushed and exhausted — physically and emotionally. It took me a few months to regain my self-confidence and passion. But fortunately, a few months later, I tested out Parag’s “reverse karaoke” technology, singing a few lines of my favorite song, and I was blown away by the results. That’s what got me hooked on startups again, and I’ve never looked back.

Sarah: Yes! I wanted to give up not once, but several times. There are moments where I was down and nothing was working out. Being an entrepreneur at early stages means you have to be self motivated, you rarely get external validation or feedback in your first year. If anything you feel that you’re sprinting to achieve your dreams while the world is moving slowly and it’s frustrating. I was a mum of a 2 weeks old baby, handling a toddler, and working with the team on the new app interface and I haven’t slept in ages and I couldn’t drop the ball. There’s no one to delegate to, and especially as a woman I needed to prove to myself that I can make it because for some reason, there’s an assumption that once a parent, I will give up. That was the opposite of what I wanted to do. As a parent, I now have 2 people watching what I do with my life and I needed to lead by example. So I’d be down at night and wish I haven’t started any of this, but then again I would pull myself in the morning and say “today I will wake up, dress up and show up” so I can achieve my dreams. It’s the only way. No one will do it for you, no one will give you a tap on the back, no one will push you.

Kim: As a founder, I wear many hats everyday. There are definitely days when it gets overwhelming and I do want to throw in the towel. The closest moment was when we had run out of money and we had to let some of the staff go, and not knowing whether we had a game at all because we had exhausted our resources to make it any better.

How does Google Play help you build a successful business?

Prerna: The access that Google Play gives app developers to the world’s largest population of smartphone users is amazing. Our mission is to make reading accessible to billions of people around the world. We want reading fiction to be as engaging as social media. This would not be possible without Google Play’s massive worldwide reach. The fact that we can simply translate our stories and suddenly have access to the entire world of readers is incredibly powerful.

One of my proudest moments was when we translated our most popular stories into 7 other languages — French, Spanish, Korean, Japanese, Italian, German and Portuguese — and launched these stories in several countries on Google Play at once. Hooked shot to the top of the charts in every country in a matter of weeks! That’s when we knew we had built something with universal appeal, with the potential to change culture around the world. It was an amazing feeling.

Sarah: Mainly reach. If it wasn’t for Google Play, stories will not reach everybody who is interested. Can you imagine the financial barriers to entry that exist in a traditional chain with distribution …and so on? Not only that, by being on Google Play, we were able to exist on a platform that allowed us to get to users in a very categorized manner since we were accepted into the “Designed for family” program.

Kim: Google Play has been very inclusive with indie developers with their online communication about the latest updates and news about their products. We learn about new features through announcements either on the Console or from emails and with the events like Playtime held locally, we are able to interact and learn about all the methods and techniques of improving the way we measure, develop and implement Google features into our games.

What advice would you give to developers about growing successful apps / games businesses?

Sarah: I think that there are a couple of things to think about. First, understanding the user base and their behaviour is very important. Running good research pre-development and having a strong analytics board post launch is crucial. Data is your window to the user’s needs and frustrations. Having a strong team around you is also major. Surround yourself with the experts and learn as much as you can from them. Learn about your field continuously because you need to know what going on, latest trends, technology, to be able to catch up. And invest in quality, don’t go cheap. People have choices and we live in a very competitive market so give the user what they deserve. And think about a good retention strategy that suits your business model be it offering new games, engaging in different levels, etc.

Kim: I think staying true to your core, knowing your strengths and weaknesses and making the best out of the little you have. Understanding your audience is important; this comes with looking at how they play and interact with your game. Most importantly, pay attention to details and be meticulous — not only it shows that you care about your players, but also that you care about how you deliver and present your game to them.

What do you think?

Do you have thoughts on creating successful app or game startups? Let us know in the comments below or tweet using #AskPlayDev, and we’ll reply from @GooglePlayDev, where we regularly share news and tips on how to be successful on Google Play.