What I’ve Learned as a CEO

Since February 2019, I have been serving as the CEO for Probot Playground. This is what I’ve learned so far.

Starting Out

I began working on Probot Playground back in September of 2018 when I was first given the opportunity to take part in an incubator program. At first, I didn’t expect much from it, but in just a few weeks we both began to understand the amount of work and effort it would take to build a company from scratch. While EJ was focused on building out our platform, my focus as the CEO of the company shifted towards infrastructure, creating long and short term goals, and flushing out the details that would nurture success in the future. Becoming a CEO has been the biggest challenge of my life and even today I continue to learn more and more about my role in the company. This is a reflection on what I’ve learned so far serving as the CEO and what I hope to accomplish as we grow our company.

Financial Budgeting

One of the most meticulous tasks that EJ and I worked on at the beginning stage of our start-up was creating an in-depth financial plan. This plan would stretch over the next five years, and included numerous variables that range from operational costs, employee salaries, and acquisition costs. Planning for staff required a lot of time and effort towards researching industry salaries, offering partial equity of our company, planning exactly when we were going to onboard all of our staff members. Just on the tech side alone, we had to looking into multiple positions ranging from UI/UX designers to full-stack developers to website security. The business side had an even longer list, which included roles such as a CFO, book keepers, marketing teams, legal councils, social media manager, human resources and even interns. This was really mind-blowing to me even now. Being only 20 years old myself and still in college, the idea of hiring and paying a whole group of qualified professionals was crazy.

Along with staff and salaries, we also had to predict operational cost. By creating various growth equations and managing an user acquisition budget, we estimated our user growth and then estimated the cost of hosting games based on daily or monthly active users. The financial plan was extremely detailed and had everything we could ever imagine and more. It not only helped with planning for the future but also provided a general roadmap of where we are now and which milestones we are planning for next.

Young Entrepreneurs in Networking

Networking and attending social events is an essential part of growing out a company. Networking events are hosted almost every week and always have a very diverse group of entrepreneurs and investors all at the same place. Networking events were the strangest thing that I had to get use to as the CEO. Most of the crowds we met at networking events were a lot older than we were. Both EJ and I are in our early 20s and still in college. Many of the people attending the event were double our age and had a lot of experience with growing start-ups and expertise in their respective industries. It took a bit of getting use to being the youngest ones in the crowd, but we’ve met a lot of great and interesting entrepreneurs as well. It’s always nice going to social events with other entrepreneurs as well, there is this energy you feel in the air. Everyone there is so passionate and eager to grow out their company, and it’s interesting being surrounded by peers who are grinding as much as you are.

Social Media and Branding

One of my primary focuses on the current state of Probot Playground is building out our social media presence and brand. Twitter, Facebook, even LinkedIn, most of my time is focusing on creating content that engages with out target market. Most recently, I have been focusing on creating articles for our blog, On The Playground. Social media has been really challenging part of my role as the CEO. Just trying to be creative when brainstorming different posts, article topics, even tech memes that we tweet from time to time. Social media was also a great opportunity to interact with different social groups that might be interested in bots, coding, and data science.

One of the pieces of infrastructure that I hadn’t accounted for was emailing. Emails like account verification or even a “forgot password” email is something that gets overlooked. Although it doesn’t seem like a big deal, a simple email like that is crucial for a platform. So when developing a lot of the infrastructure of our site, we had to looking into the smallest details to ensure we weren’t missing anything. As we prepare for our launch coming up, we are constantly trying to push out more creative content that reflects our company brand and helps attribute to our long term goals.

Looking Back and Moving Forward

Looking back on the work and grinding we’ve put in, it makes me really proud of what we’ve built so far. A lot of things have gone exactly as planned while other parts have been really rough. I’ve learned that as the CEO, you have to be able to adapt to new challenges and try to pivot and create contingencies if something goes wrong. But through each hardship, I’ve become more confident in my ability to be an effective leader and CEO.

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