Building an App, and Scaling a Team

Context:

Jose and Quentin, founders of Gamercraft, wanted to create an Esports tournament platform that solved 3 common issues.

• Rampant cheating
• Poorly matched tournaments, leading to uncompetitive gameplay
• No opportunity for amateur players to win real prizes. 

The Dilemma: 

They faced a classic challenge for startups operating in a booming industry; They needed to be first movers and establish marketshare as quickly as possible.

Having just raised a significant pre-seed round, as first-time founders without a tech team, they had 3 classic-but-not-100%-satisfactory options:

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Option 1 posed a problem where a competitor could enter the market faster and steal Gamercraft’s market share. 

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Option 2 also brings challenges. Hiring engineers is a notoriously difficult, slow process. Making mistakes in that process could set Jose and Quentin back months. With no prior experience of hiring technical talent, these were significant risks.

Option 3 risked creating an over-reliance on an external team. Founders not holding the keys to ongoing technical innovation is poorly regarded by investors.  

Each option presented serious problems for Quentin and Jose. In all cases, they would sacrifice something.  Their choice was critical to their startup’s evolution since their next round of funding depended on how they navigated building both an app, an audience, and their team.

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Then, they found Theodo. ‍

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From the first meeting with Gamercraft we laid out a plan to transfer technical ownership and leave Quentin with solid, scalable, foundations and the knowledge and team needed to continue to innovate.

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We had 14 weeks to simultaneously: 

a) launch a quality mobile app with scalable technical foundations

b) build Gamercraft a technical team

The App: 

Features: 

• User registration
• Create a Team and Squad management
• User Payments
• Users can claim prizes won In Tournaments
• Administration platform
• Analytics Pipeline
• Anti-cheating algorithms
• Tournament matching by skill level
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Technology Choices:‍
We recommended using Serverless and React Native to build the platform. Serverless would allow the product to scale easily in the future, and with React Native Gamercraft could build an IOS and Android compatible app with a single code base.  

Using Serverless and React Native allows Gamercraft to lead technological innovation in their industry, helping to attract the best engineers in the future. 

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The Recruitment Process: 

Over the last 12 years Theodo has hired and trained over 800, top-level, engineers.  With this experience comes expertise. We have refined our screening and interview processes to be highly efficient and accurate at identifying great talent. We happily share this know-how with our clients, helping them scale their team and own technical innovation in-house.

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We helped Gamercraft: 

• Design the right skills profile, job description, and compensation scheme
• Structure the recruitment process (interview process, selection) 
• Performing tech and non-tech interviews
• Trained Jose and Quentin on each interview stage so they could own the process in the future
• By advising on the selection of candidates,

By identifying the characteristics of strong engineers, we designed an interview process to attract and select the best candidates. 

With a deep understanding of how to train quickly, we know how to ensure that new hires are brought up-to-speed fast and bring value from week-one. 

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Result: 

• Two software engineers hired in 6 weeks
• 8 weeks of an integrated Theodo/Gamercraft team, training the new hires on:
• Technology stack
• Technical process to improve product quality
• Agile project methodology  

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Project Results: 

• Gamercraft’s new platform was able to raise funds 2 months after launch.
• The selection of Serverless was particularly attractive for one key investor
• Two trained engineers
• Full ownership of CI/CD pipelines, Serverless framework, React Native codebase
• Trained on project methodology that focuses on embedding quality and continuous improvement.
• Gamercraft trained on product roadmapping, estimation and visibility
• The App has a 5-Star rating

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