While working on Campfire and after the failure that was Rehance, I decided to cofound a B2B business. Why?

It was a gradual process. One of things I did to try and advertise Rehance was sponsor an email newsletter called IdeaHub. The guy running this newsletter, Charlie, reached out come months later asking for my thoughts on an idea he had for a B2B SaaS product he was calling Trophy. The idea was "Stripe for gamification" - a dashboard for controlling gamification experiences like achievements, streaks, and leaderboards, and a rich API for integrating these experiences into web and mobile apps.

The idea was interesting to me since Campfire was a perfect example of a potential Trophy customer - our product thrived on users engaging consistently (in our case, writing their books) - and we had considered building achievements many times but never were able to find the time. We would totally pay for a solution that helped us ship them faster, and so that gave me some confidence that there were other companies out there that would do the same.

But at this point, I was just giving Charlie feedback and guiding him toward a v1 that I could integrate into Campfire as a test. We settled on an email-based solution where Campfire users would start getting emails when they hit important writing milestones like 1,000 words and 5,000 words written.

After running this experiment and discovering that it boosted 4-week retention measurably, I had the conviction that this could be a success. Charlie thought the same, and we went back and forth about the direction of the product. Eventually Charlie asked if I'd be interested in joining as cofounder and after some thinking I decided, f*ck it, why not?

Growth (B2B Sales...)

My Rehance failure made it clear to me that doing sales well was critical to the success of a business like this, and also that I hated doing sales. So Charlie and I agreed that he'd be responsible for sales & marketing and I would be responsible for engineering, with the both of us collaborating on design and the direction of the product.

This has worked quite well, and I've been able to watch Charlie develop a B2B sales muscle. We tried all sorts of things, from manual cold emails to automated cold emails to starting a podcast designed to get us in the same room as potential customers. And we were able to acquire our first handful of paying customers and develop the platform around their need, while of course maintaining our own vision for the product and making sure not to build a solution that's hyper-tailored to a specific use case and unsuitable for others.

Content

To scale Trophy we've created a content engine centered around a podcast that introduces us to potential customers and provides a rich base from which to create written and video content about B2C app design, retention, engagement, and of course gamification.

We call it The Levels Podcast and while it doesn't have very many views on YouTube and Spotify, it's been excellent at getting us in the room with the right people and teaching us a ton about the B2C space. Plus, we have episodes coming out soon with some pretty big brands that we hope will increase the pod's visibility.

The Future

Looking forward we've got to double down on sales and marketing. We've taken strides on SEO recently but there's much more work to be done. On the product side, after a few more important updates in the next month or so, we can slow down development until we have customers knocking at our door asking for new functionality, and use the extra time to focus on sales. Next stop, $1M ARR...