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Cosmo Quiz - From Zero to One

12 min read ·

TL;DR

I must admit: I’ve spent a lot of my time and energy on projects that didn’t have even a single user.

Cosmo Quiz was an attempt of building a profitable business from scratch. In this blog post I describe what happened from an idea to first earned money, share some horror stories, moments of glory and reflections what I would do differently if building it once again from the very beginning.

What is Cosmo Quiz?

It’s an engaging, fully personalized quiz tailored to your needs. It’s a mash-up of classics like “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?”, “Family Feud”, and “Name That Tune”. Every participant answers to questions with physical box. It works offline in any place you want.

Where it all starts

When hosting some friends in Warsaw we were looking for some ways to spend a time in interesting way. One thing that caught our attention was a game where we pretend to be in Quiz TV-Show-like (think of Who wants to be a millionaire? or Family Feud).

We played it and it was pretty cool. It costed us 80 PLN per person and I’ve noticed that they are opening new places all over the Poland. I thought to myself: actually, it’s not that hard to build! They are doing great. Why couldn’t I do the same but cheaper and better?

I told it to my friends and the only reaction was: Why to even talk about it if we won’t do anything with this idea? Like always - we only talk.. It was enough. This question actually triggered this project.

First prototype

Even the same day I draw the flow of app. I decided that I’ll build simple Ruby on Rails app (yup, like most of pet projects, I took totally unknown to me technology) and make it playable as fast as possible.

It took… well, longer than expected before I could play it with my wife. Some bugs appeared and I kept pushing. After trying hard to add another round to the mess I had I decided to rewrite all of that into tech I know better (Java + React). Then I showed the prototype to my friends. Simple web app where people could join with their phones. It was displaying questions and then possible answers. Counting points and displaying the leaderboard. Occasionally some bug creeped in. But moments when somebody laughed or got embarassed because of choosing wrong answer - I could already see that it’s doing the same job that the game we paid for.

Later on my friend out of nowhere sent me a prototype of physical boxes. He bought some buttons, put it into wooden box, integrated it with game and suddenly we were much closer to experience of game we played earlier on.

There were many rough edges in our first prototypes:

…and many more different and strange cases. It was far away from being playable. Instead of being proud, I was rather embarassed when presenting it to others. Which I think was a good thing back then.

Enthusiasm & ignorance

I don’t know from where enthusiasm comes. However, I know that when you want to build something and make it successful, you need a lot of enthusiasm. I was happily fixing bug after bug, rewriting app once again after some reflections how it could be better, trying new ideas and pushing this mess forward. For sure it’s easier to keep this level of enthusiasm when you know that there are people who care about what you’re doing. At the beginning of project I chose the team:

From time to time I was updating them how it’s going and getting feedback. Also they were great to bounce off ideas. And when resignation was knocking to my doors, update from them was always very inspiring.

Ignorance plays also pretty imporant role when building something bigger than a weekend project. We didn’t achieved what we achieved because it was easy. We did it because we thought it was easy ;)

Our first events

After some time of iterating we decided to look for some opportunities to make money on the project. For me it was important, because if people pay for the work you did, it means that they think it’s worth it. If they are only saying that you built a cool thing - you never know.

There were few directions we were looking at:

I’ve created a landing page and we started talking to people. First opportunity came from my friends Michał and Martyna who were getting married. They liked an idea and we agreed to organize a quiz on theirs wedding. It went pretty well: people were engaged (for most of the time), everything worked. It was a great day for the project!

Then we had few more:

First money earned

Until now we earned 0 PLN and put lot of time, energy and some money. We decided to try one more thing: pubs. When I was re-working our landing page on some talk on Fosdem 2025, my friend Bartek asked me what am I doing. After explaining him, it turned out that he knows the best Warsaw’s pub owner - Cybermachina - Rafał.

I demoed the game to Rafał and he said he is seeing potential. After some talking we finally managed to organize our first paid event in Cybermachina. It was 10 PLN per person and we gathered ~25 people there (ok, I must admit - half of these people were my friends).

Event went pretty smooth. There was lot of laughs and people enjoyed the game. That’s cool, but…

…we need to talk about business model we were aiming for.

Business Model - North Star

Let’s do a quick math for Cosmo Quiz event in Cybermachina. We gathered 250 PLN. Half of it went for prizes (Cybermachina doubled what we gave them, so people had 250PLN for prizes). So we have left around 120PLN.

At this time I was no longer living in Warsaw, but in Radomsko. Radomsko -> Warsaw -> Radomsko with my car costs around ~180 PLN.

Also, it needed my time. For sure it wasn’t something we could sustain.

What we tried to achieve: the game stays in the pub, people can rent it by paying to the pub and then we share profits with the pub. If anyone reading this blog post knows the pub owner who would be happy from such deal - we’re happy to talk - for some reasons we didn’t get any.

Random call from event agency

Remember Nerds on Lakes event? After doing Cosmo Quiz I had few interesting converstations. One of them was with Grzegorz who knows a guy who has an agency that organize events for companies.

After ~8 months after this conversation, when I was about to give up Cosmo Quiz and not doing anything more with that, I got a call from Marcin - owner of agency organizing events. It turned out that he’s looking for ways to extend his offer and our game seems like a good fit.

Few weeks later I was demoing game to Marcin and his team in Legionowo. They liked it a lot and it gave another hope for the project.

Distributing our game by agencies organizing is the perfect fit: we give them equippment and supporting software - they handle finding clients and organizing quizes for them. It started to feel like a win-win situation.

Cold mails

We compiled list of 50 agencies and cold mailed them with simple question if they would be interested to see demo of our game. To my surprises we got lot of responses and phone calls. When talking on phone people were pretty excited and surprised that the price we’re offering for this deal is so cheap.

However, even if sounds sweety - it led to zero deals. We’ll call to you is the best we’ve got.

Where are we today?

Here’s a short of our last organized event:

We have a pretty cool product that helps to do cool personalized quiz events, however we found nobody who would like to pay for it.

At this point we could:

But for now we ran out of enthusiasm - maybe we will do the comeback when we receive another random call or have some random conversation.

What I have learnt along the way?

Hardware

  1. I learnt what converter is and how to reduce voltage with use of one (we were changing light bulbs in our boxes)
  2. I used hot glue gun for the first time in my life
  3. What ESP32 is and how to upload software there

Software

  1. For the first time I played with MQTT
  2. Latest version of our app is 90% written by LLM. I don’t care about your opinion that it has to be slop then. It works just great, code is modularized well, there’s lot of automated tests on the right level and I can orient in it without any issues
  3. I played with NodeJS and learnt XState on the way - which by the way is so great library!
  4. I had an opportunity to play with configuring Raspberry PI: configuring wayfire so I get right resolution when connecting to TV via HDMI, configuring external network adapter, so raspberry PI can play a role of router for more than 8 clients
  5. That keeping frontend and backend in sync may be really tricky and one shouldn’t disregard this problem!

Product

  1. That less is more. Initially every user had their phone alongside with box. It bloated the flow (everybody had to join wifi, then go to the page, join the game etc.). We cut it and now it’s host based, where everyone just gets the box with four buttons and enjoy the game. It simplifies both user experience and codebase.
  2. I wish I constraint it from very beginnig to be small system handling only one game at the time with max ~10 clients instead of overengineering a solution for lot of games at the same time and lot of players :)

People

  1. I learnt, that having people on board with who you can share your project’s progress is a great boost for enthusiasm and you can sustain for much longer. Not even mention when they contribute to the project!
  2. I learnt, that in general people happily want to help you when you talk about your project. They give you advices and share who they know that could be helpful

Marketing

  1. I got nice experience with cold mailing (and got to know cool piece of software: https://www.billionmail.com/)
  2. I’ve experienced that companies are happy to talk with you if you offer them solution that can help them win
  3. And to be honest, probably the last cold mailing campaign could be something we should start with. It gives a lot of sense if thing you’re trying to build will have the audience or not. If people are willing to meet for demo - it means that there is a potential. Ofc the best signal is when they want to buy it, but it’s not always easy to verify without having actual product.

If I was starting today - I would do the landing page and send cold mails first. If there would be people happy to meet for the demo - only then I would prepare a prototype.

Why do I write about all of that?

There are three reasons:

  1. To lower the bar for you and inspire you. Usually you hear about geniuses who are building rockets, world-wide social networks or autonomous cars. This story is about building a game that anybody could build. But instead of talking, we built it. Even if it’s not that successful as I would like it to be - I’m proud of it anyway. It gave me a this amount of satisfaction that any amount of Netflix series wouldn’t give me. Ideas are cheap. Execution is everything.
  2. Because maybe you know somebody who knows somebody…. Maybe you know somebody who I should talk about this project. Or maybe you are potential client of mine. Or you have an idea how I can push it forward and want to share with me. Please do :)
  3. To sum up the journey. So I can share with you what I’ve experienced. If you’re thinking about building something similar - you better learn from this story and validate the idea more aggresively than me.

Wrapping up

I hope that after reading all of that you have this feeling of ‘I could build something cool’. If you have it - just do it. If it helps - you can give me updates on what you’re building and I’m more than happy to give you feedback on that. Even if it’s not successful - it’s better to produce something than only to consume.