Before there was KingPick.

Having dabbled with trying to build websites since my Polytechnic days, it was no surprise when I landed on this little idea which stemmed from my other passion, which was football (the UK one 😛).

Some of the older projects were worked on by some freelancers I had hired at the tender age of 21 (The year 2008 I believe). Of course, the web dev team took me for a nice little ride, reminding me the harsh reality of losing money that was given to you by your parents, who were in no way near rich to have done so. Just blind faith.

KingPick was the first real idea that I thought of and implemented, some time during my 2nd half of National Service days. The interest in tech was always present. At one point, it was like as if I had Silicon Valley’s hottest gos’ on my fingertips. Every acquisition, every fund raise, right down to the amounts. It baffled me.

Hiring freelancers seems the best choice always, until you realise you are forever dependent on them.

Ideas were great. But to pull them off, without either coding, or design skills, it required one other aspect, money. Which I clearly did not have as a 21 year old.

Just before entering University, which I flunked out of, I tried my hand at building this. I had an idea, but no real coding skills, or design expertise on any tools, let alone the heavily bloated Adobe suite of products. I had about 9 months before school started. It sounded like the perfect excuse to my parents to justify me staying at home, perhaps.

The Aha! moment.

Not ashamed to admit, but although it sounds almost sinister, the actual idea for KingPick bore fruit from when I saw how hooked my friends were to soccer betting. It taught me a couple of things of what makes a good product, and what is the underlying drivers contributing to this buyer behaviour.

It was not the money. It was deeper than that.

As much as winning money was a motivation factor for most, the seasoned punters were driven by the small hits of dopamine, each time their prediction of the future, turns out accurate. And the satisfaction of being able to say ‘I told you so’.

Armed with this insight, and having witnessed some of the friends have great days and some others that resorted to illegal money lenders to solve their worries.

It truly hurt when I saw young promising friends of mine, lose their ways around football betting and tarnishing their reputations with loved ones.

That made me want to build KingPick, which was a virtual football prediction app that worked by allowing users to use daily issued coins called MOOL$ to place predictions on real-live football games.

Odds will be real-time like you would see on betting sites, but instead of money, you earn BragPoints. These BragPoints allow you to be ranked amongst world/regional tables, as well as private tables. The MOOL$ and BragPoints are non-transferrable, non-exchangeable for cash or anything of value.

This way, it allowed users to be able to play another game of accumulating BragPoints, to do just that. Brag to your friends and people worldwide. There even was a sound revenue model from the get-go.

A double-edged sword. But as the Indian saying goes, takes a thorn to remove a thorn.

It seems almost like we are feeding the gambling habits of people. But if you actually look at it deeper, it serves as a timely reminder to the user, that nobody can predict the future, per se.

These seasoned punters, know its a losing game. But they keep going for it. KingPick allows them to be reminded that the natural laws of the game always ensured the house wins. There might be hot streaks, but you will be always reminded of the times you lost quite glaringly.

How I started work on it.

Armed with zero skills, I put together a deck, with the help of my younger brother. He was a motion-graphic student, so I pulled a couple favours from him, until his patience ran out. He never actually told me off, but I figured from the lengthier time it took for him to make changes or new screens and send them back to me.

If rolling-up your sleeves to get sh*t done was captured as a picture, it would be this very moment.

Dumb as it sounds, it took me a while to realise in order to be a tech founder, your shot is better multi-fold if you do either coding or designing.

Bought my first Macbook Pro with a 1-year interest free monthly instalment plan. At this point, I had no clue what I was actually going to do with it. But it was the first big step I took.

Started putting aside close to 6hrs a day after my 12hr shift work at IMG. Time was spent reading how others are doing it, and maybe in hindsight I could have spent a little lesser time than I should have.

The next big step came when I was faced with the choice of climbing either coding or designing. Both of which was the top 2 highest peaking mountains in my eyes. At this point, I literally was jealous of coders who reminded me of modern-day wizards. To make things happen which a couple of clickity-clack of the keyboard.

I chose the design route, since I already had a knack for it. For some context, I was a tattoo apprentice at 14. The design basics were already there. I knew how perfection was sought in the tattoo industry, and realised thats the equivalent of wanting to design pixel-perfect UIs.

Bought my first Mac app, Sketch. Slight flex, but I think it was literally the first few years of the app ever being released. For people like me. Who loved designing UIs, but not ready to learn it on the Adobe suite, let alone affording it.

How I built it.

Couple of years went by, before anything real got built. I had entered multiple startup programs, and even won a competition with KingPick. I had used InVision and Flinto from the early days of UI/UX design tools and made hi-fidelity mock-ups.

KingPick also landed me my first real job in the tech industry. A mentor in one of my programs, actually hired me as his first Product Manager.

Even though I had garnered skills via some Government programs to do Mobile App Development using Swift and Java, KingPick had grown too much in size in my imagination. It was bloated, and growingly seemed impossible for me to build on my own. One step-forward, few steps back.

No-code is about to change the world for PMs as we know it.

It was at one of these startup programs, someone had briefly mentioned no-code solutions. I have had my fair share of experience with cross-platform dev stacks, but honestly, nothing really stuck for them to be viable future options.

Signed up for Bubble.io within the 2nd week of toying around with it. The new Premier League season was about to begin, and I had to do something ASAP. It was now or never. I started project on Bubble for KingPick, and ran with it.

By this time, I had used my skills learnt as a PM to actually trim the features down to the bare necessities, that would work as a MVP. In 2 weeks, i completed and shipped the first production code out to my friends. It was a closed- beta version and I was immensely proud of it.

This newer version my friends were playing, was a radically different one than what KingPick was initially. Although it bought me a couple of cups of coffee every week, it never really caught on.

Where I am with this project now?

KingPick will forever hold a special place in my heart. For the opportunities that such a “failed” project brought, it has paid itself multiple times over. The original idea of KingPick, always keeps coming back to me. Like I never actually gave it a real shot.

Every idea is great and can be recombined in ways to make it a success, some times they don’t happen concurrently.

The original idea, though very do-able with the skills I have now, feels like it needs to marinate a little more before I embark on it again. If I drop the other projects I am working on now, I will forever be stuck with the ‘one grand idea’.

Since finding the Indie Hacking community on Twitter, it has come to my knowledge, running an app does not have to be big and grandoise. Even if you wanted it to, you actually can make it happen being solo.

The media has painted a picture of the successful startup being one that raised a tonne of money and hired the likes of ex-FAANG engineers. I have seen some far more successful projects with greater ROIs by solo-founders.

Although I have paused my work on KingPick for now, it is within my roadmap for 2023. I have one aim and it is to try and ship 4 products for a Calendar year.

Drop me your email, and I will keep you informed on the progress of KingPick and all the other projects I will be working on.

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