How does a broke, failing company turn into a $27.7 million dollar success?

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Plain Vanilla Games spent nearly a year in bootstrapping a mobile game failure, called The Moogies.

Thor Fridriksson, the CEO and Founder of Plain Vanilla Games, put everything he had into the development, including taking loans for many million ISK.

Thor hadn’t taken any wages for months so everything was riding on a successful launch of the game.

On the day The Moogies was released, Thor immediately knew it was a colossal failure with only 1200 downloads despite being in the “Featured” section of the app store.

One of the most Anti-Climactic moments in his life

When Thor realized that his game was a failure, he sank to the low-point of his life.

He and his girlfriend had split up, the game was a failure, the business was broke and he was looking at declaring himself bankrupt.

But in this low-point, he became so desperate that he get the stroke of brilliance and drew up a rough sketch of the game QuizUp.

He had nothing to lose, so he decided to make one last attempt

Armed with nothing more than a game sketch on a piece of paper, a one way ticket to Silicon Valley and two engineers, he decided to make one last attempt at software entrepreneurship and get funding in San Francisco.

Listen to how he made his success in the episode.

Listen to this episode and discover:

• 
  
• The #1 tip all software entrepreneurs must know to be successful
  
• Why it isn’t enough to have a high quality app to be successful
  
• An ancient secret to getting great employees to work for your startup
  
• Why over-analyzing your idea is a bad thing
  

Who is in this week’s episode?

• 
  
• Thor Fridriksson
  
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  • Connect with Thor on LinkedIn
    
  • Say Thanks to Thor on Twitter
    
  • Thor on Facebook
    
  
  
  
• Siggy Gudbrandsson (Sigurður Guðbrandsson)
  

Mentioned in the episode

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• QuizUp
  
• The Moogies
  
• Seed Forum Iceland
  
• David Helgason at Unity
  
• Gunnar Holmsteinn
  
• Flappy Bird
  

The post QuizUp: The $27.7 million fairy tale with Thor Fridriksson – VE004 appeared first on Viking Entrepreneurs.