STAKESTER

In 2019 I was invited by ex Quantexa CMO Tom Fairey to become Head of Product and Co-Founder of Stakester, with a vision to bring esports competitions to a mass audience.

My first job was to create the brand, product visuals, website (built in Webflow), pitch deck, and product roadmap in order to secure pre-seed investment.

Then I designed an MVP to enable casual gamers to enter 1v1 competitions on games like FIFA, with a cash prize for the winner. I had to solve some major user journey pain points, such as; 

• How to connect two strangers, not just on our platform, but on the Playstation / Xbox platforms as well.
  

• How to verify a winner.
  

• How to attain critical mass, to ensure new users can quickly pick up a game.
  

With more than 1000 competitions completed across an initial test weekend, we proved our concept, and secured VC funding.

As we built to a team of more than 30, my focus changed from design to product leadership — setting our strategy, roadmap and KPIs based on the data we were gathering from the app. I implemented an Agile delivery pipeline with a hybrid internal/external development team to deliver significant app updates, designed by my absolutely incredible product team.

I also spearheaded moves into two new areas — competing on mobile games, and web 3.0, with a collection of NFTs to enhance user's experience of the app, which I conceptualised and designed.

Though we raised at a peak valuation of £80m, there were some challenges we simply couldn't overcome — one being that Sony released their own competition platform on Playstation Plus. Still, I am extremely proud to have built what we did from the ground up. The success we had, and the mistakes we made, made me even more passionate about working in a startup environment.