At the beginning of this project, the idea was to solve some problems that content creators were facing. But as you’ll see, things took a different turn!
Instead of guessing, my friend Akira and I started reaching out and chatting with a bunch of creators—some from Twitter, some from YouTube, and others from Instagram.
What we quickly discovered is that finding good inspiration and references is a real struggle for creators. So we started building an agent that searched for inspiration based on the creator’s profile. In just one week, we had a working prototype and started testing it. People loved it—but there was a problem…
We actually couldn’t participate in the hackathon with this product, since it relied on third-party data.
We were back at square one, searching for problems to solve and potential solutions.
That’s when I remembered a conversation I had with one of the creators, Matheus. During our chat he explained that one of his biggest dreams was to create a game for his community—a dream his community had been craving as well.
That’s when it hit me: why not create a game for Matheus’s community of more than 700k trivia addicts and join the hackathon with that? :)
So Akira and I called Matheus back and proposed teaming up. He was super excited about the idea, and we started working together.
After polling his community, we discovered that on average 40% were on Android and 60% on iOS. A multiplatform app was required for this project. The only problem was that my bread and butter is iOS development (UIKit / SwiftUI). The easy solution would have been to ship only for iOS. But I didn’t take the easy way out—I rolled up my sleeves, dove deep into React Native, and spent night and day learning the framework. In just one week, we had our first prototype on TestFlight in the hands of users!
Fast forward to today: we launched the app a couple of days ago on the App Store and created an exclusive group with 150 people from Matheus’s community to test and improve the app before rolling it out to the rest of his community. People are actually playing it at parties and having fun (see the video)
I wish we had more time to make this app outstanding, but so far we’ve done the best we could! Anyway, that’s the story of Dato—a trivia game.
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