Co-founder & CTO

Championfy was a competitive casual gaming platform for Southeast Asia: play short games, compete, win cash daily. I co-founded it and ran engineering and product for two years, through to its acquisition by Ampverse.

Building the platform

I designed and developed the platform from the ground up — system architecture, database design, backend APIs, the admin portal, and the cross-platform mobile apps. For a long stretch that meant being the person who decided the shape of the thing and also the person who typed it.

That scaled to a cross-functional team of ten across Singapore, Malaysia and India, spanning engineering, design and product. Building a team across three countries and time zones turned out to be as much of the job as building the software.

Scale

The B2C platform launched and grew across Southeast Asia to more than 200,000 users and over 20 million gaming sessions. Sessions are the number that mattered to us: in casual gaming, people either come back several times a day or they never come back at all.

A second revenue line

The same gaming engine that powered our own app turned out to be worth more than our own app used it for. I led its integration with over ten external partners as a B2B product, opening a revenue stream that didn't depend on our own user acquisition.

Cost and distribution

Two decisions that bought us runway:

• Migrated the full cloud infrastructure from Google Cloud to AWS, cutting monthly infrastructure costs by thousands of dollars.
• Conceptualised and built a Telegram gaming bot to lower customer acquisition cost and reach players where they already were, rather than paying to pull them into an app install.