I founded a tech company, Playfinity, in 2016 that won innovation prizes within sportstech over competing companies such as Garmin and Apple. I will here give some snapshots of the journey bringing the company to life. The objective is to give insight to the many tasks I have handled throughout the adventure. It has been hell of a ride! I will happily elaborate on topics as this barely touches the surface of the journey and depth of what my team and I have built.

It started with me hiking in the woods thinking “how do get my 10 year old nephew away from gaming, and enjoying this!”. I there decided; Let's make this, the outdoors, a gaming field. Following was many runs and sketches on how to do this without imprisoning players behind a screen og VR glasses. This reached the crystallizing idea - through using sound to enhance the physical world to a gaming arena powered by connected gaming objects. Hence, started presentations and gathering a team to start a tech company.

Skills sets: Concept development, Persistency, Drive for innovation, Networking, Building team

Numerous presentations were made and pitches performed to battle the company from one funding stage to the next. This was a highly innovative concept to bring to market, and we had to learn and develop a lot to find a marketfit as foundation for our business. Our strength was to keep pivoting the company quickly adjusting the business model to our learnings and findings. Our weakness was constant low budgets and small team with an enormous tech innovation to solve. “We should have been in the States” was often heard.

Skills sets: Presentations, co-develop business model, Visualizations for presentations, Guts to quite well paid secure job.

Playfinity is a platform for gamifying activity and sports to keep kids active. Identifying the global challenge of inactivity, we seek to inspire kids to be more active. By using the very source of declining activity, the smart phones, we are using technology to change this negative trend.

With 35K+ units shipped and 52 million jumps, 2,5 million throws and 25K kicks registered till now, we are starting to see our impact.

Playfinity was founded in 2016

Skills sets: Strategic thinking, Co-develop technology, Research, Insight into marketing and building user base,

Playfinity has developed the infrastructure to create a completely new experience: Active gaming. With our own developed tech integrated into our sports gear, we connect the sports activity to our games on your phone. Hence providing real time sound effects and commentary in the real world and immersing the player into a word of virtual gaming.

Playfinity focuses on “making it fun to get better”, differentiating us from the sports tech competition where the focus is “making the best better”. Thus, Playfinity targets the 98% of the underserved youth market in sports tech.

Skills sets: Concept development, research and analytic thinking, App-development, Insight into building backend solution

Plafinity is a tech company. Building technology and IoT connected infrastructure is a central part of building the company. I worked closely with my co-founder and CTO, with background from Texas Instruments, to develop our products. Sparring with him on tech solutions, specifications, configurations and components has been a task throughout the years in Playfinity. Decisions made on the techplatform gave the foundation and framework for experience development. Thus it was important that we together wayed technology risk and costs against the goals and visions for the experience. As once locked, the opportunity space was set for many years to come.

I also followed on the sidelines for developing the software for connectivity between our hardware and phones, as well as the infrastructure for backend solutions. Sparring on the tech involved here, was just as import, as the decisions made here also impacted the opportunity space for experiences. 

Skill sets: Knowledge in technology development, Communicating and coordinating with tech resources and software developers, Developing tech products, Strategic thinking

Creating games is a complex task, especially when the type of gaming we are creating is first of its kind. The player(s) has to understand the objective of the game very fast, then perform the game with only the real time sound effects to guide him in playing the game; providing motivation, indicating good or bad performance and creating an immersive gaming atmosphere. Then the player has to be provided with a score result that makes sense, and that motivates to want to do it again and again. 

Working with game development covered creating an overall concept for the gaming app, defining a visual identity, Collaborating with gaming experts setting up an overall UX concept, defining play loops and retention mechanisms, leader board setups, player profiles, onboarding schemes, user engagement concepts and iterations from user testing. In parallel we have to develop a stable connected tech providing detections to identify what is being done with the ball and developing a backend service that would keep track of the scores, leaderboards, profiles and game interaction between the global network of players. 

Skill sets: Concept development, Game development, Creative processes, sound development, visual identity, retention mechanisms, UX and UI design, User testing, technology development, insight on detection, team coordination, working with code developers, animations.

We decided that we wanted to be a B2C company, building a brand for the consumer market. We worked with several communication agencies, there amongst the internationally renowned agency, We are pi, in Netherlands that took us on only because our mission was so mind blowing and “right”. Together we worked on defining the core of our business, interviewed international industry leaders and thought leaders in relevant segments, hired user testing agency to uncover the kids needs and contemporary trends. The end goal being a map of why we should exist in todays market, and what is the company's core promise. The following steps where to build communication, brand guidelines and app experiences onto this foundation.

As much fundamental components where anchored in these processes of brand building, rolling them out in practise takes time. Given Playfinity is an early stage company, with very limited marketing team, the implementation process is still in its infancy. I have participated in the whole process of this work.

Skill set: Insight into brand building, User testing and interviews, Strategic thinking, Research

We made a promise to make robust quality products that would last. As a physical product producing business, this is an essential part of our environmental strategy. Also, defining playfinity as a supplier of experiences, the products function as the tools to enter our world of active gaming. Looking forward, the products are to be used with several apps developed by Playfinity, partners or even by indie game developers on our open source code. Hence, the long term revenue stream for Playfinity is not on sales of products, but through business models built on the platform infrastructure; our PLAY OS. Making a robust infrastructure of physical products and tech, is key to obtaining this.

For each product i developed, I had to derive test methods for the products and tech, to ensure quality control. For mass production, test points had to be defined, and criterias determined. 

Skill set: Analysing and understanding production facilities and methods, Setting up production criterias and tests, communication,  Strategic thinking 

Establishing a network of suppliers, and maintaining good relations has been key to develop our products. I have been to various sites in China, Pakistan and Tunisia to go into depth with the relevant manufacturing to understand how to integrate our tech in the production process, and develop cost efficient products. 

Skill sets: Production methods, Establishing and maintaining international relations and trust, Technical insight, Developing retrofitted production methods, Communication

Leading all physical product development single handed, I had to manage these products in close relation to manufacturing sites in Pakistan, China, France, Tunisia and Norway. This also implied budgeting the projects and defining the goals and specifications for the products. 

In addition, my role was to plan the logistics of the production, planning how the various components would come together to a complete packaged product ready for market at warehouses.

Skill sets: Project management, Budgeting, Production planning, Logistics planning and follow up

We have filed several patents, design protections and International trademark registrations. I managed most of these processes and followed others. 

Until now, the most powerful patent protection we have is made on our metode for integrating tech into inflatable balls, like footballs, in such a way that it is easily retrofitted into conventional bladder ball production and it provides for a button function on ball surface. Not only does this make it the only inflatables in the world with a button, it gives vast opportunities to gameplay possibilities when making active gaming experiences. 

Skill sets: Filing patents, understanding the strategies, costs and process of filing patents

Having control over the necessary certifications for products is crucial for bringing technology products to market. Its costly, takes time, tremendously boring, but absolutely necessary to do correctly. I managed the process of certification for Playfinitys second tech platform (integration in bladder balls) in collaboration with industry partner. Specification, following up certification lab, providing iterations to product, tech and packaging to comply with certification standards are essential tasks in this process. 

Skill sets: Certification management, network, Technical insight, Communication