Hard to believe that our first quiz was launched more than five years ago! Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, we started our journey with a small but determined team of digital doers and content creators to share our first ever question with the world—“Who is the current president of the USA?”. A lot more than just the answer to that question has changed since then.
We’ve gone from one short 10-question quiz and just a handful of users, to 18 million+ people playing our content per month across multiple platforms and devices. With so much content to choose from and so many active players, that works out at about 4K questions being answered every minute. And as our audience has grown, so have we. In the last few years, we have over doubled in size, welcoming lots of new talent to support our growing ambition and uphold our underlying mission: to entertain, educate, and engage people throughout the world.
Bumpy beginnings
It wasn’t all easy sailing, however. We caught up with CEO, Alexander, to learn about the big milestones and early learnings, that took us from one humble quiz to a thriving start-up.
“In the years leading up to the launch of GimmeMore [our leading brand under the 360 Digital Starters umbrella] , we were working on a project to become a successful mobile games publisher in cooperation with a larger online games publisher from Germany. The project ended up in a real struggle, and after two years we had to make the decision to close the doors on it and start something new from scratch.
“During those 2 years we had learned valuable lessons and agreed on three ground rules for our next project:
It should work across platforms
There should be as little dependency on third-party, external resources
It must have the potential to reach a large audience
“After some initial brainstorming and research, we had lots of ideas in the mix, but decided to run a small test case with one of them: an online quiz. Three months later GimmeMore was born.”
And we’re off!
As with many start-ups, we started small and relied on the innovation, determination, and flexibility of our initial team to master multiple tasks and create solutions that could support our ambition. Thanks to this early conviction, our products began to become more and more popular with users throughout the world, and we in turn, began to seek out new talent—it didn’t take long for the company to rapidly expand. One of our earlier additions, was HR Manager, Irina:
“The goal was to find talented new faces who could support our many different teams. Back then, I was having interviews all the time and we hired a lot of great marketing managers, graphic designers, content creators, and developers through the process. We’re now 33 people from 16 different countries with a lot of different backgrounds and stories to share. The company would not be what it is today without these fun, intelligent, and creative co-workers.”
Team expansion has brought new talents and skillsets to the company, giving us the opportunity to develop new features and make big advances on both a technical and project level.
Berlin expansion
With a rapidly growing team, we realized that our single open-plan office was going to get crowded, quickly. Lucky for us, a space had opened up on the 11th floor of the same building, and in 2018 we were able to expand our hub with more meeting rooms, social areas, and working spots, while keeping everyone together in the heart of Berlin.
“It feels good to be upstairs, especially during busy times when everyone is in the office. There we can enjoy a calmer environment and better concentration. There are two balconies, so small breaks or team stand-ups in the fresh air are great.”- Andy, Frontend Developer
Improving our processes
Our first published quiz was created without any technical resources, reporting tools, or content management system (CMS). We’ve naturally come leaps and bounds since then and, courtesy of our Dev team, now have our own in-house CMS, designed to meet the specific cross-functional needs of content creators and business.
“It's interesting to see, how the CMS has changed since the beginning. It really shows the successful team effort that went into this. New features, such as answer image blocks, user input questions, video functions and other variants, make the creative writing process for the content team much more interesting.” - Patricia, Content Manager
On and off-site work
In light of the Covid-19 pandemic, we, like many other businesses, have recently adapted to working remotely. And although some restrictions have now lifted and the office has partially re-opened, we have not fully returned to on-site work, but instead given our colleagues the option to work both at home or at the office.
The initial shift to off-site may have been an unexpected change for us, but it has in itself been a milestone for the company. It has opened a window to new flexible ways of working through the use of some really great tools, such as Zoom, MS Teams, and Monday.com and led to the introduction of new projects, such as our weekly e-newsletter and ‘cheers for peers’ initiative (where employees can give a virtual thanks to their colleagues).
“Many companies will realize that it is not always required for all employees to work on-site all the time. A healthy balance of on-site and off-site work can be possible in well-structured organizations with the right tools in place. Other long-term effects could be an improved work-life balance due to less travel time and less crowded city centers.” – Alexander, CEO
With new tools, colleagues, skills, and ideas, we’re excited to see what the next five years will bring.