Alumni Life -> Laurent RITTER, Class 18 - Voodoo

Some figures about Voodoo:

• 1 million € raised since its creation
• Largest market : the USA
• 3 games to be released in 2016 (first one next month)
• The company joined the Google StartUp program last year
• 9 employees (permanent contracts)The team should be compound of 20 persons by the end of 2017

Can you introduce your ESC Rennes career for those who may not be familiar with you?

HR course, Junior Entreprise, gap year at Total.

How the idea of starting Voodoo did come to you?

After finishing school, I've worked as a sales engineer in the oil industry. This is a work where, basically, with a phone & internet you can bring back a lot of money to your boss. I've met there a high school friend, who was engineer since then. 6 months later, I was breaking up my trial period to create a first organization with him. At that time, we were creating websites & mobile apps for customers. The idea there was to get started with entrepreneurship in order to launch a mass-market product. Our jobs were not so inspiring and creating a startup offered us a lot more possibilities. The mobile app games market was at its start, we created another organization, found a first developer and we got started!

Could you give us some feedbacks about your experience?

We really had in mind to launch a game and to be quickly doing a worldwide buzz...No, that's not at all how it happened :)

We didn't know anything about the market and did a lot of mistakes!

Concretely, if you want your app to be downloaded, you need to advertise, and advertising is expansive! We lost a lot of money every day at the beginning. To be profitable, it took 10 months of iterations, with 1 weekly new release, a behavior tracking system of our users, some A/B testing on our visual advertising displays, an automatic system to put advertising agencies in competition and so on... Success always requires, above all, a lot of work and perseverance.

Your next steps? 

I would like to invest in other startups. This is an exciting environment and incredibly positive!

Any advice for those who still hesitates to create their own company?

There never is a good moment to get started, no need to wait. I would suggest doing it as quickly as possible! The idea doesn't really matter, the way you do it does.

More information

Website : http://www.voodoo.io/