Haxo Games

Haxo started off as a college project of three friends: me, Kapitche and Charmants. We were all enrolled in a computer science baccalaureate program at the time.

The idea was something I had already been thinking about at the time. I've always had a passion for education since I started high school. It was triggered by a hate for a deeply flawed and counterproductive system. This in part is what motivated the creation of my personal YouTube channel.

The channel was a training ground for me to improve myself at scripting, researching, animating and editing videos to teach more technical subjects (I think it's still the case today). As it grew and my skills improved, I saw the potential to use it as a medium for making something bigger. Why not make a full-fledged platform with the likes of others, but better and more targeted?

Anyways I'll spare you the boring paragraphs. I met Kapitche before I even created my channel and Charmants at the college we were attending. I pitched the idea to Kapitche, who in turn told me I should pitch it to Charmants. Everyone was convinced this could and would work.

How far did it go?

Pretty far. Even though the platform was in beta we managed to earn a nice $30k USD through limited-time lifetime and discount sales. While this is a very good revenue for a startup, the costs related to a loan we had taken + a designer we paid + the maintenance of the servers throughout the few years this lasted burned through it.

In the last year of the project being online, we tried to reach out to venture capitalists, family offices and all other sorts of potential investors with no luck. The main argument we've received was "You are too early for us." or "If you could show consistent profitable numbers, we would definitely hop onboard." I personally think that the issue was actually just that we seemed too ambitious. This was pitched as an Ed-Tech platform, but we had designed and developed an entire web application of our own.

I realized it might be the issue when one investor we were pitching to straight up asked: "But why aren't you just going through a platform like Udemy?" For us the answer was easy. We didn't want to just be a course platform. We wanted to expand into a fully-featured training platform alike players such as Hack The Box.

Aside from pitching to investors, we also sponsored CTF events by offering platform access to prize winners. In exchange our brand would be displayed at said events and it gave us a lot of networking opportunities. We actually went in-person at Cybersci at the Canadian Centre for Cyber Security in Ottawa and presented the product in front of about 80 people.

So what happened?

Many, many things... To keep this short, the primary reasons were running out of funds and a lack of collaboration. The project wasn't fully ready for launch and so we had to drag the release for so long that, well, we were running out of time. We also were only two people truly working full-time on this project towards the last year (me and Kapitche). Kapitche was completing his C++ course, reaching out to VCs with the help of a friend named Jabril, and I was doing everything else (coding the platform and making my courses).

Some internal conflicts emerged between me and Kapitche and I could clearly see that he wasn't going to continue on with Haxo. I cut my losses and took care of closing the platform all by myself. I invited all the members who bought the product to a private Discord, created a Patreon and uploaded all of the contents I made on there. I also made the source code of the platform open-source (at least the majority of it).

Conclusion

Haxo Games was an amazing learning experience. It taught me a lot about choosing who I work with, how a corporation worked and a lot of web development among other things. I may have omitted many details in this post. The goal of it is just to preserve records of my work on Haxo Games since the website was taken offline.