#cashsquare

It’s not easy going from a comfy corporate job to creating your own startup. It took me 2 years to get over this hurdle and understand the differences and challenges that come with a very unknown future!

I’m not going to tell you a beautiful story. You hear a lot of stories in the media about the ones that made it and how they overcame amazing odds to conquer the world of business. That’s not the story of most startups. And I’m just going to give it to you straight.  

First, a little bit about myself. My name is Boris, and I’m one of the co-founders of Cashsquare – a casual game, which allows you to buy any venue that is registered on Foursquare. It’s like Monopoly, just for your mobile!

I honestly work 14 - 16 hours a day. Outside of eating pizza and Sushi, which is almost always ordered in, I don’t believe I eat anything else. If I get to the gym, it’s usually around 10-11 p.m and very rarely any earlier. I usually wear jeans and a hoody, and I work from home or the nearby Starbucks and very rarely at our office. This is my life and, based on conversations with other founders, pretty typical. This may sound masochistic to most, but I actually enjoy it. While we work around the clock, I can do and say whatever I wish and it gives me a freedom that I never had in my corporate job.

But there is a dark side. I don’t have the same comfy salary with vacation and benefits.We give up stability and a healthy life standard that our parents wanted us to have when they sent us to the top universities. And yes, I did go to one of the top universities in the UK, but I usually only see those diplomas a couple times a day in my mother’s bedroom – that’s about it. I never used it for anything and it never gave me a job opportunity. So, it puts my mom a good mood, but that’s about it. Don’t get me wrong, I value my education and the knowledge and opportunities it provided. I was very fortunate  to get the teachers and mentors I had throughout my studies. But, looking back at all those sleepless nights in the libraries with tons of Redbull and coffee, it hasn’t given me the same benefits as working for a startup.  It is a rollercoaster, but it’s a fun ride and hard to understand unless you have tried it for yourself.

Recently, I was talking to a fellow crazy person and we got talking about the constant problems, lack of money and limited salary of running a startup. It’s funny, when you see a lot of $$$$ on your account and you can’t do a lot with it, it has some strange benefits. While I can’t spend it on a beautiful holiday or treat myself to an amazing spa weekend, I know I did the right thing. I don’t want to be a robot, a doctor or an office clerk, I want to create and change something. I’m ambitious and I believe I am creating something new and unique for people to enjoy.  Seeing that money in our account supporting that dream makes it all worthwhile.

Most importantly,I want to share with you why this is something I believe everyone needs to pursue at least once in their life. I’m not talking about a stable business or opening a organic food store. I’m talking about a proper start-up with all its pluses and minuses - prototypes, offices in basements, sleepless nights and the hardest part – looking for investors and believers. It’s a hard thing to do, but it’s a fun rollercoaster and a ride you’ll never forget.

I was sitting in a plane when I was writing this post, coming back from Tech Crunch Disrupt London. It was an amazing event and an event that all startups should attend, regardless of their stage. The atmosphere, the people and the energy are just a little different from all the conferences you visit. Other conferences are stuffy with amazingly beautiful 100x100 meter plastic stands that will be trashed after a couple of days! Not, TechCrunch Disrupt. This is a conference that is solely concentrated on people, ideas, thoughts and amazing minds! This short infusion of power, hope and believe has motivated me once again to concur a different horizon, grow even faster and become even better. This feeling is comparable to maybe your first kiss! You feel as if you are floating and not walking, you are smiling like a freaking idiot... Yes that’s the feeling, unbelievable!

Until the next post... have a nice weekend! 

Two years ago, I launched a social media gaming company called Cashsquare. Our small team set out to create the first real-life virtual game that lets people buy and sell real-life properties, but in a virtual gaming environment. 

We wanted to bring online games to the real world and we did everything the right way. We brought together a team of talented developers and designers from a number of different backgrounds: some came from the real estate development world who dreamed to create something new and different, some were talented developers and marketers looking to try something fun and unique. Our team was hungry and diverse.

We built a business plan. We found office space, which we decided to share with two other companies to reduce costs and overhead. We secured our first round of investment. We spent countless hours developing the game. And of course, we began to build a product and brand while legally dotting all of our i’s and crossing all of our t’s along the way. We were starting to see all of our time, money and energy paying off.

Then we got sued by Square, Inc. – the payment processing company.  And it turned we were not the only victims.  Square, Inc. has sued numerous startups with the word “square” in their names. Apparently, Square, Inc. feels that it has the monopoly on the word “square”.  Apparently it doesn’t matter that there’s no likelihood of confusion (to use the trademark parlance) between our real-life virtual game and Square Inc.’s payment processing business.  I guess it’s only a matter of time before Square, Inc. insists that Moscow’s Red Square or Beijing’s Tiananmen Square change their names.

Why is Square, Inc. acting like this?  I think it’s because they know that startups like us don’t have the money to fight court battles.  I just wish they would use their pile of money to improve their products instead of bullying startups into submission.

What are we going to do?

We’re moving forward. We just launched our new version and our developers are pushing hard to make new features the next month. We feel we’ve invested a lot in our name and our brand, so we don’t want to throw all the time and energy we’ve invested by the wayside.

This is a very realistic issue that many startups and founders may face. You build something from scratch and even when you do everything the right way, there are still challenges. We are going to fight it and believe our startup will survive, because we do it for the love of the game.

We encourage all startups and founders to follow their passion and persevere in the face of adversity.

Boris