I love pub quizzes. In 2021, during my no-code phase before AI, I started building pubquizen.no: thousands of curated and classified questions in Airtable, with fun facts, extra background and hints for the quizmaster, and a web application made in Softr. The product was a new quiz every week, 40 questions I put together the way a good quizmaster thinks: a balance of categories and difficulty, fun facts and explanations, and enough of the questions you can reason your way to, because those are the ones that make the best team moments. Everyone who subscribed got the same questions and ran their quiz from them.
I put the project aside a few times along the way, and it took a while before the first paying customer came along. It stayed at that one, and they were very happy: municipal employees in the Trysil area who ran quizzes one autumn. They paid 500 kroner a month after I gave them half price, and I learned that I love giving service out of the ordinary. But when I did the sums, I saw it could never pay. The big quiz scenes have their own quizmasters, the chains make their own quizzes, and I would have needed customers in almost every town. Selling was hard, and putting together the perfect quiz every week was a lot of work. All credit to the quizmasters out there.
What I did afterwards
I know the theory: test the market before you build. Alberto Savoia and pretotyping are something I look up to, and here I did most of it backwards. But not everything you do is about maximising sales. It matters to me to solve problems I care about, and the pub quiz was one of them. When the sums didn't add up, it was fine to stop. Annie Duke's book Quit is about exactly that.
Mr. World Pool was also built from the inside out, but there the opportunities are international and huge, in Britain, Australia, Hong Kong and Japan. It can work if I prove myself a thousand times over, with books, content, courses, competitions and a community, with quality and by listening to the people who use it. I will never give up on Mr. World Pool. Selling it, on the other hand, I may give up on one day.