I’m a research clinic co-founder, retina surgeon and entrepreneur, but I most value my role as a father. I cherish the time I spend with my three young children – driving to competitive dance rehearsals, overseeing homework and tucking them in every night.
But I was frustrated – like many parents today – by the eye-rolling when I asked my kids about their day and the pushback when I enforced our ‘no phones at dinner’ rule.
I have that frustration to thank for WhoRiddle. Now a patented mobile game app, it started as a parenting hack. I had leveled up my eye-roll-inducing dinnertime Q&A to fun quizzes – guess how many flowers are in that vase – how many stars are on mommy’s shirt – get three correct and you earn a dollar! Shocked and buoyed by my kids’ willingness to put down their phones, I leveled up again, covertly firing up both sides of their brains with riddles.
From parenting hack to kid app
On 40-minute excursions driving my kids home from after-school practices, I work against sweat, hunger, hormones and sibling rivalry. I’ve worked a full day comforting patients who fear losing their vision to macular degeneration.
To abort the launch of expected and understandable meltdowns, I ask if they want to hear a riddle. Evaani, 7, is the first to answer. My tired little firecracker musters a ‘YES!’ Kavi, my five-year-old son offers the first guess to my made-up riddle, and Mahi, the tween, chimes in hers.
My blood pressure begins to lower.
My desperate survival tactic transforms into upbeat problem-solving sessions that last long after the car ride. It’s these magic moments that led to me to design an app with weekly riddles.
Crafting riddles for our kiddos was a sweet break from ophthalmic clinical research, my primary passion.
A family techventure
A colleague recently asked me why I decided to channel my inner Josh Wardle to pursue the development of a mobile app for kids. Unlike Wordle’s founder, I have zero experience in this space, and it’s no secret that sophisticated app design is not for the weak of wallet.
My colleague also asked me if this was a hi-tech hobby and quality time with the kiddos, or something that, like Wordle, would one day be picked up by The New York Times.
The answer is yes, and no. Blown away by how the riddles played to our diverse processing styles, I added a level of competition and texted riddles to friends and family, acquiring 150 players.
I treasured the Saturdays spent at Starbucks brainstorming with my daughters. Mahi, our creative director, is my oldest, and was still a tween at the time. A creative thinker and published author, she took immediate ownership of design and identity and helped write the app story requirements. My middle child, Evaani, took on the digital sound director role, picking out app sounds.
I read blogs about founder stories, including Wordle. I also followed my ‘rule of three’ and sought out three points of view, something I do for large purchases or big decisions when my knowledge is limited. Of the three teams I met with, one shared my excitement about WhoRiddle’s potential and could see his young son playing this with him. His company was also willing to work with a more modest budget and proceed in stages that allowed me to solicit creative content from Mahi, Evaani and Kavi. During the app’s early development, their inclusion was key and helped bring clarity when my judgment was clouded.
Powered by passion
Working with a company based in India required me to attend pre-dawn conferences before my full day working on complex cases as a retinal surgeon. The payoff was minimal. Fixing one glitch led to a downstream glitch. It became apparent that my app lacked the infrastructure to scale. Because this was a passion project, I overlooked the importance of an advisory board with knowledge of daily user metrics.
Hiring a marketing director was a pivotal wake-up call that prompted me to cut my losses, take inventory and, well, level-up again. She shared my app with tech experts, who all agreed that WhoRiddle needed to be completely rebuilt if it had any chance to execute on my vision.
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I brought on board a New York-based tech entrepreneur with impressive credentials and a young father’s unique belief in our mission. We proceeded with WhoRiddle 2.0, created a mascot, Scoop, and added animation features. We discussed riddle bandwidth, retention, additional animation – and the value (and cost) of exceptional design. I had to ask myself how much more was I willing to invest to test my hypothesis that WhoRiddle is a scalable product that brings families together?
At home, WhoRiddle passed the test. Evaani had shared an early WhoRiddle with her class and her dance friends, riding a roller coaster of pride and embarrassment through the steady stream of glitches and fallout. The delayed gratification (in today’s swipe culture) from waiting an entire year for the app to emerge anew (a SUPER long time for child), will serve as a valuable lesson.
Lessons learned
It’s been two years since I decided to enter a highly competitive tech space introducing my quirky, layered riddles to the world. Working with a six-member team in the U.S. and Europe to break down barriers to entry is a different kind of adrenaline fix than I get when my patient can see her granddaughter’s smile for the first time in years.
WhoRiddle 3.0 was built to prove that we had a scalable app with the potential to build 100,000 or more steady users. We’re on our way to building a user-based platform that appeals to complementary brand sponsors we admire like Hugimals – and even more famous ones that everyone knows such as Chewy or Nike.
With all I’ve learned about the nuanced world of daily active users, stickiness, dopamine effect, and the threat of Chat GPT cheaters, I make no apologies for my pie-in-the-sky launch. My parental heart took the lead. It all came from a place of passion and purpose, and that’s a payoff I can live with.
We learned countless lessons on this ride. Here are two that apply to any entrepreneur coming from a place of passion:
Know when to let go. I came to accept that my family’s personal connection to weekly riddles was not the magic bullet I believed it was. Holding on to that almost prevented me from giving WhoRiddle a chance to scale.
Bring in pros. In the early stages, I overlooked the importance of an advisory board with knowledge of daily user metrics. I let my sheer passion for the project influence my actions.
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(Riddle answer: A starfish!)
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