Rohith Varanasi grew up in Jersey and had a chill childhood, playing videos games and sports from a young age. He wanted to learn how to build a video game, and upon googling it, decided he should build a website first. At that point.. he was hooked on coding. He got into jailbreaking the playstation and writing real code to mod games. Eventually, he got into hackathons and ended up building a web browser based on SMS called Cosmos - which went viral. Outside of tech, he is into paddle, loves going to the gym, and hanging with his girlfriend and their 1 year old cat.Ro and his co-founder have been building a bunch of different consumer products. The latest product they built allows people to earn in game rewards by walking, and do so in a non-deterministic way. Under the hood, they are using generative AI to create endless outcomes, and optimal replay-ability.This is the creation story of Block Party.SponsorsSpeakeasyQA WolfSnapTradeLinkshttps://blockparty.gamehttps://www.linkedin.com/in/brohith/Our Sponsors:* Check out Vanta and use my code CODESTORY for a great deal: https://www.vanta.comSupport this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/code-story/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy
And so we have this constant feed of things that we can build. And I think right now things are constantly moving around as we get new users on board and priorities are shifting. But primarily like the focus, our North Star is can we make this like fun? Not going to make this fun just one time, but can we make this be an infinite source of fun?
That sort of helps us align with our roadmap and our decision-making of, okay, does this sort of get us closer to that vision of building these infinite games that never run out of content and are dynamic and are shaped by the players that play them? My name is Rohit Varanasi, and I'm the co-founder and CEO of Block Party.
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Rohith Varanasi grew up in Jersey and had a chill childhood playing video games and sports from a young age. He wanted to learn how to build a video game and upon Googling it, decided he should build a website first. And at that point, he was hooked on coding. He got into jailbreaking the PlayStation and writing real code to mod games.
Eventually, he got into hackathons and ended up building a web browser based on SMS called Cosmos, which went viral. Outside of tech, he's into paddle, loves going to the gym and hanging with his girlfriend and their one-year-old cat. Ro and his co-founder have been building a bunch of different consumer products.
The latest product they built allows people to earn in-game rewards by walking and do so in a non-deterministic way. Under the hood, they are using generative AI to create endless outcomes and optimal replayability. This is the creation story of Block Party.
My co-founder and I, we've been working on different products over the past couple of years. The most recent one that we launched is called Block Party. Block Party turns the whole world into a giant human monopoly, more or less. You connect your health kit, you walk around and you earn and gain currency for just walking. One step equals one energy. That's what we call it.
And then you can use your steps and energy to buy buildings in the real world. On top of that, we have different items that are just scattered all over the world. They're called drops, and you can go open these drops and you'll get different items of varying rarities. And you can use these items to go upgrade your buildings and build up your green buildings, sort of territory build.
But the core part of all of this that we're excited about is that it's not deterministic. Every game that's existed up until today is somewhat deterministic in the sense that every asset, every screen, every whatever that you see, that a player sees has to have been pre-computed. It has to have existed before that player did that action.
I think what we're doing that I'm really excited about is we're using gen AI as a core mechanic. So really there's infinite, endless outcomes. And I think we're at a paradigm shift in gaming. Using Gen AI, like I said, allows us to create endless and infinite replayability, or experiences with infinite replayability. That's a high-level overview of Block Party.
It's this really fun mobile game where there's endless outcomes. Every action you do results in a unique visual and experience that no one has seen before.
So tell me about the MVP for Block Party. What did that first version of the product look and feel like? And what sort of tools were you using to bring it to life?
Right now, we're iOS only. So our mobile app is fully native. It's all Swift. For the MVP, we really sprinted and got like V0.1 out in maybe four weeks, three weeks. And our backend is all Elixir. I started using Elixir at my first startup and I just fell in love. It's been such a pleasure to work with and it only keeps getting better and more magical.
Especially as we start to do more real-time things, it's just so well built for that. Yeah, so like I mentioned earlier, servers are hosted on Render and our backend is fully Elixir with Phoenix as the web server.
On that MVP version, when you're building any MVP, you got to make certain decisions and trade-offs about how you're going to approach building the solution, creating the product. So tell me about some of the decisions and trade-offs you had to work through, maybe around tech debt or approach, or like you said, you're on iOS only, kind of working through those decisions.
Tell me about how you made those and how you coped with the decisions.
I'm sure you understand this, but everything is a trade-off at this point and at this early stage when we're so resource constrained. It's really easy for technical founders to get into this mindset of, oh, let me just keep building all the features because I'm technical and I can build. We've definitely fallen into that trap in the past. With this go-around, we've been very thoughtful.
And so for the MVP, I think we've been trying to keep a singular focus on what the player does when they get into the product, when they get into the game. The main objective is, can we make it fun?
And I think once we aligned ourselves on what is the main objective that we're trying to bring to the player when they first land in the app is let's get them to have fun as quickly as possible and for as long as possible. The first iteration didn't have any generative visuals. It was mainly generative text.
And we were like, OK, maybe this is good enough because like just seeing the text come out might be magical enough. And we shipped it and we shipped like a very rough alpha to just like close friends. And it was terrible. It was awful. No one played it. We didn't play it. And so we kept iterating.
And then I think we got really lucky with some of the releases that have been coming out around that time when we realized that the first iteration without generative visuals was pretty lackluster and boring and not retentive. was right around when the latest image gen model that came out. And it's Flux by Black Forest Labs. At least August 1st. And we got super lucky.
And it's really the first truly low latency, state-of-the-art image gen model that's fast enough and cheap enough to work in a gameplay loop. We got really lucky with that. And so we've just been blessed in that front.
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Visit speakeasy.com slash codestory to get started and generate your first SDK for free. So you got the MVP working, right? You've got this new Gen AI library in it. The timing's great. You've up-leveled the experience and you're getting that traction. How are you going about building your roadmap of what's next, right? How are you going to mature and progress the product?
And I'm curious about how you decide what is the next most important thing to build or to address with the product?
One of the things that we're doing somewhat differently with Block Party is we shipped it super early in a very rough state just to test if the mechanics work. And we didn't really expect a ton of retention in the first version. It was buggy. We just sent it to some close friends. But people seem to be obsessed. We've had a couple users who have like 15 hours of screen time.
We have a really strong early user base that is constantly providing feedback, submitting feature requests, sharing it with their friends, and talking about what works and what doesn't, and they're constantly reporting bugs and things that could be better or more efficient or UX improvements. And so we have this constant feed of things that we can build.
And I think right now things are constantly moving around as we get new users on board and priorities are shifting. But primarily like the focus, our North Star is, can we make this like fun? And I think I want to double click into that a little bit. I think when I say, can we make this fun? It's not going to make this fun just one time. Can we make this be an infinite source of fun?
That sort of helps us align with our roadmap and our decision-making of, okay, does this sort of get us closer to that vision of building these infinite games that never run out of content and are dynamic and are shaped by the players that play them?
So this will be interesting. Tell me about team. How do you go about building your team? Is it just you or do you have multiple people that you're working with? And what do you look for in those people and indicate that they're the winning horses to join you?
Right now, the product team is me and my co-founder. My co-founder, Steven, he's the CTO. Probably one of the best iOS engineers I know. He makes me better about product and about thinking about product. The cliche, you're the sum of the five people you spend your time with. I think I really take that to heart. And Stephen and I both really are obsessed about product.
And I think that's what we really look for in any new team members that we are looking to bring on. We're talking to a couple of really exciting candidates that obsess with product and they're obsessed with block party and they're actually users and they reached out and saying, hey, can we come help? Which is so cool to see. The things that I really look for, are you driven?
Honestly, do you just care? Do you care enough about the thing that you're going to be doing? And do you have a good attitude? Do you have a positive outlook? I think those are the three main things.
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Join the Wolfpack at QAwolf.com to see if they can help you squash the QA bottleneck. I want to flip to scalability, and this will be interesting because there's so many different ways to approach this, but I'm curious about how you approached scalability.
Was it built to scale efficiently from day one or with scale in mind, maybe abstractions, things like that, or are there interesting areas where you've had to fight it as you've grown?
We're still pretty small, so in terms of scale, thankfully, we're able to just run off of the server. I think we'll probably be able to make that last for quite a bit of time. And that's honestly thanks to the Beam and Erlang and Elixir and the whole ecosystem.
And I think when we are ready to scale and we're getting to the point where we have to scale, Elixir actually makes that relatively easy for us. It has built-in networking. It has built-in message passing between nodes. And so you could run a bunch of different instances of your Elixir server and they would just all act as one. In that regard, I think choosing Elixir set us up for scalability.
Some of the interesting challenges we've had is ingesting every single building in the world. There's a lot of buildings in the world, and so we've done only parts of Canada, all of the continental U.S., and a little bit of Mexico. We just threw a giant ballot box over the U.S., and it got some of Mexico and Canada in there as well.
That was like 175 million buildings that we had to ingest into our Postgres DB. And so there was some fun stuff that we had to figure out how to wrangle that into the Postgres DB. I think we tried naively approaching it. And I'm like, yeah, let me just ingest them in like batches of 10,000. It was going to take forever.
And so we had to come up with some creative ways to ingest 175 million records at once or in a very short period of time. Honestly, we just did it using AWS Glue and it was the right way to do it. But that's probably the main scaling challenge that we've had for Blockparty.
So as you step out on the balcony and you look across all that you've built, what are you most proud of? And I mean with Blockparty specifically.
I'm really proud of just how fast we've shipped and our momentum. I think Steven and I have been building consumer products for the past two years and we've just been shipping. And I think somehow we just keep getting faster. So that's been really cool to see.
And I think that's probably what I'm the most proud of is just our velocity and our ability to iterate and ship features and respond to feedback and address any customer bugs or user bugs that show up. That's definitely the thing that I'm most proud of.
Let's flip the script a little bit. Tell me about a mistake you made and how you and your team responded to it.
Less of a block party, but I think just over the past couple of years, our biggest hamstring is just not having an in-house designer. I think design is just so important. And for the longest time, we would bring on part-time or work with a design agency. And they're all great. And we've had great experiences working with every single designer thus far.
But I think it makes such a huge difference of having an in-house designer whose sole purpose is to think about the product and the thing that everyone is working on And so I think if I could do it all over again, we would probably bring on a design resource much earlier into the fold. We're making some moves there to remedy that right now.
But yeah, I just really wish we had a good in-house design.
So this will be fun because it's early days and it's you and your co-founder. But what does the future look like for the product and for your team?
The last time there was a really big like paradigm shift or a new reckoning and gaming was when I guess there's two there's like Facebook releasing it's like platform back in the day. And then Zynga Poker and Farmville and Mafia Wars, all of these came out and then that sort of carried on into like mobile gaming. That sort of brought gaming for everyone, just like widespread accessibility.
we're heading in this direction of generative gaming, like I've said over and over. And they really believe in that. And so there's this rare opportunity, and I think we're really well positioned to grow into this, of building the Zynga of generative gaming. It's inevitable, in my opinion, that the future of gaming has some sense of generative AI.
And I think there's going to be a whole new genre of games where the core tenet is generative AI. And I think that's the big goal for us, is how can we be the ones to define and lead the next era of gaming? A year down the line, we would love to ship another title. Five years down the line, have a portfolio of generative gaming titles.
for the team steven and i are big fans of small but very effective teams we always look up to the whatsapps who like did it all with 50 employees and the instagrams and so i think that's where we would like to be is have a very focused and badass team that is just able to crush it
Let's switch to you, Ro. Who influences the way that you work? Name a person or many persons or something you look up to and why.
The cliche thing is my parents, obviously. They worked their butts off to move to this country. Give me a wonderful life and a great childhood growing up. And I think my dad's story is super inspiring. Just grew up in a tiny village in India. My grandparents were cattle farmers and like he had to typical walk uphill two miles both ways to school.
Story that he would always tell me when I was younger. I think he's been a huge inspiration. Apart from that, I think just, I had a good mentor when I lived in Detroit. He told me the only thing worth collecting are people and just relationships.
And since then, I've made it a point to ask people who I really look up to, to have some sort of like unofficial mentorship, just if I can just ask them questions about life or whatever. And so I have a whole, I have a handful of of mentors that I regularly talk to. They're definitely the ones who influenced me the most as well as like my best friends.
I think my best friends and are all doing really cool shit and they all inspire me to be better.
Last question, Ralph. So you're getting on a plane and you're sitting next to a young entrepreneur who's built the next big thing. They're jazzed about it. They can't wait to show it off to the world and can't wait to show it to you right there on the plane. What advice do you give that person having gone down this road a bit?
It's a roller coaster. Strap in. That's my advice. I think it's very common. You go on social media, on tech Twitter or whatever, and you see all of those celebrations that are happening. Everyone's life is going great. Everyone's company is doing well. But I think the reality is like when you're in the sea, it's a roller coaster. The highs are high and the lows are low.
And if I was sitting on a plane and there was a young me sitting right next to me was jazzed about the thing that you just built. I would have loved to just have been told that it's a roller coaster. The highs are going to be high and the lows are going to be low. I think being a second time founder, you have thicker skin and you're hardened.
But first time founders, it's very easy to just tie your identity to the thing that you're building. And I think that's super important and necessary for a little bit. But I think it can also get pretty toxic if you go overboard.
Absolutely. Couldn't agree more. Well, Rove, thanks for being on the show today. And thank you for telling the creation story of Block Party.
Thank you for having me. This was very fun.
And this concludes another chapter of Code Story. Code Story is hosted and produced by Noah Laphart. Be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or the podcasting app of your choice. And when you get a chance, leave us a review. Both things help us out tremendously. And thanks again for listening.