MrQ was never conceived as an online casino. From day one, the founders' ambition was to build a data-driven technology company that operated in the gambling space — born out of frustration with clunky white-label platforms that couldn't surface real-time player data.
Where this was said
At 6:13 · chapter starts 1:20
Shane invites Iulian to introduce himself properly, and the result is the kind of honest career narrative that resonates with every developer who has taken the long road to a title. Iulian has been a software engineer for 13 years, more than half of which have been spent at MrQ. Before that, he moved through large corporates — stints at Gamesys, time in smart housing, time in banking — searching for a fit that never quite materialised. After six years of that, he was hungry to start something of his own but admits it was probably too complicated a move at that stage. Instead, he found MrQ and its two founding directors, Sava and Oded, through Lindar — MrQ's parent company — and immediately sensed the opportunity. It's a story about knowing when to take the right risk rather than the biggest one, and it sets the cultural tone for everything that follows.
MrQ was founded in September 2015 but did not launch to the public until 2018, spending the intervening years bootstrapping and doing other projects to fund development.
Sam built Algrow, a SaaS for finding viral content formats, with zero coding experience using ChatGPT and Cursor. Six months later: 10,000 users, $14K/month in revenue.
Sam's first MVP threw an application error on its very first user — and he shipped it anyway. The core idea worked, and that was enough to validate the product and keep users coming back.
Sam joined Discord voice chats, muted himself, and silently screen-shared his product. Users in the chat started tagging him asking what the tool was. No pitch needed — curiosity did the selling.
Most founders post links in Discord and immediately get banned for self-promotion. Sam's approach was the opposite: build rapport, help people with the tool, let word of mouth do the work.
Find where your ICP lives. Listen before building. Validate with DMs and Loom recordings. Build in public with users inside your own Discord server. Turn early adopters into advocates with free access.
Instead of fearing the self-promo ban in large Discord servers, create your own private server for your product. You funnel in ideal customers and build a relationship that email can't replicate.
Algrow helps creators find and replicate viral video formats, starting at $25/month. It analyzes subscriber counts, average views, and trending formats — and can even generate the videos with AI.
After weeks of Sam silently screen-sharing in a Discord server, the server owner — unprompted — made a full YouTube promotional video about Algrow. Sam paid nothing and asked for nothing.
Producer Gus admits Discord never crossed his mind as a customer acquisition channel. Pat connects the insight to a broader lesson: match your distribution channel to where your actual customers live.
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