The story of Discord is a story of platform shifts. Jason Citron started his career in game development studios creating some a few titles for Xbox and PlayStation 2 (that's how old he is 😂) that you probably never heard of. In 2008, the "app store" was just announced and Jason thought this would be the perfect time to take the entrepreneurial plunge.

His thesis was that with the launch of mobile gaming on the iPhone he would get "free distribution" if he manages to become a "launch title" (ie develop his game before the app store is live). Whenever a new console comes out, there is always a new set of games that offer a new kind of experiences that are "native" to that console.

Jason raised some seed capital from the uncle of one of his roommates and was off to the races building Aurora feint. The Good News: it got rave reviews. The Bad News: the business model didn't really work.

The pivot to OpenFeint: One day, while discussing with the another founder, Citron realized that the iPhone did not have Xbox live in it, but their Aurora Feint 2 did have a similar feature.

The $104m payout: Over the next two years Openfeint took over Jason's life. By 2010, Openfeint had more than 10 million users and was powering 30 of the top 100 games on the App Store. Next year the company was acquired by a Japanese company (named GREE…but thats not really important) for a whopping $104 million (for reference the company ever raised $3m).

Jason took a 7 months hiatus after being booted out of his own company. I was surprised to learn, however, that he didn't go on a self-discovery journey in South-East like many of the great founders before him (looking at ya Steve Jobs ). Instead Jason took the time-off playing video games….A LOT of video games.

After a few hit-and-miss with launching different games (3 to be specific), Jason had Another ONE (idea) up his sleeve…this time for a game called Fates forever. Six months later, Fates Forever shipped to the app store, and yet again didn't really live up to the expectations of Jason or the team.

Jason was going around in circles trying to figure out how he can "fix" Fates Forever. The idea was building Teamspeak meet skype. Stan (Stanislav (Stan) Vishnevskiy) made the case for building *yet another voice app* for gamers that would overcome all the limitations. Jason was onboard, after all this kind of fitted neatly into his "Xbox live" for iPad grand vision for the company.

Jason and Stan started building the first version of Discord as a side project within the company. The first 20 customers for Discord were friends, friends and friends. Those 3 weeks were yet another reminder to Jason of how important distribution was. So Jason and Stan got one of the friends to post in the Final Fantasy 14 (a popular game at the time) subreddit. The reason they narrowed it down to this one specific game was that there was a new expansion (i.e new features, content..etc) coming out which meant that there was a lot of anticipation, speculation, and excitement about the new release on Reddit.

For the next 1000 customers, Jason and Stan focused all their product work on just 3 games, all of which had upcoming expansions (i.e new releases) in an attempt to make integrations with these games as seamless as possible.

Ali Abouelatta • 🎮 Discord