I don't think I made many mistakes while building Threkka.
But the ones I did make have seemingly cost me hundreds of thousands of pounds.
Looking back, there isn't a lot about its five-year development period that I'd change. But these, I would. And oddly enough, for a systems thinker, they all come from the same kind of place.
Silence vs Presence
The first mistake was silence.
Threkka's core idea isn't especially complicated: connect real-world movement to in-game progress. Tie a free-to-play management or city-builder-style sim into Apple's HealthKit, and you have a loop where exercise drives meaningful change in a game world.
It ain't rocket science, and because of that, I was cautious about talking about it too early.
I figured that if I spoke about it publicly before launch, someone with an existing team and tech could build a lighter version, move faster, and occupy the space before I had the chance to do it properly.
Worth saying here that if there's one thing I'm very proud of with Threkka, it's the level of coherence, integration, and elegance threaded throughout the whole thing. Someone could copy the core – unique – mechanic, but without everything that surrounds it, they'd be shipping something far more hollow than it could be. That 'consistent universe' vibe is something only I can do, because it draws from an incredibly personal mix of life experience, professional experience, and worldview.
The problem is that the market – press, investors, players – would be blind to that context. My worry was that if the core idea was 'proven wrong' by a cynical quick-buck product, I'd be dead in the water before I'd had a chance to address the market.
So I kept my head down and built. In hindsight, though, that caution was misplaced.
I was focused on protecting the integrity of the idea – making sure that when it appeared, it did so confidently and expressively, with all of the surrounding systems that make it work already in place. Impossible for someone to do a cheap knock-off, when they'd be shipping a shell of what I'd just made.
But what I missed is that the market doesn't see integrity first. It sees presence.
Had I got early exposure right – if I'd made sure that the context of Threkka's development was as much a part of the story as what Threkka is – it would likely still have defined the space. It would have shaped expectations and become the reference point. I'd have put a hill to climb in the way of any copycats, as people would know me, and the 'why' behind the 'what' of what I was making.
So, by the time Threkka was ready, it had none of the context that makes something understandable at a glance. It was complete, but it wasn't situated.
I learned the hard way that visibility compounds. And without it, even well-executed ideas arrive at a disadvantage.
In practice, obscurity is a much bigger risk than imitation.
Invisible Work Doesn't Create Visible Credibility
The second mistake followed directly from the first.
When I eventually started reaching out to press, I was effectively an unknown.
I've spent most of my career working diligently in the shadows – establishing rock-solid production pipelines, untangling challenging design problems, delivering the impossible. Making sure things ship and people stay employed. It's work I'm proud of, but it's not exactly visible. I never built a public profile, never put myself forward, never really needed to. I was happy to let others take the limelight.
But whilst that mightn't matter much inside an organisation, turns out it sure as hell matters outside one.
When I reached out to journalists, my emails were essentially indistinguishable from those of a first-timer with a passion project and no clear audience. It didn't matter that I had decades of experience or that the product was well thought through, well executed, and targeting a specific – potentially very valuable – market niche. From the outside, I was just another person with a game. A game that didn't fit neatly into the categories they were used to covering.
Credibility doesn't automatically transfer from the work you've done to the perception people have of you. It has to be built where people can see it.
Working quietly for years doesn't create that.
Investors Like Certainty
The third mistake was assuming that solving a problem – and doing so elegantly, uniquely, and with real nous – would be enough to attract investment.
I believed – still believe – that Threkka solves something real. Games and fitness have circled each other for years without quite connecting. There have been attempts from large companies with far more resources than I had, but none have quite landed in a way that sticks.
I thought that 'games do fitness: solved' would be enough to generate interest.
It wasn't.
What I misunderstood is what investors are actually buying.
They're not buying ideas. They're not even buying solutions, in the abstract. They're buying reduced uncertainty. They want proof that something works, evidence that it can scale, a proven team. They want signals that the risk is lower than it looks.
From that perspective, Threkka was the opposite of what they wanted. A new approach in an unproven space, built by a single developer without prior examples of success in that specific category.
It didn't matter that the thinking was sound. Or that my output, and the quality of my work, compared favourably to entire teams I'd worked with in the past. Or that there was a long-term plan to truly own the space, well beyond what was there at launch.
Without traction, it was just possibility.
And possibility isn't what investors are looking for. They're looking for evidence.
Interest vs Follow-Through
The fourth mistake was more personal.
A lot of people said they wanted to help.
I'm pretty certain that most of them meant it when they said it. But very few of them followed through. I'm completely cool with that – people are allowed to have other things going on in their lives, and although Threkka was the centre of mine, it very much wasn't the centre of theirs. And that's okay.
What I'd underestimated was the sheer attrition that took place between saying and doing.
So this isn't a criticism. People are busy. Priorities change. Good intentions don't always survive contact with reality. I'm forever grateful for the Threkka Checkers that stuck with me. Not only did they encourage me, but I implemented entire new systems off the back of their experiences.
But building something like Threkka requires a very clear understanding of who is actually going to show up and do the work.
I didn't make that distinction early enough.
Interest is cheap. Follow-through isn't.
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Looking back, none of these mistakes were about the product itself.
Threkka works. The systems are sound. The design does what it set out to do. It's a set of complex systems, implemented near-seamlessly, where the virtual world reflects and influences the real one, and vice versa.
The mistakes were in the real-world context that development sat in.
I treated visibility, credibility, investment, and support as things that would naturally follow from building something good.
They don't.
They are systems in their own right. They need to be understood, designed for, and worked on deliberately.
If I were doing it again, I wouldn't just build the systems inside the product.
I'd build the ones around it too.