"We can have people who can create the games and we can have people who can play the games."
Questo's first outside creator, Radu, was a legal advisor at a petroleum company. He emailed 15 pages of haunted Bucharest, dark enough that the team half-joked about calling the police. Neither founder would ever have written it, and 1,000 people played it. That became the model: 35,000 local creators writing the quests.
"Okay, let's see if the people use it."
Before launch the team spent three or four months on an onboarding where you rotated the logo with your finger to discover the app. Then they walked the streets of Bucharest and Sibiu with 1,500 testers, and nobody used it. It was the first thing cut in the next update, and "let's see if the people use it" became the mantra.
"Everything worked while we are at the barbecue in the mountains. And without our intervention, the app didn't crash."
They expected almost nobody at Radu's haunted-Bucharest game and drove to the mountains for the weekend. A thousand people played, and Claudiu ended up talking to a TV cameraman in flip-flops. That Halloween a night across 10 cities drew 20,000 players, and Cluj gridlocked so badly that the police asked them to switch the app off.
"The success of the company is the success of the team. But the failure of the company is the failure of the leadership."
Ten years, a pandemic and a peak of around €3M in revenue. Claudiu's honest read is that Questo opened too many tabs, kept too many use cases alive, and stayed in survival mode so long that saving the company started to feel like a badge of honour. The habits that get you through the hard years are not the ones that make a company big.
"Life has a very long compounding effect."
After stepping away from Questo he felt he was back at zero, then called that "the very wrong assumption". At 41 he counts what each chapter built: experimenting, learning, surviving a very difficult context, adapting. Stop judging your life in narrow segments that didn't work, and list what you actually know how to do.
Claudiu Petria was born at home in a Romanian village of four houses. At eight he told his father to choose between school and the goats. His father sold the goats. Claudiu went to high school in "Hackerville", said no to a crew of scammers, and talked his way into advertising by asking too many questions. Then he co-founded Questo, a platform for story-led city games that got more than a million people playing in the real world across 1,000+ cities, with 35,000 local creators writing the quests.
We get into why Questo deliberately has no AR or VR, how the first MVP was a PowerPoint sent over Facebook Messenger, and the first outside creator whose haunted-Bucharest game drew 1,000 players while the founders were at a barbecue in the mountains. Then a Halloween night across 10 cities with 20,000 players, when Cluj gridlocked and the police asked them to switch the app off.
And the harder half: ten years in survival mode, why "the failure of the company is the failure of the leadership", why money doesn't solve a startup's problems but scales them, and how to leave the company you built without feeling like you are starting from zero.
This one is for any founder who has wondered whether it is time to let go.
Questo & Claudiu — Highlights:
→ Story-led city games played on foot, written by local creators and solved from clues on the street
→ More than 1 million players across 1,000+ cities, with 35,000 creators
→ Sold direct and through travel platforms such as TripAdvisor and GetYourGuide
→ Halloween nights with thousands of players per city, and a Wizard of Oz game with 300,000 players
→ Backed by Early Game Ventures and Sparking Capital, with revenue peaking at around €3M