Last Friday, Studio resident Paul Archer spoke to us about his mischievous mobile games, and trying to blindly find a fit for a business that doesn’t fit. Paul came to the Studio after a world record breaking 15 month round the world taxi expedition, on which he came up with an idea for a business centred around road trips and challenges. The same business, Daredevil Project, is now focussed on creating one-word challenge games. Paul spoke to us about his journey through the arts, gaming and tech worlds, and the mistakes he has made on the way.

Paul started his talk by describing the journey that lit the Daredevil fuse; It’s On the Meter. In 2011, Paul and two friends from Aston University set off to drive a taxi round the world, and managed to clock up £79K on the meter. He showed us photos of their various breakdowns, in Siberian snow, middle-eastern desert and an Indian monsoon, and a video of their return, which saw Paul driving a cab (tailed by the Spice Girls) through the Olympic Stadium in the 2012 Closing Ceremony.

While on the road, the team had a lot of conversations with people who loved the idea of embarking on this kind of adventure, but had full time jobs and famiies they couldn’t leave for months on end. This sparked the idea of arranging bite size challenges for other people. The It’s On The Meter team came up with the idea to organise a challenge packed 2 week road trip from London to Moscow called Rushin’ Roulette, creating an app as a catalyst for mischief, by setting people tasks to complete along the way. The trip never quite materialised, but the app idea flourished, and Paul has been testing and developing smart-phone based challenge games ever since.

Paul started his residency in the Studio last July, looking to develop a one-word challenge game, where people respond to a word (say ‘ fish’ or ‘smile’) as creatively or amusingly as they can, take a picture on their phone, and then send it to an external judge. In November he teamed up with Movember to stage a series of tournaments using this game format, raising money for the men’s health charity. The events proved popular, and they worked well when twinned with Movember but without this kind of moral anchor, they leant towards the kind of ‘stag-do mentality’ that Paul quickly realised wasn’t scalable.

Paul and the Daredevil Project team are now developing a simplified, peer-to-peer one-word challenge game, the structure of which is similar to Quizup or Draw Something. The app is called Challenge Off. In it, you play against one friend, and both of you interpret a one-word challenge, after you have played, you judge. Judging between two other submissions is half the fun, as you get to see other peoples’ creative responses to the word. The app would be free to download, and Paul would hope to partner up with commercial sponsors. Challenge off might become an umbrella name over a cluster of small peer-to-peer challenge games, which are tailored to different demographics.

Having started out trying to develop and market a completely new business model, Paul learnt that this takes a lot longer and the road to success is paved with challenges. To do this, you have to be sure that what you are setting out to achieve is better than what is already out there, and perhaps following in the footsteps of successful business models will provide you with the means to elaborate on something that you know works and make it your own in the future.