What we do
Sqkii - n. (skwee - kee) : A company that solves real-world problems by mobilising crowds through gamification.
Sqkii is known for our #HuntTheMouse and #HuntFromHome campaigns that give away cold, hard cash to players. In the good old pre-COVID days, our hunts and custom games got Singaporeans squatting in random spots and running after golden eggs. For now (and the foreseeable future), we’re bringing players on virtual adventures through their mobile screens. They’re still super cool, just ask the mouse.
We recently paid a virtual visit to the player community in Malaysia with #HuntFromHome — Around The World, and oh boy do we have big plans ahead for SEA and beyond. Big plans = bigger team, so we’re on the hunt (ha) for someone who wants to be part of this exponential growth.
Why we do
How it began
Back in 2016, our team wanted to recruit more users to try out our beta app.
We had an impromptu brainstorming session, and one of us suggested printing 10,000 flyers to be handed out at various tertiary institutions.
It was nothing short of an ordinary idea—one that could have invited responses like:
• "Huh? When was the last time you took notice of a flyer that was given to you?"
• "People take flyers and throw them away.
It is almost always a knee jerk reaction amongst us, humans, to dismiss or criticise an idea as soon as we receive them.
But somehow on that very day, each of us resisted that temptation to criticise and the first response that followed was instead: "Is there a way such that people don't throw our flyers away".
This led to another suggestion that if we could make our flyers valuable, people may not necessarily throw them away. What if each of our flyer can be exchanged for cash? What if the content of our flyer was printed on cash itself? What if we hide a box of cash and the flyer contains clues that lead people to the hidden box?
At that moment, #HuntTheMouse was conceived.
Looking back, if one of us had dismissed the ordinary-sounding idea of distributing flyers during that impromptu brainstorming session, Sqkii would have been a very different company today.
This ridiculous idea helped to turn our business around and who would have imagined that a few years later Sqkii would go on to hide S$100,000 that got almost half a million people out of their home searching for cash.
How we do
Together in hardcore
October 2016 was a pivotal month for all of us at Sqkii. It was the month where we were left with only a few thousand dollars in our bank, an incomplete product, and one of our key developers had left us.
By then, our team had already spent close to four years trying to make this startup work. We had pivoted on multiple occasions, taken multiple pay cuts, worked tirelessly to find a breakthrough. Under those circumstances, no one would have blamed us from walking away. Most people in our position would have called it quits.
Unbelievable as it may seem, the thought of quitting never once crossed our minds. We took the situation as it was and acted on there.
The first thing we did was to buy additional time. Our team made an unanimous decision to greatly reduce our salary so that we have enough cash runway. In the month that followed, all of our pay was cut to zero.
There were no complaints. In fact, the struggle spurred us on, and made us even more determined to make things work. With the extra 3-4 months at our disposal, the entire team gelled together, hustled day and night, and we entered into one of the most innovative period in the company's history.
It was not by accident that #HuntTheMouse was conceived less than a week after the pay cuts were implemented. For survival, we had to be innovative. As they said, necessity is the mother of invention.
October 2016 was not the only period where sacrifices had to be made for the greater good. Throughout our startup journey, our teammates have stood firmly by us and we never had to choose the easy way out.
Together in hardcore is about having the collective strength to make tough choices together. Anyone can run away, it's super easy. Facing problems and working through them, that's what makes us stronger.
