> Gaming Frog

Win cash & prizes playing your favorite video games

Gaming Frog is an eSport platform that allows gamers to play their favorite games for cash and prizes.

Juan Duque - Founder & CTO

Lucas Romero – CEO

Juan and I met playing Call of Duty: MW2, in 2009. At the time I was living in Colombia and he was living in Miami. After playing for a while I came to Miami to visit my family and finally met him in person. I remember playing COD for hours, even until the sun came out at times.

We have always been very competitive and ended up playing FIFA games for money between us and our friends. I remember back in 2016, I was on a winning streak playing FIFA 16 at the time and I just got bored and said to myself, “I wish I could play this for money”. I immediately got the phone and sent Juan a text. Asking him what he thought about the idea and if he would be interested in starting a business on it. This is how Gaming Frog came to life.

We have been working in different ways to differentiate ourselves from our competitors. One of the most obvious ways was to integrate an AI, in order to determine match outcomes automatically. We have tested a few AIs and we are still in the process of coming out with the best way possible to enhance the user experience. But the true key component we believe will make this the best platform is the Social component. We are creating a social platform within our application, so users can follow each other and share achievements and view other users’ activities. This is very important because we must have our users engaged with the platform even when they are not playing on it, this is will keep our users coming back.
What makes Miami a unique city for doing business, is its diversity. We have people from all over the world, coming from different social classes. This is why there are so many great ideas and business opportunities. We are in a melting pot, where people immigrate to with different views of the world and with the hunger for success and this city can offer the infrastructure for everyone to achieve their dreams and make the impossible true.
Building a startup seems very simple, but it is not. It is very common for entrepreneurs to leave some stuff unaccounted for. There is a simple explanation to this: lack of expertise and the excitement of kicking off a new venture. But these two things are our greatest assets, that we as entrepreneurs have, if we knew all the things that we were about to face, probably we wouldn’t tackle the challenge of creating a startup. In our case it was the legal complexity this business has, we had no idea until we started looking for payment processors. We then realized we needed a legal structure (which we now have) before anything else, this is the reason we have taken more time to launch than initially expected.