STORY TIME
How did we get here?

Hi there! I'm Aleksi "Alinhox" Aalto, the founder of MORE. From here, everything is based on my observations and experience. Hope you enjoy our story!

I was a social media influencer in early 2010's. There was almost 100k followers in my biggest account so at least for me, it felt remarkable. Back then the industry wasn't super profitable nor engaging, and it felt a little odd to post pictures to Instagram: yeah, likes and comments were fun but no one actually feels connected by that sort of interaction. Who are these people? Why do they follow me?

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My solution back in 2014 was to create a group chat for some of my followers. Many years later social media platforms have introduced broadcast channels and so on, so I was kind of ahead of the trend there. But this was exclusive. My followers sent me applications and I chose who gets to join.

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After a few followers were in, one of them sent a message "and all the competitors have arrived to the Big Brother house." It was a reference to the TV format Big Brother that was currently running on TV.  However, those words shaped the future in my head. 
What if, instead of a regular chat, we could have a competition? Attending Big Brother requires 18 years of age and it exposes you to all kinds of negative publicity. But when it all happens in a private group chat, anything is possible. Even the scaling. Can you imagine how much it costs for tv company to have 100 people in a house? In a group chat, I can make this without a budget.

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I took the rest of the followers in and revealed they have attended to WhatsApp Big Brother. Every day, I would send them a challenge to complete and after every day, someone would be voted out. This kept happening until there was only one person left in a chat.

And guess what, the concept was a success! During 2014-2019 I arranged over 35 seasons like that. Everything on WhatsApp, votes and challenges hosted manually on excel. What kept people coming in was unique challenges and twists no one could have expected. I even hosted one IRL competition where all the players were invited to a cottage over a weekend.

At some point, with help of my friend, I started making a brand out of this. I wanted to differentiate myself from Big Brother. WhatsApp-BB turned into WG (WhatsApp-Games) and after a few years, into MORE (Mobile Reality). 

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At some point I started to see this as a business opportunity. In 2019, a team started to form around the idea and our goal was to make this all automatic, so that a bot would run the whole hosting for us. We got accepted into Boost Startup Journey 2019, a local startup accelerator program. During the summer, we worked on the idea, ended up winning the program and attracted our first angel investors in.

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It was time to scale this up. We hosted competitions and players paid entry fees to attend. It wasn't only "my followers" anymore, we had 10 000 registered users.
Many influencers started to notice how the concept could be used as an activity for their followers as well. 

We made a few competitions for other influencers but it was hard to scale it up. It isn't easy for an influencer to host a competition on top of their content creation but it sure is fun to see who can reach the top.
The solution was to create ranking lists. Now, any influencer can create their own ranking list, have their followers join in, and drop them casual challenges while the followers compete who is the biggest fan of all!