As part of the Start-up Academy, Britta Werksnis received start-up coaching from April 2021 to September 2023 to support the founding of her start-up Clueless Rabbit GmbH.
The company's website can be reached at mortysmysteries.de
We conducted the following interview with Britta Werksnis in January 2024.
The idea and the associated hobby that gave rise to "Morty's Mysteries" have been around for many years, for around 15 years in fact. The deciding factor for me to actually take the step of founding a company was an event organized by the career service that I attended and where I found out that the Gründerakademie supports people interested in founding a company. I then simply wrote a non-binding email to arrange a meeting for an initial discussion and from then on I received support and advice from David Sauer. This enabled me to develop a business model, write my first business plan and also get my first grant.
Morty's Mysteries are cooperative murder mystery games. This means that a group of friends (or families or colleagues...) take on the roles of suspects in a fantasy murder mystery and solve a murder case together. The exciting part: Any of the people at the table could have done it and now it's up to everyone else to find out who really did it - and of course not to be suspected themselves.
So we are a mixture of a murder mystery dinner and a detective game - but what makes us special is that our games can be played spontaneously and flexibly. This works because we have digitized all the clues and clues and send them to the smartphones (or optionally tablets or PCs) of the individual players on a time-controlled basis.
Nevertheless, our game remains communicative and cooperative and is played as a board game at the table - except that everyone has their smartphone with them and is constantly sent new information in a kind of clue feed.
The technology behind the game is a specially programmed web app. This means that for users, it looks like a normal homepage in their usual browser - only it can do much more. We opted for this option because it means players don't have to install anything extra from the app store and they don't have to enter any personal data. All in all, this makes access to the game as accessible as possible.
In addition to our completely digital version, we also developed a print version for our game concept last year; in addition to the digital game elements for their own roles, the group also has real game material in the form of clues and clues that they can combine together.
I was very grateful to have advice and a range of events that I could attend regularly right from the start. When you spend a lot of time working on your own idea, it can happen that you get a little "lost" or that your thoughts go round in circles and become complicated. Having a contact person who I could (and still can) call at any time with questions and problems and also going to start-up events and meeting other people, listening to other ideas and getting input on my own was worth its weight in gold for me.
I think if I hadn't had this external motivation, it would have been much harder to stay on the ball - I might not even have seen the idea through to market launch.
In addition to the start-up academy, I got a lot of help from my private environment, but also from the Chamber of Industry and Commerce and various offers in Saxony. We received the InnoStart bonus, which helped us a lot during the initial start-up phase. I also went to Ahoi events in Görlitz and we have now also gained new contacts and support through a start-up program run by Mitteldeutsche Mediengesellschaft.
We would like to design even more ways to ensure that people can have fun together.
Of course, this includes more games in the format we have now started with, i.e. our cooperative crime games. However, we would also like to expand and develop the game formats themselves - for example, digital crime city rallies to play yourself or team-building activities are on the agenda. We are currently working on a print version of our digital game format and are also equipping the app with additional features. This will allow players to make their own decisions in the game and steer the plot. We are also working on offering our games in several languages. This could be particularly interesting for team-building events.
As I've already described, I think it helps to create a network - whatever that looks like. In the beginning, I spoke relatively little about the business idea in private because I always thought that nobody would probably be interested anyway. As I got more and more involved with it and the matter became more serious, I naturally started to talk about it from time to time - and noticed that I got a lot of feedback. That was pretty good. And often from unexpected directions or in such a way that sometimes ways open up that I wouldn't even have had on my radar, for example because someone can contribute something to the idea that I wouldn't have thought of or can also give feedback from a perspective that is rather foreign to me. There are also some good offers from universities, federal states, the federal government etc. if you want to start up. In my experience so far, it's always worth asking at places that could be interesting for your own start-up. So far, this has helped us a lot, both professionally and financially.
