Fill In My Blank

Origin

Fill In My Blank started in a classroom. I was a CS major at UW-Madison taking a course called “Starting a Software Company,” which was half business fundamentals, half build-something-real. Five of us, all CS majors and friends, teamed up with a simple pitch: take the energy of party games like Cards Against Humanity and put it on your phone, playable with friends anywhere.

We built the first version that semester. A Ruby on Rails backend with an Android app. It worked well enough that we signed up for the class again to build the iOS version in Objective-C.

What We Built

Fill In My Blank let users play with their friends to create hilarious and often inappropriate results through a combination of Blanks and Fillers. Real-time multiplayer sessions, cross-platform play between Android and iOS, and custom data synchronization that kept everything in sync.

Timeline

September 2012 - January 2014

Technical Specs

• Native Development: Built from the ground up using Objective-C (iOS) and Java (Android).
• Backend: Ruby on Rails API server handling multiplayer sessions and user data.
• Architecture: Real-time multiplayer sessions with custom data synchronization between platforms.

The Ride

The game found traction fast. We hit #1 in the Google Play Store for the “Cards Against Humanity” search term, grew to 500 daily active users at peak, and scaled to over 8,000 registered users. For five college students, that felt like the real thing.

We did real VC pitches as part of the class and secured $20K in seed funding. We created an LLC called Get Weird Games, hired a designer to give the brand a proper identity. For a brief stretch, we were running a company.

What I Learned

After graduation, reality set in. The five of us scattered across the country for jobs. One by one, team members got too busy to contribute. Within a year, I was the sole remaining developer, maintaining two native apps and a backend on top of a full-time job.

I tried to simplify. I started rewriting the Ruby on Rails backend to Facebook Parse (and was eyeing Node.js) and got most of the way through the migration. Then Facebook announced Parse was shutting down. That was the signal.

Maintaining Android, iOS, and a backend solo while working full-time wasn’t sustainable. I’d spent about $5-6K of the funding on design, hosting, and developer accounts. I returned the rest in good faith and dissolved the company.

The technical lessons were real: cross-platform architecture, API design, app store optimization. But the bigger lesson was about building with people. A startup needs sustained commitment, and “we’ll work on it on weekends” doesn’t survive five people in five cities with five new jobs. That experience shaped how I think about team dynamics, project sustainability, and knowing when to ship versus when to stop.

Fill In My Blank didn’t become a company. But it’s the reason I call myself a builder.

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