Blue Rabbit
Bernardo Lattaif spent 10 years as a trainer, speaker, teacher, and web UX designer in the gamification industry before deciding to build Blue Rabbit. He created the platform to solve a real problem he understood intimately: how to make education and corporate training engaging through game mechanics. The platform went on to win awards and gamify over 12,000 players across all continents, serving major corporate training programs, events, and schools.
By 2020, Blue Rabbit had grown to 45 customers and was generating $7,000 per month in revenue. Bernardo had even attracted investor attention, raising $25,000 from an investor who approached him after he won an award for outstanding gamification software. The investor seemed eager and brought momentum to the business.
COVID-19 devastated Blue Rabbit's revenue. The company lost roughly 30 of its 45 customers, dropping from 45 to around 12 customers. By the time of this interview, the MRR had plummeted to just $200/month—a 97% revenue decline from 2020. The investor situation turned personal and negative, with the investor not delivering on promised capital and eventually losing everything.
Bernardo identified a fundamental problem with the gamification business model: companies need to engage for 2-3 years before seeing real results, and they often demand immediate ROI. The bigger issue was that Blue Rabbit wasn't the bottleneck—the customer's content creation was. Companies would delay building training content, then blame the tool and churn out. One major contract worth ~$200,000/year evaporated when the client's corporation cannibalized its internal gamification team mid-engagement.
Bernardo is keeping Blue Rabbit alive in a holding pattern. The platform still experiences seasonal revenue spikes between September and March, bringing in $10,000-$30,000 during those periods. However, it's not enough to sustain the business year-round. He's supported by his wife, a software engineer at a major tech company, which gives him the freedom to experiment. Rather than pivot Blue Rabbit itself, he's co-founding a new company with a gamification expert from Germany on a 50-50 basis, serving as CTO. The new venture aims to be a "step before" gamification—a tool that simplifies content creation and makes it easier for companies to gamify their products and services. It's currently pre-revenue with an MVP in development, but his German partner has existing clients willing to pay and more robust business infrastructure than Bernardo built at Blue Rabbit.
- •Bernardo's 10 years of direct experience in gamification meant he understood the customer pain deeply, but this domain expertise alone was insufficient to overcome the fundamental mismatch between the tool's value delivery and customers' ability to execute on content creation.
- •Word-of-mouth traction worked initially because early adopters were self-selected believers in gamification, but this channel proved fragile when external shocks (COVID-19) and internal customer failures (content delays, organizational changes) eliminated the referral base.
- •The subscription model created ongoing revenue dependency on customer success, but Blue Rabbit was not positioned to guarantee that success since the bottleneck was entirely on the customer's side (content creation), making churn inevitable when clients faced delays or internal restructuring.
- •The $25,000 investment from an award-driven investor lacked due diligence on unit economics and customer retention, masking the underlying business model weakness until revenue collapsed, demonstrating that external validation does not replace product-market fit.
- 1.Before building a tool for a market, identify and validate the true bottleneck in your customers' workflow by shadowing 5-10 prospects for a full engagement cycle, not just initial adoption, to confirm your tool solves the blocking issue rather than a downstream consequence.
- 2.For subscription SaaS in B2B, require new customers to demonstrate capacity to execute (e.g., content team in place, budget allocated, timeline clarity) before closing, and track this signal as a leading indicator of churn risk.
- 3.Test your business model's resilience by stress-testing your customer concentration, channel dependency, and revenue seasonality against at least two external shock scenarios (e.g., industry downturns, platform changes, economic cycles) before fundraising.
- 4.When pivoting after failure, partner with someone who already has paying customers and operational infrastructure in the adjacent space, rather than building the new business from zero—this validates the repositioned problem and accelerates path to repeatable revenue.
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