Hey Banto community! Sometimes, people are curious about who's behind the Banto brand and platform, so I'll share that story with you today. I'm Douglas Pham, the writer of this story and co-creator of Banto. And working alongside me as the co-creator of Banto as well is Grant Kitlowski.
Before we ever thought about party games, Grant and I spent a year and a half building software for environmental conservation at another startup. He handled engineering (aerospace background), and I did business dev (finance major). Eventually, though, the company pivoted, so we left. On our last call that summer, he told me, "If you ever want to build something again, ring me."
Nothin' Else To Do...
After leaving, my summer became substantially freer, and he refocused on another internship he had been working on while staying in New York City for the summer. During that time, I decided to learn more about software engineering. At the time, I only had a semester's worth of learning about data structures and algorithms with 5 years of crappy kiddie script experience on Roblox for superhero games that, for some reason, blew up in popularity.
I completed some mini Django projects, learning about model-view-controllers, but never fully managed to deploy them correctly. I got into watching Fireship. I relearned basic HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. And I kept struggling to wrap my head around what the heck useEffect() and useState() even meant. By the end of the summer, I was all right. I understood the concepts but hadn't practiced them enough yet. It was still fun, though. A nice getaway from looking at binomial option pricing models or doing bond pricing over and over again.
We Tried to Make a Satellite Company
Returning to UT Austin for my senior year, I recalled the last thing Grant had told me on the call. I was kind of bored and did want to do something. So we met again. The first brilliant thing we came up with was a satellite company. We thought the new wave of affordability for space launches would make this idea incredibly feasible.
We spent the entire semester meeting with people from the DoD, creating spreadsheets to determine the launch cost, and working on various other projects that ultimately came to nothing. Welp.
The Birth of "Party Games"
Christmas passes, and so does another month. We meet at the Texas Union, located on the UT Austin campus, and we decide to try something again. This time, something we would like and would be more feasible for us to make: party games!
He had been complaining about how much it cost to purchase another party pack on Jackbox and how there was an open-source party games repository on GitHub called RocketCrab that seemed like a good foundation to build upon in terms of the idea. It seemed good enough to me, so we went for it. He set up the repository a week later, and we settled on a name that wasn't "Party Games."
The Naming Journey
HappySlap - The First Mistake
"Something a little bit shocking," was my suggestion.
"HappySlap?" was the response after twenty other name ideas, give or take.
"That sounds good to me!"
It was not. That was a terrible idea.
A few months passed, and by this point, we had established a community and recruited a few players. During this time, my software engineering skills also improved. Thanks to both a few more programming minor courses under my belt and each code review from Grant. And boy, did I suck initially (unconsolidated API calls -- sometimes O(n^2), zero DRY-ness, no modularity). Additionally, we identified gaps that other platforms had overlooked, such as trading and marketplaces, that were significant in their own right but also had substantial fan bases. We learned many helpful things from our few loyal users.
On the other hand, those we were reaching out to test the product (namely, teachers, as they were the ones who would use such a platform daily) outright ignored the emails. We figured HappySlap wouldn't be the name that would resonate with that audience. Oh, well. New name!
Chimps.tv - The Second Mistake
"Chimps.tv?" I asked Grant.
"Yeah, that sounds good."
It was not. That was a terrible idea.
A week into it, we discovered that the word "chimps" was banned on TikTok, violating its community guidelines. You had got to be kidding me.
Banto - The Final Choice
We met again for one last name change, with the domain name changes now costing us a total of $75 after this one. Two meetings until this name comes up from Grant:
"Banto. It's like banter + an 'o' since we want people to banter during the game."
"I like it."
Sold. We slept on it for a bit, though, just in case. Since then, the brand identity has revolved around Banto, the purple and yellow color theme, bananas (as an extension from our former name, Chimps.tv), and a party games atmosphere able to target anyone.
Who Does What
Currently, I handle full-stack development, business, and community building to ensure we can iterate as quickly as possible while also maintaining our brand presence. Grant programs full stack [incredibly proficiently], too, and he owns our DevOps to ensure we don't ship anything that crashes and is responsible for maintaining scalable infrastructure. We don't have a big team behind us. No big budgets. Just us. That's the truth of it.
What's Next?
From here, we plan for Banto to evolve, but hopefully, this provides context into who are the guys behind Banto, why we're doing it, and where we may end up. Ultimately, the vision is to create the "Roblox for party games," but all that depends on whether we can create something scalable, sustainable, and, above all, fun.
Stick around for the journey, and we promise you you'll love it.