csGRO — Sold & Acquired by OPSkins
Bootstrapped a digital items platform for CS:GO — trading, investing, stats, and an automated screenshot generator that cut 7-minute tasks to 16 seconds. Sold to a Santa Monica-based company.
Overview
A multi-purpose digital items platform for investing, trading, statistics, and automation based on Valve’s CS:GO items marketplace. Acquired by a Santa Monica-based company (OPSkins).
csGRO.com was a project spearheaded from scratch for over a year and a half. Bootstrapped and entirely self-funded from minimum wage savings. Acquired in 2018 while still in Beta.
Platform Features
The site began as an investment portfolio tracker for digital video game items and evolved to include:
- Automated In-Game Screenshot Generator — Generated screenshots up to 4K resolution within seconds (~7 minutes reduced to 16-second max, without launching anything). The most successful aspect of csGRO; unique to the platform; the major reason behind the acquisition and influx of users ~6 months before acquisition.
- Trading Platform — Enabled users to trade items with each other
- Items Database — Tracked more than 500,000 unique user items
- Item Statistics — Aggregated market trends based on certain parameters
- Investments Portfolio — Showed profit/loss, included alerts, and more
My Role
- Handled frontend development, some backend tasks, automation, and set up supporting sites
- Built and set up a GPU server with ghost displays for the screenshot automation platform — saved ~$1,500 on displays and $740/month on fixed server costs
- Designed and prototyped every aspect of the site
- Hired specialized developers, including two contracted software engineers (necessary for obscure frameworks such as the Source Engine)
- Managed a team of nine: two software engineers and seven community volunteers
Biggest Impact
The screenshot generator reduced the average manual time of ~7 minutes to an automated 8–16 seconds without launching or installing anything. This feature alone drove the majority of user traffic in the ~6 months leading to acquisition.
Design Highlights
- Pattern-based badge system — Introduced a pattern-based badge system to help users identify rare patterns without hunting down specific numbers
- Icon usability — Divided into two categories: semi-transparent for functions, full transparency for badges
- Investment portfolio columns — Solved the challenge of varying user preferences by enabling/disabling specific columns
- Scamming countermeasures — Built profile and trading countermeasures to protect users
Summarizing a year and a half of work on a project to which I’m deeply emotionally invested is challenging, to say the least. I cannot express enough gratitude to the volunteers and developers for their unwavering commitment and hard work, persisting through thick and thin to meet deadlines.
Update: As of mid-2020, the parent company shifted focus to a different sector and no longer hosts Valve-related projects online; this unfortunately includes csGRO.