If you talk to its founder Yang Wang, you’d quickly pick up that there’s a funny little contradiction when you peek behind the curtain of his mobile app company CrowdLotto.
And that’s because, for a company with apps built specifically for lottery players, you’d actually be hard pressed to find any lotto players among the bunch, Yang included.
“Though I did buy tickets to test the app,” he quickly appends.
What Yang does love, however, is the technology itself. He studied computer science and tends to think in terms of systems and views everything through an engineer’s lens.
To understand how CrowdLotto got its start, you’d have to turn back the clock, to those early days of AI, before large language models were even part of our everyday vernacular, and before a phone could recognize practically anything you pointed it at.
But that’s precisely what Yang and his partners were trying to figure out back in the day: image recognition, or to put it more technically, optical character recognition (OCR). AI wasn’t trained to handle manual handwriting well enough just yet, but printed, more standardized text; that might be doable.
So they went looking for any kind of printed text that everyday folks might need help reading.
Then it hit them: lotto tickets.
Sure, if you had one ticket, the task of checking the numbers was easy enough. But a stack of tickets? That’s a more annoying chore to handle, they thought to themselves. Then add group lottery play to the mix, and things can become more complicated quickly.
“People often play together,” Yang shares. “You need scanning, financial management, messaging, everything combined together.”
So armed with these insights and their brand of OCR technology, the team went ahead and built Lotto Monkey, an app where individual players can scan their own lottery tickets.
Then shortly after that, they shipped another app, one called Smart Captain, this one specifically built for people managing pools of players instead.
Now, here’s the part where Yang gets quite candid about the startup lesson he takes away from all this. The usual formula: start with a problem, then apply the technology, wasn’t necessarily followed here.
And Yang is first to admit how he and his co-founders did it all “backwards.”
“Don’t pick the technology and try to figure out the problem. You should have the pain point first, then find the right technology to address it,” he expounds.
But right path or not, it still led him to create a real app with real users and real lessons about how people actually use technology to help unburden themselves of the ordinary hassles that life tends to always throw at us.
