Reforged Labs: Changing the Game in Mobile Game Marketing
- NUS Entrepreneurship Society
- Mar 24
- 4 min read
Updated: Mar 26
Reforged Labs is building the world’s first AI Copilot for mobile game marketers, optimising and automating ad creation to give studios a creative edge.
Reforged Labs is revolutionising mobile game marketing using AI to automate ad creation through storyboarding, competitor insights, and trend analysis. But behind this cutting-edge tech is Robert Huynh, the YC founder and Harvard dropout whose journey from idea to execution offers invaluable lessons for aspiring entrepreneurs. In this exclusive, we explore Rob’s personal story, his hard-won startup wisdom, and the AI driving Reforged Labs.
The Story
From Microsoft and Google X to Harvard and YC
The Early Stages
Hi! I'm Robert Huynh, CEO and co-founder of Reforged Labs. I started my career at Microsoft, where I spent four years in a leadership program that exposed me to different parts of the company. I got to be part of the Xbox team, as well as next-gen technology projects like the HoloLens.
After Microsoft, I joined Google to work in corporate strategy. I realised I wanted to go deeper into emerging tech, so I transitioned to Google X, the moonshot factory, where I worked in advanced cybersecurity and self-driving cars. But after three years, it became frustrating not to see projects get released. Waymo (Google'e self-driving car project) had been in development for over a decade, and I started questioning if I wanted to wait around or build something myself.
That’s when I went to business school at Harvard. I met some amazing classmates, and we decided to work together, heading to Asia to build our first startup, Nook. The original plan was to experiment for three months, fail fast, and go back to school. But we loved it, so we stuck with it. We raised money from Y Combinator and big investors, running the company for two years. Eventually, though, we realized it wasn’t a great business model. We had taken something that worked in the U.S. and transplanted it to Asia, but it wasn’t truly localized. The U.S. version also started failing.
Looking at similar startups that raised tons of money but never broke even, we saw the writing on the wall. The truth is, our egos kept us going for a while—we tied our identities to the startup instead of treating it as an experiment with a 5-10% chance of success. A year later, my co-founders returned to Harvard, and I started thinking about my next steps.
The Next Level
Gaming has always been a huge part of my life. I was a competitive StarCraft player when I was younger, and I also spent a lot of time grinding up to the top ranks in multiple games—think League of Legends, Magic: The Gathering, and even Dance Dance Revolution tournaments at the mall. So when I thought about what to do next, it made sense to work on something I was truly passionate about. That's why I started Reforged Labs with my co-founder, Oscar.
One lesson I took from Google X was how they embraced failure. They didn’t just accept it—they celebrated it. When a project was shut down, people were rewarded, and the insights gained were called "moonshot compost," fuelling the next big idea. That’s how I see failure—it’s like a roguelike game. In games like Hades, Dead Cells, and Slay the Spire, you have to restart the whole game whenever you die. However, every time you restart, you get a little better—whether through experience, skills, or resources. Entrepreneurship is the same. Now, I’m onto my next startup—because there’s nothing else I’d rather do.
The Tech
How AI is Transforming Mobile Game Marketing
The Problem: Slow and Inefficient Ad Creation for Mobile Game Marketers
Marketing a mobile game is a time-consuming and repetitive process. Typically, the process involves researching other ads, storyboarding an idea, briefing a creative team, iterating on the ad, then running it. After launching the ad, you’d collect data on its performance and repeat the entire process. This cycle is painfully slow, expensive, and resource-intensive.
The Solution: An AI-Powered Co-Pilot for Mobile Game Marketing
At Reforged Labs, we’ve built the first AI marketing co-pilot for mobile games. Instead of manually looking through ads for inspiration, our AI analyzes thousands of high-performing game ads across platforms like TikTok, Facebook, and YouTube to identify key insights and automatically generates a storyboard for you.
In addition to simplifying ad creation, what also makes our tool so powerful is its ability to create not just one ad, but multiple variations with different assets and angles. For example, if you’re working on Pokemon Go, you could get multiple ads featuring different Pokemon using the same core concept. This enables marketers to target smaller, personalized segments (10,000-100,000 people) for more efficient A/B testing, unlike traditional ads that target millions.
Our AI engine ("Boa") uses foundational models, such as LLaMA and OpenAI models, and customizes them through fine-tuning and prompting so that responses are highly relevant to game marketers. By automating the creative process and providing data-driven insights, we enable smaller game studios to compete effectively without the usual trade-offs.
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