For this week’s Founder Friday, we spoke with Tobias Quinn, the Gold Coast entrepreneur who moved to a new city knowing no one and went on to build an app designed to help people connect.
“If there’s a problem in the world keeping you awake at night, and you can’t stop thinking about how to solve it, then you might just be one of us.”
Tobias Quinn moved to the Gold Coast in 2005 and did not know a soul.
He was into early mornings, fitness, and the kind of lifestyle that has you up before sunrise and at a café by 8am on a Sunday. He wanted to find his people. The ones out running at dawn, swimming before work, looking for a boxing partner or someone to fill in for a touch football game.
But there was no easy way to find them. “I was always into health, fitness, and early mornings, and I remember wanting to meet other people who lived that same lifestyle,” he said. “Healthy, active people who were up at sunrise making the most of the day.”
The thought that kept coming back was simple. “Imagine if there was an app for that?” He could not shake it. And eventually, he stopped trying to. “At its core, KRUNK was built to solve a problem I personally experienced,” Tobias said. “Helping people find their tribe in the real world.”
That simple idea became KRUNK, a community-first social network built for real-world connection, designed for run clubs, gyms, fitness communities, and brands that want to bring people together offline. Not keep them scrolling.
Building against the grain
“Does this help people connect in real life? If it doesn’t, it doesn’t belong.”
From day one, Tobias knew what he did not want to build. “We deliberately removed vanity metrics, so no public likes, no endless dopamine loops, and no doomscrolling,” he said.
In a market where every other platform is engineering for time on screen, that is a genuinely contrarian position. And it was not accidental. “Big Tech wins when you stay glued to the screen,” Tobias said. “KRUNK wins when you get off your phone and actually go meet people. That philosophy has shaped everything we build.”
He is clear that what he is doing goes beyond building a product. “We’re not just building another app,” he said. “We’re creating an entirely new social movement.” Staying true to that has meant saying no to a lot. Plenty of paths would have been easier, more commercially obvious, and faster to monetise. He considered them.
“There have been plenty of opportunities to take easier or more commercially attractive paths,” he said. “We could have pivoted into dating multiple times. It probably would have been easier. But KRUNK was never meant to be another dating app or another platform built to trap attention.”
The filter he keeps coming back to has not changed since the beginning. “Does this help people connect in real life?” he said. “If it doesn’t, it doesn’t belong.” “It’s been an epic journey to get to this point, and if I had to narrow it down, I’d say resilience and purpose have been the biggest drivers,” Tobias said.
The $6 million he walked away from
There have been moments where the easier road was also the well-funded one. “We had a $6 million investment opportunity from owners connected to some of the biggest dating apps in the world,” Tobias said. For most early-stage founders, that conversation ends one way. For Tobias, it did not. “That kind of injection would have changed things overnight,” he said. “But it didn’t feel right, because it would have changed the DNA of what we were building.”
He walked away from it. And then, almost as an aside, he mentions something bigger. “We also had a potential $20 million opportunity with a Chinese investor,” he said. “But that’s probably a story for another day.”
Two major capital opportunities. Both declined. The reasoning he keeps coming back to is straightforward, even if living by it was not. “Not every opportunity is the right opportunity,” he said. “Sometimes protecting the vision matters more than chasing the cheque.” It is easy to say. Far harder to do when the bills are real and the runway is short. Tobias has had to mean it.
What entrepreneurship actually looks like
Ask Tobias for advice and he does not reach for the polished version. “First, and we’ll use the word successful loosely, because success means different things to different people,” he said.
What follows is honest in a way that a lot of founder advice is not. “A true entrepreneur is someone who sees a problem they simply can’t unsee and becomes irrationally committed to solving it,” he said. “That’s exactly what happened with KRUNK. We saw a massive problem in what social media was becoming. Endless scrolling, loneliness, disconnection, and attention addiction disguised as connection, and became obsessed with building an alternative.”
He does not dress up what that obsession costs. “The reality is, entrepreneurship isn’t glamorous. It’s not the highlight reel people post online. It’s uncertainty. Pressure. Rejection. Self-doubt. Long nights. Sacrifice,” he said. “At times, we’ve sacrificed nearly everything in pursuit of building something we genuinely believe matters.”
The advice he gives is direct and unvarnished. “You need to be a little crazy. You need to be relentlessly driven. You need to hear no a thousand times and keep going anyway. You need to be willing to make sacrifices most people won’t understand.” The lessons he has carried through the hard parts are ones any founder will recognise. “Purpose matters. If you’re only chasing money, you’ll quit when things get tough,” he said. “Execution beats ideas. Great ideas are everywhere. Relentless execution is rare. Protect your energy. Entrepreneurship is a marathon disguised as a sprint. Stay true to your values. Not every opportunity is worth taking.”
And underneath all of it, the same question he would put to anyone thinking about starting something. “Ask yourself: do I care about solving this problem enough to keep going when it gets really hard?” he said. “Because it will get hard.” He ends where he always ends. With the problem. With the purpose. With the kind of stubborn belief that either drives you forward or wears you down, and sometimes both at once. “Entrepreneurship isn’t for everyone,” Tobias said. “But if there’s a problem in the world keeping you awake at night, and you can’t stop thinking about how to solve it, then you might just be one of us.”
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