Natanel Eisenberg met Christopher Legg as a classmate at WVU Tech, turned co-worker as C.A.D. Drafters at a local engineering company. Having a creative mindset and the will for entrepreneurship, Nat and Chris embarked on a venture to launch an idea: the ConsumerBreak® application. Little did they know that this would begin an unimaginable decade-long journey.

The year is 2011. One day Chris and his dad Frank are discussing the annoyance of traditional advertising - that even as brands pay big money to publishers, they are disrupting us as consumers and stealing our time. Why couldn’t there be some way of advertising that would make us want to look at the ad, or had a monetary incentive provided from some of that ad spend?

Frank asks the question that ties it together: “What if you turned an advertisement into a puzzle?”

Chris goes to work the next day and excitedly tells Nat that they came up with a crazy idea the night before. But he’d promised his dad he wouldn’t tell anyone yet, so he keeps the details a secret… until lunchtime, when he can’t contain himself and talks about the idea. Natanel doesn’t understand the excitement at first, but after sleeping on it agrees that this could be revolutionary for the advertising industry and that he would like to start a company and do what it takes to make the idea real.

Nat, Chris and Frank form the company Concept & Innovation Group, LLC.

Nat and Chris design web screenshots, raise investment funding from personal connections, and hire a local development firm to build a desktop prototype by the end of 2012. Nat begins learning how to make videos from YouTube tutorials.

Original web mockups: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1JX449woEL-0mcJJ-4BEHCCCOkdLmppEv?usp=sharing

After a long development process in 2013 and a 6-week appeal with PayPal to allow payments to winners (apps that pay aren’t a thing yet!), ConsumerBreak.com launches on desktop using puzzles featuring Nat’s photography and some prizes out of pocket. Nat produces a promo video which includes narration provided by a fraternity brother and recorded in his livingroom.

Without a good marketing plan and budget in place while the world is quickly shifting to mobile by 2014, it’s clear that more development work and more investment funding is needed.

Chris and Frank step down from the company and remain advisors. Natanel’s father, Michael, becomes company CEO and funds legal paperwork for further private investments as well as development of iOS+Android apps - hiring a new 2nd development company to build them.

As development continues through the year, Nat creates an extensive Kickstarter campaign to raise funding. This includes elaborate animated videos and pitches along with a page full of information and screenshots.

Kickstarer rejects the campaign because they don’t allow products that give away prizes. So they launch the crowdfund on a platform called RocketHub instead (which has since been discontinued, so there is no live link) - and raise $888 from friends.

This covers Nat & Mike’s trip to Jacksonville, FL to present the web prototype at One Spark Crowdfunding Festival 2015, in which they get a lot of positive feedback from the public but fail to raise funding. They then spend months making custom pitch videos to investors and agency heads that would have the resources to scale ConsumerBreak, but are not considered by anyone.

The Jacksonville trip gets Natanel fired from his job, so he then moves to Maryland to be with his girlfriend of 4 years, Megan, and later they are engaged.

Without further outside funding, Mike funds six figures in development from his own assets. Unfortunately this development process turns out to be a complete disaster. The project scope is too overloaded and complex; Nat and the developers go back and forth for months trying to fix bugs and create a workable product. Eventually it becomes evident that ties need to be cut, and they are forced to close the project with a useless product in order to get the existing code in hand. The original desktop prototype is also rendered unusable after all the modifications and troubles with hosting. Nat and Mike are forced to start over from scratch. That, or give it up and move on.

In the summer of 2016, Natanel’s mother & Michael’s wife, Barbara, gets diagnosed with untreatable Stage 4 soft-tissue Sarcoma cancer. Natanel and Megan move up their wedding date for Barb to witness, and they have a beautiful small family wedding.

Unbelievably, four months later Mike gets diagnosed with Stage 3 esophageal cancer.

In 2017 Michael undergoes chemotherapy and radiation treatments as well as a 4-hour esophageal surgery. He decides to spend his remaining assets on a simplified minimized prototype for iOS to give Nat something to work with after all was lost, and hires a new 3rd development company.

Natanel designs and works with the developers to launch the ConsumerBreak iOS prototype which includes one 15-level contest at a time. They kick off with two back-to-back games for a $500 prize to the best score, followed by a few months of other cash prizes out of pocket. After failing to grow a user base, they put an unattainable 100-play goal on the games and focus on quality of life.

Michael and Barbara Eisenberg tragically lose their battles with cancer, in the same Hospice room on February 12th and February 14, 2018.

Natanel is committed to carrying on the legacy after all they have been through. He tries to ramp up iOS prototype traction again by funding a new contest for cash every week for 3 months, and pitches brands and venues to host a game but fails to gain users or brand interest without data. It’s clear that more funding and an Android app are needed for any chance of success.

By unplanned chance, Natanel connects with a single private investor who is willing to put up big funding to see what happens with the concept’s potential.

Enough funding for the development of an Android app and more features, salaries, advertising... and MANY prizes. After another long development process, Nat sets out to gain traction with this new prototype and prove the ConsumerBreak concept, which launches in December 2019.

Getting ConsumerBreak off the ground is a Catch 22. There need to be many players to attract sponsors, but there need to be sponsors to provide the prizes and puzzle content. So Natanel sets on a crazy “proof of concept” experiment - to provide the prizes and the content and grow the user base to a point of attracting sponsors and continuing the cycle.

Nat creates and runs hundreds of puzzle contests from 12/18/19-1/10/21, using paid Facebook advertising as the main source of spreading the word. He uses puzzle content from small brands with permission, user-submitted photos, and royalty free images. He pays out 68,000+ individual prizes of $1+ each to 4,800+ unique winners across the country - totaling over $100,000 with top winners accumulating over $500.

He designs and runs a skill-based rank system for winnings to allow everyone a chance to win, as well as a March Madness themed elimination tournament. He starts a Facebook group that grows to 1,000+ members filled with puzzle content participation. Through experimentation he invents a new scavenger hunt and riddle-style game using collage images, calling it QuestBreak™.

Over the year, Natanel seeks puzzle designers to help out and recruits Sheila, Katie, and Ashley who each freelance from home. They launch a brand apparel website MerchBreak.com to add merch gift cards and discounts as prizes to the games.

After all this incredible amount of time, effort and money lost over the years while still never making any revenue, Megan is understandably ready to move on with a normal family life and future. However, Natanel is too far invested and will not give up the company, and so they mutually decide to be happier divorced and moving on separately - and so Nat moves back to West Virginia to continue full-time work on the app.

To finish off the year, Nat produces a promotional video and ramps up advertising as well as offering 12 Days of Christmas contests that have $15,000+ in giveaways.

At the end of all this, Natanel is left with definitive data that the puzzle contests create prolonged guaranteed engagements with memorization of content and unparalleled advertising immersion. However, he is also left with less than 500 people who play regularly, and when prizes are taken away this user base dwindles to less than 30.

Natanel teams up with a freelancing salesman to reach out to several hundred e-commerce and restaurant brands to participate in a campaign, but no paying sponsors are willing to try unless they can reach at least several thousand users. Nat is forced to figure out alternatives to reaching success.

Natanel connects with an independent developer who suggests giving the app a makeover with a new code base, because the current app code isn’t scalable and a development company is no longer affordable. They start building this new version that also includes more features such as portrait-style puzzles and customizable piece & level count.

In the meantime, Nat designs multiple other ways to use the puzzle gameplay outside of sponsored contests in order to create numerous revenue streams and ways of getting users. Some of these can be launched in 2021 while others will need to wait until revenue is available.

The BibleBreak™, StudentBreak™ and StoryBreak™ apps will use the puzzles as educational and storytelling content. SkillBreak™ will be a version that is managed by contest pairing platforms like Skillz® that handle all the contests and prizes. ConsumerBreak® will add GPS location services to launch globally in all countries that allow contests, and will release a Challenge Friends feature.

Natanel teams up with his old friend Christopher and freelance artists on Upwork to produce beautifully illustrated stories for the BibleBreak™ product, which include immersive music, sounds effects and narration. He also recruits another few developers on Upwork to handle launching and managing multiple tech products.

Nat connects with an old college friend Travis who is active in WAX blockchain crypto/NFT communities. Together they design a creature collection project called Hybrid Creatures NFT which will be used as a consistent sponsor on ConsumerBreak and a pioneer of weekly Play-To-Earn puzzle games. After Travis introduces Nat to a couple blockchain developers, they plan a roadmap to deploy their own gaming token on the WAX chain to launch worldwide play-to-earn games and NFT Achievement Badges with staking benefits. Natanel hires a crypto contests attorney to provide legal opinions for their plans and begin releasing products in January 2022.

2022

WEEKLY SPONSORED GAMES FROM WAX NFT PROJECTS
REGULAR LIVE STREAMS, 1,600+ FOLLOWERS - Twitch.tv/ConsumerBreak
50,000+ NFTs Minted & 1,000+ Member Discord

2023

Co-Founder of NFTOPIA METAVERSE CONVENTION - 4 Successful Events
WV BUSINESS PLAN COMPETITION FINALIST
BibleBreakApp.com & StudentBreakApp.com COMING SOON

2024

New app dev partners from WAX ecosystem take over IT and plan to relaunch in the fall
NFTOPIA METAVERSE CONVENTION: May 3-5
MONTHLY NFTOPIA School & AMA Train Live Streams: 2k+ FOLLOWERS
100,000+ total NFTs Minted