Meet Battle Pig: Kickstarting a 1st Place Startup Weekend Las Vegas Idea

Battle Pig is a health and fitness mobile game that encourages users to workout alongside a piglet-warrior friend. Users can choose workouts, exercise, and level up their pigs as they progress. Then, users battle friends’ pigs for Ultimate Glory!
“The goal of Battle Pig is to take care of your adorable yet fierce piglet warrior friend,” explained Greg Wingert, PrimoPig (CEO and Cofounder of Battle Pig). “Users get to name their pig, dress it up in different pop culture inspired outfits, work out together, and then mercilessly vanquish enemies in fierce unrelenting arcade-style combat!”
Wingert says Battle Pig’s primary long-term goal is to help curb childhood obesity rates.
“Most of our team has personal experiences as to why we believe that living a healthy and happy life is a basic human right no matter where you are from or what you look like,” he said. “By giving people something to take care of, play with, and healthfully compete with, we can make exercising more attractive and easier for everyone.”
The idea for Battle Pig all started with a doodle.
“The doodle was of a somewhat harmless pig carrying an axe and I first sketched it during my business law class at UNLV,” Wingert said. “That same semester, my professors urged me to participate in a Startup Weekend event in Las Vegas, which is a competition to create a startup in 48 hours. My professors urged me to pitch an idea to compete with. At a loss for what to pitch, I decided to use an idea I had been sitting on for a while ― a fitness game. The idea I pitched won first place at Startup Weekend and so a teammate from the competition, coder/designer Leonard Madarang, and I decided to make Battle Pig a reality.”
This is the first startup Wingert has been formally involved, while Madarang works for another startup in the Las Vegas area called Sabanetics. So far, Wingert says the journey has been rewarding and full of great lessons.
“Aside from my marketing background from UNLV and Leonard’s Computer Science degree from UO, we started by taking startup classes at Work In Progress. Then, we eventually moved into developing more and more of the code behind the application,” explained Wingert. “We talked for several hours about art and game design. This is an ongoing process especially as we combine the design of the game with both the code and the graphic art.”
When Battle Pig won Startup Weekend, they won a free 3-month membership at Work in Progress, which they now call their home.
“The community is great and always friendly, plus nowhere else in the valley will an entrepreneur find so much professional help than at Work In Progress,” said Wingert.

He says that so far, the biggest challenge in getting Battle Pig off the ground is handling legalities with a limited budget. As a solution, Wingert and Madarang decided to launch a Kickstarter campaign so that they can cross the hurdle of legal costs. Depending on how much funding they receive from the campaign, they also plan to hire extra help on the development side.
“Then we will focus on growing our community, which will make the game more fun for everyone,” said Wingert. “Running a successful campaign will also prove market acceptance to potential investors. Battle Pig’s upcoming Kickstarter has been in development for some time now. You could say we’ve been working up to it since a couple of months after we started coding.”