“People want to socialise more. They want to have people over, cook a nice meal, decorate the house and do something together,” says Matheus Alves, Founder of Murder at Mine.
For Matheus, that observation is at the heart of Murder at Mine, a digital platform that uses AI to create personalised murder mystery games.
Players choose a theme, invite their friends and assign characters, then play together in person, with their phones providing the information they need along the way.
Unlike traditional boxed games with set stories and fixed characters, Murder at Mine creates a new mystery each time, tailored to the group’s interests, friends, location and almost any idea they can imagine.
From software engineer to mystery maker
Before becoming a software engineer, Matheus worked as a product manager for major technology companies in China, where he developed an interest in coding.
He went on to spend the next decade freelancing as a software engineer, building products for clients and developing both his technical and product experience.
But after years of working across multiple projects, Matheus wanted to build something of his own.
“I really wanted to be the one making the decisions,” he says.
He had built small SaaS products before, but nothing had felt right enough to put all his effort behind. That is, until he envisioned Murder at Mine.
Spotting an opportunity
The idea happened while Matheus was on holiday with his girlfriend and her friends.
They wanted an activity they could do together, something other than visiting a bar or a restaurant. So they decided to try a murder mystery game.
But it wasn’t as easy as they imagined.
The games they found offered limited stories, and some were designed for large groups where certain characters became less important if not everyone participated.
Matheus thought, “why don’t we just download an app and play one? I’m sure with AI now there’s a very good way of doing this”.
There wasn't.
Around the same time, Matheus was seeing TikTok content about people creating their own murder mystery parties, some attracting thousands of views and engagement.
The interest was clearly there, but creating a game from scratch could take weeks of writing stories, characters and clues and then the host couldn't properly participate because they already knew the ending.
“That looked like an opportunity,” says Matheus.
The idea began to take shape in June 2026. By mid-July, he had a version ready to test with friends. In August, just two months after starting, he launched Murder at Mine.
Making murder mysteries more social
The first version of Murder at Mine was closer to a traditional murder mystery, with players working through clues to piece together what had happened.
But as Matheus tested the game, he realised investigation wasn't necessarily the most social experience.
“That’s not the most social way of doing it,” he says.
The game has since evolved into a series of scenes where players interact with one another to uncover information, rather than simply reading clues and solving the mystery on their own.
The phone offers character information, motivations and instructions, but stays in the background.
“For the time that you’re playing the game, the phone is on the side,” Matheus says. “You just grab it as if you grab a piece of paper to read what you need.”
A story starts with an idea
AI plays another important role in the experience by helping players create the story itself.
Rather than choosing from a small number of pre-written scenarios, players can start with almost anything they can imagine.
Matheus has experimented with ideas ranging from Schoolies on the Gold Coast in 2009, to a murder mystery set in Melbourne in the early 1900s.
Another idea involved a group of Australian friends travelling to the World Cup in the US, where one of them disappears.
The player describes the concept, and the system builds a murder mystery around it.
“If you have something in your head, you can build a new story around it,” says Matheus.
For people who don't know where to start, Murder at Mine also provides prompts, including settings such as a speakeasy, masquerade ball or Wild West.
Players can customise the number of participants and the tone of the story, and the same prompt can produce a different mystery each time.
For Matheus, this flexibility is one of the product's biggest points of difference.
Finding early traction
Murder at Mine has already attracted users without significant advertising.
Around 200 people have used the product, including 10 parties outside Matheus's own testing.
Of roughly 200 website visitors, around 100 went on to play, with approximately 10 purchasing the game and inviting friends to join them.
For Matheus, that points to the potential for a network effect. When one person discovers the game, buys it for a gathering and introduces it to their friends, they then become customers themselves.
The initial focus was Australia, but Murder at Mine has already attracted interest from the UK, the US and Canada.
The next step is to put marketing behind the product and see whether that early organic interest can be scaled.
Rethinking the subscription model
Building Murder at Mine has also changed some of Matheus's thinking about how digital products should be sold.
Having worked in technology for years, he had previously assumed that a subscription model would be the natural approach for a new digital product.
But the behaviour of Murder at Mine's early customers has suggested otherwise.
The game is linked to an occasion such as a birthday, dinner party, gathering or night with friends, making a one-off purchase feel different from committing to another monthly subscription.
“People don’t want to sign up for another $10 subscription,” says Matheus. “But for the game, I’m finding that people will buy it because they have an occasion coming up.”
The experience has also challenged his assumptions about apps.
While there is often a perception that getting people to download an app is difficult, Matheus has found that users with a clear reason to use the product are willing to make the leap.
Creating a reason to get together
Matheus describes the concept as “low-pressure, structured socialising”.
It’s giving people a reason to get together at home, cook dinner and do something together.
As social habits change and the cost of going out continues to rise, people are increasingly looking for affordable ways to spend time together at home.
Low-cost experiences like Murder at Mine offer a new way to socialise without heading to a bar or restaurant.
Over the next three years, Matheus wants Murder at Mine to become a go-to option for people looking to bring a group of friends together, with the potential for thousands of games to be played each year and people returning to play multiple times.
Eventually, he sees the opportunity extending beyond murder mysteries altogether.
“Murder is what’s popular right now,” he says. “But I think people want to keep doing social hangs with activities that link things together.”
The longer-term vision is to use AI to create new digital social experiences around other types of games and activities.
Finding energy in the founder community
For Matheus, building Murder at Mine has meant moving from the isolation of freelancing from home into a community of other founders.
Stone & Chalk provides a place to have conversations with other entrepreneurs, exchange ideas and learn from people working on different businesses.
“I come into the Melbourne hub, and it gives me this extra energy,” Matheus beams.
Since joining the community before Murder at Mine launched, Matheus has taken the product from an idea to a business, with hundreds of people using it.
For a founder who spent a decade building products for other people, the experiment is now his own.
“I wanted to do one for myself,” he says. “And see if I like having that day-to-day life of making the decisions and focusing on one thing intensely.”
For now, the first mystery is solved. The next challenge is seeing how far the idea can go.
