Someone is on the train from Lisbon to the Algarve right now, opening their iPhone and playing a round of Sudoku while the landscape passes. Someone is on a bullet train in Japan doing the same thing, twenty thousand kilometers to the east. And someone is on a bench in Parque Vaca Brava, in Goiânia, with the sun coming through the trees, opening the same app to switch off for fifteen minutes. Sudoku BLA is a single app. But it reaches the world in many ways. And it is from Goiânia.
The person who built Sudoku BLA is the same Ivan Grycuk who, in 1996, at eight years old, was the only kid in an HTML programming class. He left that class building full websites. By twelve, he was writing and personalizing his own blogs straight in the code. The relationship with programming and with text started in the same year and never split. Thirty years later, with twenty years of marketing experience, an MBA from ESPM, and ten years in medical and pharmaceutical communications, he signed the first app from BLA Publicações e Conteúdo Digital. It was not a pivot. It was continuity. The same kid who poked around HTML blogs now pokes around SwiftUI in Xcode.
The choice of Sudoku was no accident. Sudoku has been one of Ivan’s favorite games since the first time he played it. The love started with discomfort, as it often does with a good puzzle: it looked complicated, and whoever played it seemed to have to be very smart. He learned. He realized Sudoku is a game of logic and reasoning. It feels like an investigation. It is as if you were the detective looking for the solution to a case. You find clues, discard options, close the picture. When the last piece falls into place, the round ends. Like a suspense series you watch in one sitting and at the end you think: now I have to wait for the next season.
The concrete trigger to build the app was frustration with a Sudoku from Apple Arcade that Ivan had played for years. It was the app he used most on his iPhone. So much so that he kept his Apple Arcade subscription almost only for that. With iOS updates, the app started to crash on common in-game actions. Bugs that never got fixed. The last major update was during the pandemic. Ivan needed a reliable Sudoku. He decided to build one.
Aiming to build the best Sudoku app on the App Store is not a marketing line, it is a product standard. For Ivan, best means quality and consistency. It means no repetitive sound, because if you want music you can play it from another app. It means working offline, in the elevator, at the farm, on an international flight. It means zero ads, zero interruptions, zero unnecessary permission dialogs. BLA apps only ask for what they need to work. You open the app for the first time and it simply works. The line is Ivan’s, in the moment he describes the standard. Summed up in one sentence: I want a Sudoku app, that is all. I want to play Sudoku, period.
Goiânia matters in this story because it is the city where BLA Publicações e Conteúdo Digital was founded and is headquartered. BLA is an editorial studio, working with clients in healthcare and pharma, running a podcast in Spotify’s top 15%, with years of work in scientific narrative and high-end branding. Goiânia is a beautiful city, full of parks, plenty of trees, wonderful people. It is much more than the capital of Brazilian country music: it embraces a diversity of styles, of people who come from elsewhere, of ways of living that do not fit a single label. Sudoku BLA is not an app made in Silicon Valley or in Faria Lima. It is made in Goiânia. And that matters.
BLA’s product line follows one simple test before any code is written: would the person who uses this app pick it as their main app for that function? If the answer is no, the app is not built. Sudoku BLA passed that test first for Ivan, then for readers and clients who saw the first version. It was BLA’s first app. It also worked as a stress test for the studio’s logic and technical capacity, and it became the design template. The BLA system of colors, typography, animation and components was extracted from Sudoku BLA into a template called Modelo BLA, which every following app clones to start.
Brazil has very few apps built for its own domestic market. BLA is in full expansion, and Sudoku is the first piece of a declared project to launch other apps over the coming months. The focus is on accessibility and utility, mostly for the Brazilian market. In two years, BLA expects to have a consolidated line of apps that are references in their categories. For now, there is a Sudoku ready to be played on a train through the Algarve, on a Japanese bullet train, and on a bench in Parque Vaca Brava. And there is a site, bla.vc, that ties it all together. You can download Sudoku BLA on the App Store. It works offline, in silence, without watching you. It hands you the game and gets out of the way.
