Beer Labelsss

Helene took me beer brewing :)

We brewed 5 gallons of Trappist Triple Ale over memorial weekend. Chimay style -golden with mild sweet orange citrus aroma and flavor.

It will be 3 more weeks of fermentation before we bottle our beers, but I've already designed our beer bottle label.


I love the idea of giving them out as gifts.

Peggy2 Project 1.3

Here it is finally, after bug after bug after bug.

The video below is my Peggy2 (a matrix of 625 white LEDs) visualizing audio. Same as my previous post, this is serial data running from my Mac to an Arduino and then to my Peggy via I2C. The audio equalizer code was written in processing.



I also sped up framerate issues with the webcam feed and made a new video.



I really want to call it a wrap on this project and start on something new. But a bluetooth extension would allow this thing to detach from my computer. That would be kind of nice.

The Black Keys - Brothers

I want to see the Black Keys live.

Gorillaz iElectribe

Gorillaz teamed up with Korg to take on the iElectribe. The result is an awesome iPad app to mix and remix their new album 'The Fall'.

This is a collaboration worth digging about.

Inspiring

Just give him a minute

Excelhistogram.com

Creating histograms on Excel is a pain. Doing that on a Mac is even worse.

Each year 50,000+ searches on made on Google from people looking to figure out how to make histograms on Excel.

If I can convert 1% of those searches into paying customers. Each of which would pay $9.90 for a copy of my template. That would be $4950 in revenue.

Okay, so let's first see if I can even make a dollar for the half day spent putting this website together.

http://www.excelhistograms.com/

UPDATE: 30 hits later I've already sold one copy :)

Sick new Justice single

The Strokes - Angles

Been waiting for this one for a while...

Lupe Fiasco

Not quite Kanye, but Lupe's a great distraction.

Gameday Tycoon: Lean Startup Challenge

At my social sports game startup, Gameday Tycoon, we make damn sure no time is wasted "spinning our wheels."

The truth is that initial customer development is difficult in games. You can perform full blown studies to identify a market that loves your game idea, but the end product can still be a total flop. The reason? Games are more than just ideas, they’re experiences.

So can a game startup be lean? Is it possible? Yes and yes. A game startup can start off by identifying the core experience, building a minimum desirable product (see Andrew Chen's ebook), testing it with users, etc... Lean is just way of thinking and a set of tools to help you act lean.

When friends and family ask what I've been doing since Gameday Tycoon released a few months ago, my answer is always "making it better." Usually I need to further explain what this means, let me give you an example from last week and show you how we're "lean":

At this stage of Gameday Tycoon, we only care about one thing -engagement. Engagement is why users pay, invite friends, revisit your app, send nasty emails about bugs-to-be-fixed, and many more.

But let’s step back a little bit first. Before a user becomes engaged, he/she first needs to be initiated. The reason initiation is important is because users need to be setup for engagement. A good initiation experience converts a first timer into an engaged user (a repeat user).

In Gameday Tycoon, we consider ‘initiation’ choosing an assistant and completing step 1 & 2 of our mini-tutorial. It takes around 5-10 minutes to complete and is essentially a guide thru the core game experience:

    1. Choose an Assistant
    2. Mini-tutorial 1
        - Pick on a live game
        - Collect Cash
    3. Mini-tutorial 2
        - Purchase a team
        - Send front row tickets to friends

Let's track our users to see whether they convert thru our 'initiation' funnel in Mixpanel:


WOWZA! 2 of 117 people ‘initiated’ on March 8th! Now that is simply horrendous conversion… simply unacceptable!

So what should I do?
I can inspect the first-time game experience myself and pick out all the things “I think” users are getting stuck at, OR go out and talk to real users to find out how I wasted 5 minutes from each of those 115 user's life. I hope you can guess what I chose to do :)

I went out and got 50+ students on MIT campus to demo my app. Want proof?

                                             

Okay, so lots of things went wrong. Here are the major problems (and what we did to fix them):

• Users didn’t feel obligated to finish the tutorial (award them with bonus incentives)
• Users didn’t know where to click (guide them with big green arrows)
• Users were shown sports leagues they didn’t care about (ask for their favorite league up front and personalize the experience from there)
• Users said the screen was cluttered (stage new features as they make progress)
• Users not interested in sports (ignore them, I can’t make everyone happy)
  

Was it a lot of work? Absolutely. Would it have been more time and energy wasted guessing what the problems were? You bet.

Now let’s check out my ‘initiation’ funnel on March 15th…

Not too shabby huh? Mini-tutorial 1 conversion increased from 29.06% to 57.14%. Mini-tutorial 2 conversion increased from 1.71% to 33.33%.

Geckoboard shot:


Moral of today’s story:

• Set goals for your users
• Create a funnel with these goals
• Track the funnel with numbers
• Improve numbers by talking to users
• Rinse and repeat until you achieve success
  

Was the story exaggerated? A little bit.
Is it real? As real as the startup.
Are we making money? Yup.
Are we looking for mentors? Yes.

P.S Thank you Noah @Appsumo for this opportunity. Check out his site for great deals on web apps.