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.

The Strokes - Under Cover Of Darkness

I want to see the Strokes live.

iPad2worldwide.com

An online store I built this weekend. It took ~10 hours, and I'm pretty happy about it. I used open source online store software Prestashop.

Now you can tell your friends when they can get an iPad 2: http://www.ipad2worldwide.com

Rubberband Game Mechanics

One of the few reasons why Nintendo games are so immensely popular are because they understand how to make multiplayer games fun.

How? The rubber band mechanic.



So what is the rubber band mechanic? It is handicapping players based on how they are performing in relation to their peers. A simple example from racing games would be that the car behind is always faster than the ones in front it. An exaggerated example from Mario Kart would be that karts last in place always get the powerful items over those leading the race.

So why does this matter? Because it makes games close. Close means competitive. And close competition makes players feel like they have a chance to win. Basically, it makes games fun.

In my opinion, all social games, particularly the competitive ones, should use it in some form or manner. The key to using rubber band game mechanics without player's feeling like the game is cheating or not fair is to hide them behind a mechanic that is "supposed" to be random.

Radiohead - The King of Limbs

Letter from Jack Ma, chairman of Alibaba.com

Fellow Aliren:

As we have announced today, the B2B board of directors has accepted the resignations of B2B CEO David Wei and COO Elvis Lee. Additionally, former senior VP of B2B HR Kangming Deng has resigned his post as Chief People Officer of Alibaba Group in acceptance of responsibility and will be demoted to a different post.

Several months ago, we discovered that some of our B2B China Gold Supplier (CGS) members were suspected of fraudulent activity. What made it shocking was evidence indicating that certain members of the CGS sales team knowingly allowed, or in some cases even helped, these fraudulent companies join the Alibaba.com marketplace.

We formed a special task force to investigate the situation. According to the preliminary results of a month-long inquiry, we found 1219 CGS (1.1% of all Gold Suppliers) who joined in 2009 and 1107 CGS (0.8% of Gold Suppliers) who joined in 2010 were engaged in fraudulent activity. These fraudsters had joined the Alibaba.com marketplace for the sole purpose of exploiting the platform that we’ve labored to build up over the past 12 years to defraud overseas buyers. At the same time, the investigation confirmed that nearly 100 CGS sales staff knowingly allowed fraudsters to become CGS members so that they could “make their numbers” and receive commission income.

Any tolerance of this type of affront to business ethics and company values is a crime against the rest of our customers and Aliren who remain honest. We must take measures to safeguard the values of Alibaba! All the colleagues who were directly or indirectly involved must be held responsible; more importantly, B2B’s management team must assume primary responsibility. We have already terminated the storefronts of all 2,326 CGS members suspected of fraud, and we have asked law enforcement authorities to assist us in our investigation.

Since the day that Alibaba was established, pursuit of profit has never been our main goal. We have no interest in turning the company into a mere money-making machine. Rather, we have long held firm to our mission of “making it easy to do business anywhere.” When we say “customer first,” we mean that we’d rather sacrifice growth than do anything that would jeopardize our customers’ interests, much less be a part of any blatant fraud.

Over this past month, I’ve experienced a lot of torment, a lot of frustration, a lot of anger…

This is the pain we suffer as we develop, a price that we pay as part of our growth, and it hurts! But we have no choice. It is not possible for us to be mistake-free; we may from time to time commit errors of judgment, but we will absolutely not err by compromising our principles. If we do not face up to reality and find the courage to take painful action, Alibaba will no longer be Alibaba and our pursuit of our 102-year dream and mission will become nothing but a joke!

This world does not need another Internet company, much less another company that can make money;

What this world needs is a company that is more open, more transparent, more sharing, more responsible, more global;

What this world needs is a company that is grounded in society, serves the interests of society, and accepts the responsibilities of society;

What this world needs is a culture, a soul, a belief and an acceptance of obligation. Because these are the only things that will allow us to go further, do better, act with confidence on the challenging path of entrepreneurship.

What comforted me is learning that the overwhelming majority of our CGS sales colleagues upheld their principles in the face of temptation. To these colleagues, I salute you! More importantly, we thank the colleagues who have the courage to stand firm and fight against what is wrong. From their actions we witnessed the courage and power of upholding integrity and principles. In them we see Alibaba’s future and hope! And we need more Aliren like them! Those who do the extraordinary must assume extraordinary responsibilities!

The resignations of David and Elvis are tremendous losses to the company. For me this is extremely sad and hurtful. But I think their willingness as Aliren to step up and accept responsibility is most admirable. On behalf of the company, I want to express my sincere gratitude to the both of them for their unrelenting dedication and contribution to the company.

Fellow Aliren, the B2B board of directors has appointed Jonathan Lu as B2B CEO; the Group has appointed Lucy Peng as Chief People Officer of Alibaba Group. I hope everyone will fully support the work that lies ahead and believe we can make a difference!

This is an era full of promises and an era that no one wants to miss out on. Only through holding onto our ideals and our principles will we be able to become the pride of this era!

If not now? When?

If not me? Who?

Jack Ma
2.21.2011

Pocket Grow

Thinking about starting a LabBox growing project of my own.

The Labbox is a hydroponic plant growing box that has an automated drip system and high powered LEDs to maintain plants all the way to harvest. According to the micro grow project website, you can use your iPhone or a website to control light, temperature and nutrient delivery. And even tweet plant health status!

Now I just need an incremental idea to make this even more interesting...


Hardware is art.

Gaming Based Marketing

More of a book for MBAs new to the idea of gamification than for designers.

I wonder whether if we'll one day become immune to gamification. When we've got points, awards, and progress bars for everything we do, we will probably become selective of the carrot and sticks we're presented with.

I think school, test scores, and grades are indicators that gamification is not an end all be all. It's not like kids don't know what the repercussions of failing out of school are (the end goals of getting good grades), the fact is they simply just don't care.

If every other company were to practice the same few contests & loyalty programs described in the book, I think customers will in the same way start filtering them out. I suppose the question is whether the engaged customers will become more engaged? Or the standard for customer engagement just went up?

Project 1.1 of 2011

Still tinkering with my board of LEDs (see project 1.0). It wasn't a smooth sailing process at all, bugs kept me up a few nights.



Anyhow, here is streaming live serial data from my Macbook Pro to my peggy2 :)





For those who are curious about the details of what is going on, serial data is being sent from my Macbook Pro (created through processing / quartz composer) to an Arduino Uno through USB, and then converted to I2C before displayed on the peggy.

Project 1.2 will be either turning it Bluetooth (wireless!) or making it sync to my iTunes equalizer.

Social Games are not social like they seem

I guess it's weird to say something like that when I'm literally betting my career on social games.

But I stand firm on my point. The "social games" we know of today are nothing more than multiplayer games on a social network. These "social games" are not about helping each other out and neither are they about re-engaging with friends. That is just a load of crap from the big *ah-hem* social game developer/publishers.

The truth is that the majority of social gamers only care about themselves. Their farm, their city, their graveyard, etc...the list goes on. The only reason why we call these games "social" is because player's are confronted with obstacles that keep them from progressing in the game unless they find "friends" to help them.

The fact that most of these games have comments like "add me" littered throughout their forums and newsfeeds makes my point clear. When was the last time you heard a social gamer talk about helping friends? They are always talking about what they achieved in the game (such as how big and awesome their city/character has become).

Portland Cello Project Covering Kanye West "All of the Lights"

Project 1 of 2011

Haven't worked on a side project in a while...

Learn Molecular gastronomy

Stjepan Hauser and Luka Sulic - Smooth Criminal

Records on the List