We started out a couple of months ago with a simple goal: We wanted to meet a person in 10 years, that we didn't know from before, that had our game and liked it.
This is a very good goal to start out with, but when have we succeeded? Waiting 10 years for confirmation and then decide is a long time for students about to graduate..
What we have experienced is that our goal keeps on moving further away each time we get one step closer to our current goal. Based on the feedback we have gotten, we have expanded our goal accordingly, resulting in a far more ambitiuos goal than the original one. This is of course a good thing, it keeps us on our toes, but it makes defining the point of success very complicated.
We have to decide in a relatively short while wether or not this idea is something that we want to pursue full-time. This decision will of course be based upon the question of if we're able to reach our goal. When the goal keeps moving away, this desicion is always uncertain..
What we believe is that our original goal is still the most important one. The rest is only a bonus. Wether or not we are going to continue with the idea we will find out in about 7 months, and until then we are going to run as quickly as we can, get as much as we can done, and reset our goal then.
Success? Like our professor in Boston told us: What do you want to be when you grow up?
What do we want to get out of this start-up?
When we can answer that question, defining the point of success will become easier. But there are no black and white answer to this unfortunately.. (as engineers we hate this of course..)
Thursday, November 25, 2010
Monday, November 22, 2010
Marketing or sharing ? - A social media question
What is the difference between telling and selling?
If I tell my closest friends about a product I'm making, that would be regarded as sharing, right? If my friends likes it and wants to tell their friends about it, they would be sharing too. When did this become marketing? I don't know the definition of marketing, but I have learned this: You don't have to market something that people want. You just have to reach them and make sure that they receive the message. Perhaps this is the basis of all marketing. I think it at least should be the basis of ideal marketing.
Most people today have understood that they have the power over the salesman. They have developed a thick skinn towards sales-pitches and some might even say that the harder the salesman pushes, the less the customer will end up wanting his product. People are smart and proud. They want to believe they figured out what they wanted for themselves, or perhaps through a friend they consider close enough. I believe this is why companies are taking so much interest in social medias these days. The best way to reach customers is through their own friends investing their social capital by telling others that they need to buy a product. Or even better, discovering it for themselves, believing that they have found something precious.
I love Facebook
Sunday, November 21, 2010
How long can we keep running without a plan?
We are reaching the limit, that's for sure.
When we started making the game, our goal was simply to have fun. We wanted to fill a gap that we percieved in the trivia board game market. Not because we believed it was a profitable thing to do, but because we wanted to be able to play a trivia game where the categories were more aligned with our own interests and areas of expertise. In September, we put up a website and started to collect questions for this game. We talked to some printers, and to a bookstore. We set up a Facebook Page. Our hope was to sell enough copies that we'd cover the worst of our production costs, and walk away with one copy of the game each. We joked that it would be great to meet someone, ten years from now, who had played the game and liked it. But we did it just for fun, to see if we could, to see how far we could get.
Then the ball started rolling, and we had to run to keep up. Our Facebook Page hit several hundred fans, then a thousand, in just a few weeks. We have been to several events, as keynote speakers, talking about our start-up and our game. We have got some soft money funding. People we don't know come up to us and say they've heard about what we are doing and like it. And no-one has even played the game yet!
Right now we are in the middle of prototype production, and will begin game testing soon. After that, we'll prepare for printing and selling our first batch of games. And right now, we're starting to feel the fact that we don't have a clear-cut strategy for how to proceed from here. As the potential of the game seems to grow, decisions are harder and harder to make without some guidelines. When do we release the release date? How many games do we make? How will we market this? Should we lock-in to one retailer or do we want to spread out? How do we answer this or that post on Facebook? There are thousands of questions, and they are getting harder to address every day.
We recently got some perspective on this in conversation with a friend, who recently went through a successful exit from a start-up he worked on for the past two years. Talking with someone who has experience with the phase we are in now is very helpful. He could clearly see that we have digged deeply into product development, and to some degree have dipped into all the other areas that need to be handled - marketing, suppliers, finance - in order for the game to reach market. But we clearly don't have a plan. We set out on purpose without one, to see where it took us. However, we've been running after the ball since the get-go, and it is time we sat down and decided where we want the ball to roll next. We need a strategy.
We need a business plan.
When we started making the game, our goal was simply to have fun. We wanted to fill a gap that we percieved in the trivia board game market. Not because we believed it was a profitable thing to do, but because we wanted to be able to play a trivia game where the categories were more aligned with our own interests and areas of expertise. In September, we put up a website and started to collect questions for this game. We talked to some printers, and to a bookstore. We set up a Facebook Page. Our hope was to sell enough copies that we'd cover the worst of our production costs, and walk away with one copy of the game each. We joked that it would be great to meet someone, ten years from now, who had played the game and liked it. But we did it just for fun, to see if we could, to see how far we could get.
Then the ball started rolling, and we had to run to keep up. Our Facebook Page hit several hundred fans, then a thousand, in just a few weeks. We have been to several events, as keynote speakers, talking about our start-up and our game. We have got some soft money funding. People we don't know come up to us and say they've heard about what we are doing and like it. And no-one has even played the game yet!
Right now we are in the middle of prototype production, and will begin game testing soon. After that, we'll prepare for printing and selling our first batch of games. And right now, we're starting to feel the fact that we don't have a clear-cut strategy for how to proceed from here. As the potential of the game seems to grow, decisions are harder and harder to make without some guidelines. When do we release the release date? How many games do we make? How will we market this? Should we lock-in to one retailer or do we want to spread out? How do we answer this or that post on Facebook? There are thousands of questions, and they are getting harder to address every day.
We recently got some perspective on this in conversation with a friend, who recently went through a successful exit from a start-up he worked on for the past two years. Talking with someone who has experience with the phase we are in now is very helpful. He could clearly see that we have digged deeply into product development, and to some degree have dipped into all the other areas that need to be handled - marketing, suppliers, finance - in order for the game to reach market. But we clearly don't have a plan. We set out on purpose without one, to see where it took us. However, we've been running after the ball since the get-go, and it is time we sat down and decided where we want the ball to roll next. We need a strategy.
We need a business plan.
Wednesday, November 17, 2010
Entrepreneurs and Students
Today it hit us hard: We are students, and still have our pre-thesis to finish.
People have been telling us how nice it is to be students and entrepreneurs at the same time. You have a lot of time, you have few set commitments, and as students, people are willing to help you and give you advice. This is of course all true, but an issue that has been somewhat underestimated is the deliverable we have to present in December; our pre-thesis. We now have less than a month to finish our thesis, and we are not excactly on track...
The problem is not motivation for the pre-thesis. We are writing a very interesting project, but the trouble is that our startup is so much more fun! We have now placed orders for parts for our prototypes and can't wait until they get here. We also need to start planning our marketing strategy, sales strategy, ensure that our suppliers can deliver on time when we order the first products in January, and so on... There are still so many things that need to be done, and so little time to do it. It is very hard to put down the work with our business and start focusing on the thesis, but we have no choice right now. We are eager to do a good job because the problem statement is very exciting. We chose this problem ourselves and really think we can make a contribution to the field!
So, student and entrepreneur at the same time?
As long as you are good at time management and you work hard, there is nothing you can't do. The freedom and flexibility you have as a student makes this an excellent opportunity to start a business. However, you need to prepare for long days at the office and a lot of work. It is hard going, but we hope to be able to do both by our deadline in December.
People have been telling us how nice it is to be students and entrepreneurs at the same time. You have a lot of time, you have few set commitments, and as students, people are willing to help you and give you advice. This is of course all true, but an issue that has been somewhat underestimated is the deliverable we have to present in December; our pre-thesis. We now have less than a month to finish our thesis, and we are not excactly on track...
The problem is not motivation for the pre-thesis. We are writing a very interesting project, but the trouble is that our startup is so much more fun! We have now placed orders for parts for our prototypes and can't wait until they get here. We also need to start planning our marketing strategy, sales strategy, ensure that our suppliers can deliver on time when we order the first products in January, and so on... There are still so many things that need to be done, and so little time to do it. It is very hard to put down the work with our business and start focusing on the thesis, but we have no choice right now. We are eager to do a good job because the problem statement is very exciting. We chose this problem ourselves and really think we can make a contribution to the field!
So, student and entrepreneur at the same time?
As long as you are good at time management and you work hard, there is nothing you can't do. The freedom and flexibility you have as a student makes this an excellent opportunity to start a business. However, you need to prepare for long days at the office and a lot of work. It is hard going, but we hope to be able to do both by our deadline in December.
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
Sanity checks..
...on all levels of your business.
Now we've been sitting in our "bubble" in the office for over a month, developing a board game. We are engineers, but engineers are so varied and so differentiated in their knowledge. Making a game that will make everybody happy is not so easy when you have to take into account all the different specialties.
That's where the sanity checks are important! We have had three sessions now with different engineering students testing our game, and we've gotten a lot of feedback on the questions and the game. So thank you to the people that had an awesome time (or so we hope) testing our game!
Another thing we've learned is that you'll not only need feedback on your finished product, but also on the entire road to the product. We've talked to several lawyers, patent experts, product developers and distributors, and every time we talk to them, a new problem is formed. This saves us tons of time, and allows us to focus on problem solving instead of "problem discovering"..
So, talk to people! Just pick up the phone, send emails, talk to friends and get references to new people.
You might think you know enough, but the beauty of experience is that there's always someone who knows more.
That's also why this is so much fun, and also pretty tiring. It's an enormous learning process for us. And even though the going gets tough once in a while, we will definitely come out on the other side more enlightened and knowledgeable than when we started!
Now we've been sitting in our "bubble" in the office for over a month, developing a board game. We are engineers, but engineers are so varied and so differentiated in their knowledge. Making a game that will make everybody happy is not so easy when you have to take into account all the different specialties.
That's where the sanity checks are important! We have had three sessions now with different engineering students testing our game, and we've gotten a lot of feedback on the questions and the game. So thank you to the people that had an awesome time (or so we hope) testing our game!
Another thing we've learned is that you'll not only need feedback on your finished product, but also on the entire road to the product. We've talked to several lawyers, patent experts, product developers and distributors, and every time we talk to them, a new problem is formed. This saves us tons of time, and allows us to focus on problem solving instead of "problem discovering"..
So, talk to people! Just pick up the phone, send emails, talk to friends and get references to new people.
You might think you know enough, but the beauty of experience is that there's always someone who knows more.
That's also why this is so much fun, and also pretty tiring. It's an enormous learning process for us. And even though the going gets tough once in a while, we will definitely come out on the other side more enlightened and knowledgeable than when we started!
Tuesday, November 09, 2010
A Few Facebook Pages Grievances
We recently renamed our game from our original working title to its current name. Doing so made our original Facebook Page obsolete, as there is no function in Facebook Pages for changing its name. From a user perspective, I can understand Facebook's position: I wouldn't want someone to be able to rename a Page that I was a fan of, but it did present us with a major challenge. We had already gotten more than 1000 fans on our old Page, and now we had to do something bad - ask them to visit the new Page and become a fan there instead. . Telling our fans that we have changed your name isn't neccessarily a bad thing, but asking them to actively take some kind of action in order to keep following us is bound to cost us some goodwill. Which is evident since only about 1/3 of the fans have actually followed us to the new site over the past two days since we announced the change.
To ease the transition, and to explain to our fans why this was neccessary, we wrote an update that we sent out to all our fans through the Facebook Pages Marketing tool. This was our first update since we set up the original Page, because we hadn't wanted to come across as a spamming Page in fear of loosing fans - and besides we haven't got a product ready for sale yet anyway. In other words, we hadn't tested the update system before, which was really too bad, because it turns out Facebook users aren't given notification when they receive updates from Pages! The update is just placed in a sub-folder in the Facebook message inbox, but doesn't trigger a "new mail" icon or email notification. The result is that no-one sees this update, and so we have to rely on relatively short-lived wall posts to notify our users of the change.
I can see that there are arguments for preventing Page admins from sending out mass emails to all its fans, but the result is that Page admins are left with very sparse communication tools here. And if a Page needs to change its name, like we did, a lot of the momentum is going to be lost.
To ease the transition, and to explain to our fans why this was neccessary, we wrote an update that we sent out to all our fans through the Facebook Pages Marketing tool. This was our first update since we set up the original Page, because we hadn't wanted to come across as a spamming Page in fear of loosing fans - and besides we haven't got a product ready for sale yet anyway. In other words, we hadn't tested the update system before, which was really too bad, because it turns out Facebook users aren't given notification when they receive updates from Pages! The update is just placed in a sub-folder in the Facebook message inbox, but doesn't trigger a "new mail" icon or email notification. The result is that no-one sees this update, and so we have to rely on relatively short-lived wall posts to notify our users of the change.
I can see that there are arguments for preventing Page admins from sending out mass emails to all its fans, but the result is that Page admins are left with very sparse communication tools here. And if a Page needs to change its name, like we did, a lot of the momentum is going to be lost.
Wednesday, November 03, 2010
On entrepreneurs and consultants
Joachim over at The Social Media Marketing Quest has an excellent post comparing the work of "professional" entrepreneurs to that of business and management consultants.
From the post:
From the post:
So the big difference is that you let the marketplace define the problem you're going to solve and how to solve it, instead of having a client telling you what problem to solve. Besides this a lot is similar for the two parties. What's more, they both work in groups most of the time.Read it.
Sunday, October 31, 2010
Product development
There are several things that I don't know about product development. Actually, I don’t know the first thing about it. A few lessons have been learned from this though.
At a relatively early stage in the development of the game I discovered that each time a good solution to a problem was found, two new problems developed in the proximity of the solution, but at a later time. It appears that when developing a product, the "quality-price-delivery time-compatibility"-equation never adds up. When the price is right, the quality fails. When the price and quality is right, the delivery time is too long. When the price, quality and delivery time is right, the part is not compatible to the rest of the game.
Back to square one.
Back to square one.
Thursday, October 28, 2010
Lessons learned about printing
There are many interesting ways to realize a trivia game once all the questions have been collected and verified. A lot of people we talk to have creative suggestions, and there is no doubt in my mind that we will have to explore several of these more thoroughly in due time. However, we have since the beginning had our minds set on making a good old-fashioned board game, and it is towards this goal we are putting our efforts now.
So, how does one go about making a trivia board game? Well, first of all, and most important of all, you need the questions. Luckily, we have gotten a lot of help from our friends and from fans of the game through our web site. Then you need to design a game board, design the graphics for the question cards, and design the graphics for the game box. We've had a lot of help here from our highly skilled and very awesome friend Ida, who designs and sells t-shirts through gløshaugen.no. The next thing on the agenda is printing the game board, the question cards and the game box. That part's easy, right? Just send off all the design files and questions to a printer, and get it back in a week, right?
It turns out there's more to it than that, to put it in terms of Gross Understatement. Over the past weeks, I've learned more about paper weight, surface treatments, offset prints, silk prints, file formats, cutting, folding and the overall process of putting everything together than I thought there was to know. Apparently, and this is news to me, there are thousands of different types of paper! And, to make the game box the exact size we wanted, they have to make a new tool! I have a newfound respect for the professionals in the printing industry. Every job is a custom job, with specific parameters and requirements. There's no magic printing machine that spits out everything I want to exact specifications.
Another thing I've learned about printing, is that it is expensive. Much more expensive than I thought it would be. Now, we are obviously learning the lesson that every entrepreneur in Norway learns at some point: production in Norway is pricey, so don't do it. However, given our tight schedule and small volume, as well as our need to be able reach our suppliers on short notice, going abroad isn't really an option at this point.
The third and most important thing I've learned about the printing business, is that everyone in the business seems to be very friendly and helpful, as well as enthusiastic about our game. Which is fantastic - I cannot imagine having enthusiastic suppliers is a bad thing for our game! :)
So, how does one go about making a trivia board game? Well, first of all, and most important of all, you need the questions. Luckily, we have gotten a lot of help from our friends and from fans of the game through our web site. Then you need to design a game board, design the graphics for the question cards, and design the graphics for the game box. We've had a lot of help here from our highly skilled and very awesome friend Ida, who designs and sells t-shirts through gløshaugen.no. The next thing on the agenda is printing the game board, the question cards and the game box. That part's easy, right? Just send off all the design files and questions to a printer, and get it back in a week, right?
It turns out there's more to it than that, to put it in terms of Gross Understatement. Over the past weeks, I've learned more about paper weight, surface treatments, offset prints, silk prints, file formats, cutting, folding and the overall process of putting everything together than I thought there was to know. Apparently, and this is news to me, there are thousands of different types of paper! And, to make the game box the exact size we wanted, they have to make a new tool! I have a newfound respect for the professionals in the printing industry. Every job is a custom job, with specific parameters and requirements. There's no magic printing machine that spits out everything I want to exact specifications.
Another thing I've learned about printing, is that it is expensive. Much more expensive than I thought it would be. Now, we are obviously learning the lesson that every entrepreneur in Norway learns at some point: production in Norway is pricey, so don't do it. However, given our tight schedule and small volume, as well as our need to be able reach our suppliers on short notice, going abroad isn't really an option at this point.
The third and most important thing I've learned about the printing business, is that everyone in the business seems to be very friendly and helpful, as well as enthusiastic about our game. Which is fantastic - I cannot imagine having enthusiastic suppliers is a bad thing for our game! :)
Wednesday, October 27, 2010
Just do it!
We are as mentioned all students at the NTNU School of Entrepreneurship (NSE), and so we all wanted to create something of our own.
Last chance!
Now, during the last year and a half at this school, we've been taught to analyze the market opportunities, the technology behind concepts, the economic potential of ideas, and what the organization has to offer both experience-wise, and also knowledge-wise.
So we started working on different high-tech concepts which got relatively good scores on these factors. As it turns out, the projects failed, or is still in operation but without room for young business developers such as us..
4 weeks ago, we were sitting at school, working on our master thesis, thinking that this is really our last chance to start something. We are all applying for jobs, and figured that next year it will be difficult to start a business next to work. So we all decided that we wanted to create something. The concept of "The Engineering Game" (EG) is something that we've been thinking about for some time, and even considered working on as our start-up project in the 4th year of NSE, but it failed the feasibility analysis, and so we didn't continue working on it.
What makes a good idea?
And that is what I mean it all boils down to, what are your intentions?
If you're looking for cash, starting in the game industry, towards a niche market, in Norway, sounds like suicide. (Of course it is...) But our intentions were simply to start a business, create a product of our own, and thereby be remembered (or at least so we hoped..) And so we figured, hey, last chance... JUST DO IT!
We started our project, the EG. Many challenges stood before us of course, being students, we didn't have money for marketing, we didn't have the time to make all the questions for the game ourselves, and we put down an ambitious goal of making the first sale before the christmas season was over. So what to do...?
Marketing: We used Facebook! An excellent way of using our network, our friends' network and the buzz we got, to reach 900 people in just 3 weeks.
Questions: Link from the facebook page to our homepage, www.ingeniorspillet.no, where we allowed everyone to post their own questions, thereby giving them the chance to get their own questions in the game, and shape the game towards their field of expertise.
But is this a good idea still?
And as it turns out, the initial niche market loves the concept. We are now playing around with the idea of going international. Translating the questions to other languages and just go big.
BUT, if that would have been the intention from the beginning, we never would have started the concept, and we never would have gotten to the point where we are now.
Just do it!
So what I'm trying to say here is:
You all have ideas that might have great potential, but if you never try, the you'll never know..
So if you have a concept, that you're pationate about, and you're intentions are aligned with the perceived potential when you start out...
JUST DO IT!
Last chance!
Now, during the last year and a half at this school, we've been taught to analyze the market opportunities, the technology behind concepts, the economic potential of ideas, and what the organization has to offer both experience-wise, and also knowledge-wise.
So we started working on different high-tech concepts which got relatively good scores on these factors. As it turns out, the projects failed, or is still in operation but without room for young business developers such as us..
4 weeks ago, we were sitting at school, working on our master thesis, thinking that this is really our last chance to start something. We are all applying for jobs, and figured that next year it will be difficult to start a business next to work. So we all decided that we wanted to create something. The concept of "The Engineering Game" (EG) is something that we've been thinking about for some time, and even considered working on as our start-up project in the 4th year of NSE, but it failed the feasibility analysis, and so we didn't continue working on it.
What makes a good idea?
And that is what I mean it all boils down to, what are your intentions?
If you're looking for cash, starting in the game industry, towards a niche market, in Norway, sounds like suicide. (Of course it is...) But our intentions were simply to start a business, create a product of our own, and thereby be remembered (or at least so we hoped..) And so we figured, hey, last chance... JUST DO IT!
We started our project, the EG. Many challenges stood before us of course, being students, we didn't have money for marketing, we didn't have the time to make all the questions for the game ourselves, and we put down an ambitious goal of making the first sale before the christmas season was over. So what to do...?
Marketing: We used Facebook! An excellent way of using our network, our friends' network and the buzz we got, to reach 900 people in just 3 weeks.
Questions: Link from the facebook page to our homepage, www.ingeniorspillet.no, where we allowed everyone to post their own questions, thereby giving them the chance to get their own questions in the game, and shape the game towards their field of expertise.
But is this a good idea still?
And as it turns out, the initial niche market loves the concept. We are now playing around with the idea of going international. Translating the questions to other languages and just go big.
BUT, if that would have been the intention from the beginning, we never would have started the concept, and we never would have gotten to the point where we are now.
Just do it!
So what I'm trying to say here is:
You all have ideas that might have great potential, but if you never try, the you'll never know..
So if you have a concept, that you're pationate about, and you're intentions are aligned with the perceived potential when you start out...
JUST DO IT!
Explanation is king
Hello world.
Why
In the month since we started our microventure, we've negotiated with distributors and suppliers, formally started a company, tried our hands at social media marketing, learned important lessons about intellectual property and made a bunch of major strategic decisions in a hurry. Every day is a learning experience, and every day brings something new. The fact that it is a cliché doesn't make it any less true. To paraphrase a classmate of ours, "The only difference between starting a small and a large venture is the size." There's wisdom in there, somewhere. So, to address the "why": we set up this blog to share some of our experiences as microentrepreneurs with you, the Internet.
Let me kick off this blog by giving you a quick walkthrough of the who, the what and the why.
Who
This blog is a co-effort between myself, Bård Gamnes and Andreas Bertheussen. We are all graduate students at the NTNU School of Entrepreneurship in Trondheim, Norway, and all of us will (hopefully) complete our MSc degrees by the summer of 2011.
What
This blog is about the lessons we learn in our new-started microventure: The Engineer Game (Norwegian: Ingeniørspillet). Our intention is to create a trivia board game with only technical or scientific topics. The idea for this game was hatched while playing a classical trivia game, and being annoyed that five out of six categories were purely concerned with "soft" topics such as "History", "Geography" or even "Arts". Questions for the Engineer Game are generated in a web 2.0 fashion, by allowing anyone to submit a suggestion for a question. The questions are then reviewed, and the best ones are selected for the final game that we are currently working towards publishing.
This blog is about the lessons we learn in our new-started microventure: The Engineer Game (Norwegian: Ingeniørspillet). Our intention is to create a trivia board game with only technical or scientific topics. The idea for this game was hatched while playing a classical trivia game, and being annoyed that five out of six categories were purely concerned with "soft" topics such as "History", "Geography" or even "Arts". Questions for the Engineer Game are generated in a web 2.0 fashion, by allowing anyone to submit a suggestion for a question. The questions are then reviewed, and the best ones are selected for the final game that we are currently working towards publishing.
Why
In the month since we started our microventure, we've negotiated with distributors and suppliers, formally started a company, tried our hands at social media marketing, learned important lessons about intellectual property and made a bunch of major strategic decisions in a hurry. Every day is a learning experience, and every day brings something new. The fact that it is a cliché doesn't make it any less true. To paraphrase a classmate of ours, "The only difference between starting a small and a large venture is the size." There's wisdom in there, somewhere. So, to address the "why": we set up this blog to share some of our experiences as microentrepreneurs with you, the Internet.
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