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.

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! :)

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!

Explanation is king

Hello world.

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.

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.