Ethan Beardsley

Eric Ries evangelizes about lean startups using his experience at IMVU, a virtual world focusing on teens and young adults. Eric focuses particularly on getting the product out quickly and cheaply, split-testing, customer feedback and continually releasing small improvements.

This notion highlights one of the things I find to be so interesting about online gaming. Contrary to the film or videogame industry, your success does not ride on the sales numbers of the first two weeks.

Instead it’s all about releasing an initial product, building a community of core users, understanding their reactions and behavior and gradually improving the product. Your product will probably have issues at first but, if you have a coherent, rigorous method for improving it, you will get there. The biggest error would be to spend years and millions of dollars in product development before getting a conversation started with your users.

Production of Nooja, our virtual world, has been done on a reduced budget and tight timeline. When we release, we will need to continue to apply lean startup principles : testing, improving and retesting as rapidly as possible…

The economics of producing content for the Internet mean that you have to be low-cost, experimental and quick to adapt to feedback from your users. Multi-million dollar investments in TV animation are probably very risky if you’re investing on new franchises.

It’s interesting to see new virtual production studios like Israel-based Aniboom evolving as cheap(er) platforms for content innovation.

If you can produce quality short-form content for the web, it’s pretty easy to get a quick consumer response before starting development of more costly, long-form content. Traditional studios are starting to get it. Fox has just recently announced a crowd-sourcing deal with Aniboom to try to discover the new Simpsons.

Great excerpt from a TED talk of Peter Hirschberg that was picked up by Fred Wilson. Tough days to come for traditional broadcast TV…

Our pre-site has just launched for Nooja, a Flash-based next gen virtual world for kids 8-14. Don’t forget to hit the refresh button if you want to see more sample avatars. Launch of public beta is expected in September ’09. The site is developed by Yamago, a Paris-based online game studio.

Some good coverage (in French) from Fred Cavazza on the inspiration behind Nooja.