Lean startups
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…