Ethan Beardsley

As a first time digital startup CEO, I spend a lot of time reading blogs which share experiences and best practices

One of the blogs that I’ve found most interesting is Eric Ries’s Lessons Learned blog.  While a lot of the stuff is pretty technical (Eric’s a former CTO), I’ve found that he’s established a very clear, pragmatic framework for thinking about the best way to build a lean startup.

I also find a lot of Eric’s examples quite relevant because he often refers back to his experience at IMVU, a teen virtual world with a strong UGC component. This means that he has applied a rigorous  development process to a content-driven B2C product which addresses a pretty fickle demographic.

The foundation of Eric’s model is built on the agile software development model whereby you build quickly, release and iterate rapidly in order to incrementally improve the product based on customer feedback. The strength of this model is that it harnesses the essential power of the Internet. You can ship an imperfect product and improve it in real-time based on customer feedback. You’re spared the educated guess on what your consumers will adopt (no costly focus groups and market surveys…) and you don’t start marketing the product until you’re sure you’ve got your addressable market nailed down and you know how to make consumers pay for your product.

As we work on getting ready for the Nooja launch, I refer back to this model which is full of promise for the content and videogame industry. The entertainment industry is notoriously hit-driven and success is very difficult to predict. If you can combine creative excellence and innovation in the pre-launch phase with a humble, agile and community-driven post-launch improvement phase, you significantly reduce the level of risk associated with investments in digital content.

This is a very interesting  presentation on gaming startups from a European perspective. Jussi focuses on a lot of the funding strategies I’ve been learning about during the past 18 months with Nooja. The comments about the public funding process really hit home and it was interesting to see how close they are to our experience in France with the CNC production advances and government tax credits. Jussi also discusses lean startups and the importance of interacting with your consumer very early. We’re thinking about getting the big picture right for our September launch but we realize they’re will be a lot of tweaking to do. Our question always has to be is it “good enough”?

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…