5 Things We Suck At (for now)
As a startup with limited resources, we are keenly aware of the fact that we can’t do everything we’d like to. Most of this will be fixed with time, but as of right now we want everything to have been done yesterday.
Over the last two weeks I’ve had the opportunity to personally walk 47 companies through our platform for the first time. For the most part the response I get to a new demo is, “We were just getting ready to build this ourselves, I’m glad we found you.” Most companies find that our platform is flexible, can accomplish what they need, and will be a considerably better option than building everything from the ground up internally (even the hard-core “not invented here” CTOs quickly come to this conclusion). A few come up with use-cases that will require some added functionality for our API – which we love to find. Some file the concept away for when they have a bit more time, most seem to dive in immediately.
I’ve been “selling” stuff in one form or another for the last 20 years and I can honestly say that I’ve never before experienced this much interest in anything I’ve been involved in. That is very cool, but it also means we need to deliver – and “find the customer love” as we like to call it around here. One of the best ways I know of to do that is to listen to our customers and then constantly improve on the things that are important to them. We value transparency, so I figured we’d make a list of some of the stuff we suck at so you’ll know what it is that we are working on and getting better at:
- We don’t have game mechanics on our own site. Lame, I know. What’s the old saying, “The cobbler’s children have no game console” (or something like that). The best place to demo game mechanics for a non-game site is on our own site. We’ll get there, but for now the cobbler’s children will be forced to play with a stick and an old tire in the middle of the street.
- Real-time analytics. Up until a week ago we had real-time aggregated analytics, with cool charts and graphs. We built our systems from the ground up to provide deep analytics, but the process we were using for aggregating and then presenting that data was meant to be an intermediate fix. We knew it wouldn’t scale to huge proportions, but we thought it would last for a while. We ended up hitting our critical mass late last week, and the hourly updates to our analytics ground to a halt. Turns out that providing deep analytics on 200 million API calls per month is tough for a startup to do. We are cranking on a very cool new infrastructure for our analytics that will provide real-time analytics at scale and will give our platform considerably more access to analytics. (Worth noting: All transactions and data in our API are accessible real-time, it’s just our aggregated analytics that temporarily outgrew themselves.)
- User Interface. We’ve spent the vast majority of our time and energy making the back-end of our platform work really well, but our “front-end” tools need some work. They may be highly functional, but they aren’t overly pretty and more importantly the design and flow isn’t always overly intuitive. This comes from a deeply held belief that the API is more important than the GUI we slap on it, since anyone can put their own GUI on our API. But the reality is that our GUI should set the example for the rest that are to come so we will be working to improve it.
- We aren’t quite sure yet how to talk about our platform. Is it game mechanics, or is it a virtual economy? Are we the scorekeepers, the accountants or are we the game builders? Do we power virtual currency or do we enable points and reward systems? Not sure? Neither are we. We do all of the above, but we are still figuring out how to communicate what exactly it is that we do. With an emerging concept comes an emerging industry and with it an emerging lexicon. Some words mean one thing to one company and something entirely different to another. I love discussing what it is we do and seeing how people react – even when it is painfully obvious that they are giving me the “What in the f___ did this guy just say?” look.
- Our platform isn’t accessible enough. Jeff likes to say that we’ve built silly putty; “It can do everything, but by itself it doesn’t do anything.” This is the way many platforms start out, but it doesn’t change the fact that it introduces the requirement that for now programmers/developers are required to implement our platform. Our early customers love that, because they want to configure and customize their own game mechanics and virtual economy and all have great engineers to implement what their product and marketing folks design. But we are working with the developer community to build an “apps layer” on top of our platform that will make it much easier for non-developers to add game mechanics to their site or app. Just think how cool it will be when as a blogger, in under 10 minutes you can point and click your way to adding game mechanics and a virtual economy to your site.
Like any startup, there is a very long list of the stuff we suck at. These are a few of ours that I’ve been focusing on and that we are working furiously to improve upon. So tell us, what did we miss that’s bugging you and what do we need to make better?
