A brief history: I got the idea for a trading card game featuring the heroes of science and technology back in the Fall of 2008.  I did some planning and research for a few months, and in spring and summer of 2009 I did a lot of development for it.  In fall of 2009 I got a cofounder and that worked for about 6 months until that relationship failed slowly and silently.  My work slowed to a halt until summer of 2010 when it ceased.  Now, over a year later, I’m going to go over the reasons why I failed and what I can do about  that in future ventures.  Hopefully you can learn something from this, but this is mostly for my own benefit.  Here’s a list of some of the things I did wrong.

1. I Was Planning to Launch a Mature Company

Good grief, you should have seen some of the things I spent time and energy working on.  Partnerships with other companies.  Building a generalized game engine that could accomodate any known trading card game.  Plans for community participation in the sourcing of future characters.  Many hundreds of scientist bios sorted by category.  Reading multiple books on game design.  Structuring online tournaments.  A release schedule for themed sets of cars going years into the future.  In my head, I was running the company that would have resulted with ~2-5 years of perfect execution.  Silly me, I glossed over the work necessary to get to that point.

2. My MVP Was WAAAAAAAAAAY Too Complex

Like a good boy, I did some market research into CCGs in general, and ran surveys for my specific idea.  Emboldened by good results, I started working on my MVP of … a completely generalized game engine running on a realtime gameplay platform.  I wrote a pretty good game engine, but it consumed 100% of my development time (see also #5), but the realtime part was beyond my grasp (see also #2a)

I should have gone roughly in this order:

1. you can collect and view cards (with no game rules)
2. cards get one new rule
3. you can play the game with 100% page refreshes every time you do anything, including having to guess and check when your opponent is finished with their turn (imagine chess by mail)
4. when customers can successfully use that feature, return to step 2
5. once the gameplay is fun, work on player experience features (drag and drop cards, async updates to the page, etc)

Why didn’t I do this?  First, #3 would mean that it would super duper suck to try and play the game, and I didn’t want that to be the first impression. Second, I was trying to optimize for my personal development flow instead of product development flow.  The goal was quicker total development time, but it instead led to burnout and quitting due to lack of visible progress.  Finally, I had in mind the “charge from Day 1″ mantra and I knew that it would be a long time before this gave anything worth paying for.  So I basically waterfalled myself to death.

2a. My MVP Was Beyond My Ability

Making an MVP is not the place to be a hero – it’s an feedback and verification phase.  Part of my planned MVP was a real-time multiplayer card playing surface.  Remember, this was 2009, so no Node.js, a much less mature EventMachine, etc.  (If I get any dates wrong, remember this is my perception of what was out there.  People were doing this stuff, just not me.)

There were two big problems: not only was this extremely overkill as an MVP, it was beyond my technical abilities.  I did not have the skill to prototype this.  My plan was literally a) learn EventMachine and use that, b) learn Python and use Tornado (I heard it was good), or c) learn Erlang because that was the “right way” to do event driven server programming.  I was not confident enough in any of those choices – I figured EventMachine was the best idea given that I was writing the site in Rails but I couldn’t find documentation and tutorials enough to give me the courage to actually work on it (also next point as well).  I was aware enough of the deployment and integration difficulties of managing multiple platforms to know that I probably wasn’t going to use Python or Erlang, but that just helped me not choose those options.

I think if I knew in real life someone that had been using EventMachine and could give me a 10 minute overview and answer basic questions like “How do I pass a user between a Rails app and EM evented code?”, that probably would have been enough (alternately, I could have reached forward through time to get the PeepCode episodes on EventMachine.  Instead, I just left it as unknown and went back to work I knew how to do because I had no priorities or deadlines to force the issue of how to code the gameplay part of the app.

3. Analysis Paralysis for Unnecessary Topics

Speaking of time, I continually spent 10+ hours researching questions that could have been answered in 2 minutes by a knowledgeable mentor.  These were things that wouldn’t make or break my business, but I was so worried about wasting time later to fix something I did incorrectly at the beginning that I just ended up researching more or punting.  Things like corporate structure, how to collect payments, where to get a merchant account, which collaboration and project planning software to use, etc.  I did plenty of research on the Internet, and found plenty of facts, but there was no one to tell me “Given my knowledge and your situation, you should do this, this, and this”.  I believe I ended up making correct decisions, but it took massive amounts of clock and calendar time for me to feel confident about them.

4. Unrealistic Financial Expectations Clouded My Decision Making

A big part of the reason I had become interested in startups was because of Paul Graham’s writing.  Essays like How To Make Wealth made so much sense.  I never wanted to be a billionaire or world famous so the Bill Gates and Steve Jobs stories didn’t appeal to me, but the idea of solving “the money problem” did.

By this time, I had two young kids and I wanted to spend time with my family, not at work.  But because of said family, I had higher expenses I didn’t have unilateral power to decide what I did or how we lived.  We had some savings but also leftover student loans, a mortgage, etc so my runway was helicopter short.  Quitting the day job was not an option, so the target became *replacing* the day job.  This meant ~$10K per month to replace salary, pay COBRA, etc.  This was aside from expenses that the business needed to run, biggest of which was a whole bunch of art assets that I couldn’t produce.

It may seem obvious that it’s really hard to get from $0/month to $10,000/month, but that was my goal.  I made decisions based on that premise – will this help me earn $10K/mo?  I ended up doing a micro version of the VC shoot-for-the-moon game, because I was unwilling to consider a plan that led to making $250/month and included enough momentum to keep going next month.  It was all or nothing, and nothing won.

5. I Did Things in the Wrong Order

As part of my way-too-huge plan, I figured out that I needed four things: a flexible game engine, a website that included basic administration and the ability to play the game, a game design including ~200 cards, and a community of ~50 playtesters.  I had 10-15 hours a week, so I figured that this would take me years to do all those things.  I worried that I wouldn’t make progress if if I tried to do them all at once, so I tried to do them sequentially.  I managed to finish the game engine and get a crude version of the administrative website done.

The problem with this is that even though I made good progress on those parts, I made zero progress on the other parts during that time.  Extrapolating from 0% progress over 6 months  is pretty discouraging.

6. I Was in Denial About Dependencies

The schedule problems from #5 also meant that it was impossible for me to work with others because I had no ability to schedule dependencies.  For instance, I knew early that I wanted to feature the real life heroes of science and technology, and so I went to the TechCrunch50 conference, where I met some awesome people that were interested in being on the cards.  I tried following up with them on how that would work, but because I was being frugal about how and when I spent money, I didn’t want to commission the illustrations of them.  So I just ended up coming off as a flake because I didn’t follow through.  This made me even more hesitant to work with people in the future, so it ended up being either done by me or punted indefinitely.

By the later stages of my winding down, I knew that I needed another partner, either an artist so I could save cash and get some design help, or a developer to push functionality faster.  But I had been moving so slowly on my own that I had two worries: that the search for a partner would take away the rest of the little time I was spending, and that if I did find a partner, they would quickly be disillusioned by how little work I was producing.  So I consciously made the choice not to work on finding a partner, even though I knew it was the right thing to do.

7. Unrealistic Schedule, No Accountability

Before things started falling apart, I had an ambitious but reachable schedule for doing things.  If everything had gone exactly according to plan, I would have stayed on schedule and done great.  But there was a pernicious psychological feedback loop that hurt me.  When I slipped a teeny tiny bit on the schedule, I would get discouraged, and adjust the schedule backwards.  But when I missed that again, I started to feel defeated and ended up working less.  That made the schedule slip worse, which gave me less motivation to work, and this spiralled out of control to the point where I stopped.  In the middle of this cycle, I stopped announcing things on my blog because I was ashamed of how consistently I failed to meet any previous deadlines I set.  So I lost the reinforcement that comes from public accountability, which made it even easier to slip the schedule.

I truly believe that if I had been more realistic and flexible about my schedule (and about the scope of work, see #2), then I would have hit more deadlines, stayed accountable, and had more reserve willpower for when things got tough.  A track record of success would have gone a long way to encourage me.

8. I Was Shattered When My Plan Fell Apart

In 2009 things were going according to plan.  I had written a lot of code on my own, and I found what looked like a great partner that complemented my skills.  Things went pretty well for the first few months but long story short, that partnership died a slow uncertain death, to the point that it was very dead before I even realized it was dying.  Now it was six months later, there was unresolved uncertainty around ownership of the company and assets, and I a lot of the progress I thought I had made was now gone.  This was a blow that I couldn’t really handle and basically the death of the present version of GeekStack.  I didn’t admit it for a while because I wanted to be determined, I wanted to be committed, I wanted to be unstoppable.  But the thought of starting over and being so faaaaaaaar from launching was too much for me, so I just pretended like GeekStack was still alive.  I still read game design articles, I still collected scientist profiles, I still did little stuff, but from that point on I don’t think I wrote a single additional line of code on GeekStack.

Now What?

Writing this has been very cathartic so far, thanks for listening.  (What?  I’m the only one left?  Oh well, catharsis doesn’t need an audience.)  But getting things off my chest doesn’t matter if I don’t learn anything from it.

What are the good things about my experience?

• I have a well of about 6-9 months of determination
• I verified ideas in the market before spending too much time or money developing them
• I could develop code outside of a structured work environment and pick up new skills as needed
• I had interest and organizational skills beyond just coding
• I can expand a plan as needed to accomodate new information or ideas

What are the weaknesses I need to work on and be aware of in the future?

• I rarely was willing to scale down plans to something simpler or smaller
• I was very, very dependent on momentum and routine to stay motivated
• I would go into denial about problems I wasn’t sure how to fix
• I could get paralyzed now by problems that I didn’t need to solve until later
• By refusing to compromise schedule, I instead compromised completion and progress
• My short term goals were too big and too demanding

Action Items

I don’t know when or if I will return to developing GeekStack.  It has been nice to live without the anxiety of a big project hanging over my head.  I’ve spent more time with my wife and kids and been more focused at work.  I also really love the place I work now and I’m getting tons out of my time there.  I have been improving our money situation in slower, steadier ways than looking for a big startup outcome.

On the other hand, I love the idea of GeekStack and I still have a huge desire to improve the way society views creative, productive people.  I think the business idea is still sound and sustainable.  And the siren call of solving “the money problem” is still appealing.  So GeekStack is not dead dead, more like encased in carbonite.

If and when I start on GeekStack again, here are things I promise to do:

• Find a partner/cofounder to share the work with, or at least a Mastermind type group that can keep me accountable for progress
• Spend more time on task decomposition and prioritization, making sure that I do the most important things in order and that I have weekly-ish deliverables to keep visible progress and internal motivation high
• Get other people (customers, playtesters, etc) involved as soon and as frequently as possible, even if it’s in a more limited way than I hoped for.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this journey.  It was an expensive and roundabout way for me to learn lessons about my own psychology, but that’s a heck of a lot better than failing under a delusion.

—-

Got a similar experience or concern?  Need a shoulder to cry on?  Email me (my personal email) at peter @ pchristensen . com

Dear Chicago Lean Startups Group,

I think any time you capitalize the letters to make a Methodology, you’ve got problems.  So agile development is good, but Agile Development can lead to a bad fit for some projects.  Same thing with customer development vs Customer Development.  Steve needs to be an unflagging advocate of CD because people pay more attention to someone who sounds certain, but like any other evangelized method, there’s the usual “it depends”.

The primary goal of customer development is to reduce the cost of mistakes.  Just like catching a bug in development is cheaper than fixing it once it has been released, confirming lack of customer demand prior to ramping up a sales engine is cheaper than finding out once you have a paid sales team.  This is basic enough that I don’t think anyone can argue with it – reduce the cost of mistakes.  Actually, the essence of everything in CD is the same as Marc Andreesen’s Product-Market Fit.  First, build something you think people want.  Second, find out if people want it and at a price you can sell it at.  Third, if they don’t, return to step 1.  Fourth, when you have a repeatable scale model, you have very little risk and can either scale profitably or take investment on good terms to scale quickly.

Let me give an example of CD/cd in my own project.  I’m making an online trading card game with a science and technology theme.  It’s not a technology risk, it’s fairly straightforward web development, so there’s just a market risk.

Here’s the market:

• Trading card games – large but sort of stagnant.  Casual online games have taken some of the steam out of it, plus there was over a decade of insane growth from Magic: The Gathering, Pokemon, and YuGiOh respectively.
• Online games – obviously booming, with Zynga, Playfish, social games, Facebook, ridiculous viral growth, etc
• Competitors – there are online trading card games, though most haven’t taken off.  MtG has an online game but you need a downloadable client so it’s got more friction than other online games.  It also has an XBox Live version.  Challenge Games has some trading card games but they’re focused on collecting, trading, and deckbuilding with no interactive gameplay, so they’re a hybrid between casual games and typical trading card games.  The closest competitor to what I’m actually doing is Chaotic, which has real cards and virtual cards and you can play online.  However, Chaotic is 3rd or 4th banana in the trading card game biz and such a tiny part of the gaming market as a whole that we’d be competing in parallel than directly.
• Monetization – trading cards have a proven model (sell cards), online games and virtual good have shown that people will spend money online.  I don’t need to prove either of those things.

So there’s a known market.  I don’t need to go around and ask people if they would play a trading card game, or how much they would pay for a pack, etc.  The only things I need to prove are:

• Is my game fun?  No matter how good everything else is, if the game isn’t fun, it won’t be successful.
• Do people like, dislike, or not care about the science and tech theme?  I’m betting on the theme resonating because kids love science, on the novelty being appealing in a world full of swords, ogres, and dragons, and on higher parental approval because of the educational factor.

So in the context of agile/CD/MVP, I’ve spent a decent amount of time developing a super flexible trading card game engine to make it easy to quickly iterate through game ideas and mechanics until the gameplay is up to snuff.  Then, if I find the theme isn’t resonating, I can change it and still have the game engine underneath so that isn’t a time consuming change either.  My choices locked me into the trading card game market, but since it’s a proven, existing market that isn’t a concern for me.

Since my primary risk is making the game fun, I’ve spent more time signing up playtesters (shameless plug: sign up to be a playtester) than talking to potential paying customers.  When the game is refined and fun, then I’ll focus on how to sell it to new gamers and/or people that play other card games.  It may be that current tcg players are the best to target because they’re already familiar with the concepts, or they might not be interested because they’re already invested in their games and mine don’t compare favorably.  That requires a whole different strategy, and it’s not until that’s worked out that I can really worry about scaling up demand.

I hope this helps.  Steve Blank the evangelist needs to speak boldly and confidently about how awesome CD is, but really it’s about product-market fit and reducing the cost of mistakes.  I personally think that for web startups, the Eric Ries/Lean Startups spin is much more applicable.  Steve Blank is savvy but he has never worked specifically in this market.  Same principles apply, but for specific application, check out Eric Ries.

-Peter

A long time ago I created an alternate RSS feed for people that wanted to keep up with GeekStack but didn’t care about the other things I sometimes blog about – geeky t-shirts, education stories, etc.  When I set it up, I was just posting links to delicious.  When I started putting things directly on this blog, the No Links feed didn’t do it’s job of conveying condensed GeekStack news anymore.  But, it has been fixed, fear no more, and here you go!

GeekStack No Links Feed

Shop << Attract Mode.

More on Euler’s Identity

Science Heroes Art – 1st of over 200 Pictures Needed!

It was actually a good exercise because it forced me to put into words some of the basic premises and requirements of the project.  Here’s the information:

GeekStack trading card: Heroes of Science and Technology

About me

I’m making an online trading card came.  Think Magic the Gathering or Pokemon, but with a science and technology theme.  I’ve seen and experienced the sheer volume of information that kids retain from the games they play, and I’ve seen the fanatic, almost obsessive lengths people will go to for trading card games and it looked like a match made in heaven.

I’m developing the game engine so my game can be played online, but I need it to look outstanding in order for it to be successful.  The art, concepts, graphics and visual design in mainstream trading card games are extraordinary and that’s the bar that I need to clear to complete.

This is the first card design, meant to be used on the website, in early promotional and marketing materials as well as be included in the set.  I haven’t figured out exactly how many cards will be in the first set but I would imagine it’s between 200 and 300 cards, all of which will need their own art.  So this is just the beginning of things yet to come.

Target Audience

Trading card games have served a few major demographics.  Games like Pokemon and YuGiOh were aimed at children 6-10.  Other games like Magic the Gathering and World of Warcraft TCG were split between early teenagers discovering the game for the first time and dedicated adult players (both have organized tournaments, for example).  I would like to aim for the second category, young teenager-ish people, say ages 11-15.  Similar to the kind that would buy a Lego Mindstrom kit or enter a FIRST Robotics league.

The purpose of the game is to create an immersive experience, where each player is trying to use science to improve the world.  Sounds wishy-washy and goody-two-shoesy, but there are a variety of ways to accomplish that (note: since the game is still being designed, none of these are definite).  You could invent or improve something useful, you could make money to change the world another way, you could make the public more aware of science to increase the demand for it, etc.  The game will cover all aspects of how science takes place in the real world, including funding, education, deployment, industry, advocacy, etc.  The structure and rules of the game are meant to be a simulation of the real world, so that just like Madden helps you understand football much better, hopefully playing GeekStack will give a greater appreciation for how science makes the world better.

Requirements

Produce the art for one card.  The subject of the card will be John Von Neumann.  He was one of the prominent mathematicians of the 20th century and among other things, invented game theory, oversaw the design and construction of the first programmable computer, and did the math behind early weather prediction.  More information is at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_von_Neumann and all over the web.

The art should be representative of his accomplishments and abilities, not just a picture of what he looked like.  Bring the magnitude of his accomplishments, intelligence, and creativity into the picture without just being a slideshow of his life.  I haven’t settled on a style (cartoony, comic book, painting-like, etc); this contest is a way to see the range of designs available, so don’t feel constricted.

Format will be similar to popular trading card games, roughly half of of a 2.5″x3.5″ trading card.  I haven’t worked how the printing size translates to pixels, but ithe picture should be at least 1024×1024 px.  It may be cropped to fit the shape and size of the box when the card layout is finalized, but the whole art may be used on the website, marketing materials, etc.

For examples of cards from other games, see
http://www.wizards.com/magic/tcg/article.aspx?x=mtg/tcg/magic2010/spoiler
and
http://entertainment.upperdeck.com/wow/en/products/huntforillidan/default.aspx

How good were the old [chemistry] sets? They were certainly more exciting, stocked with iodine and nitrates good for making unstable explosives or homemade rocket motors. Chlorine and cyanide compounds could emit deadly gases. A few chemicals turned out to cause cancer.

Kits from the 1920s to the 60s might include radioactive uranium, deadly sodium cyanide, or pure magnesium foil that burns at 4,000°F, with manuals that told how to mix up gunpowder or melt sand red-hot to blow your own glass test tubes. The Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments debuted in 1960, packed with risky experiments. Its 19th-century predecessor, The Boy’s Own Book, had 20-plus pages of chemistry and fireworks recipes.

People tolerated more risk back then, but in exchange, generations of young experimenters were rewarded with deeper discoveries, bigger thrills, and the satisfaction of daring to achieve something important for the future.

Rocketry, nuclear energy, plastics — new sciences that were changing the world — were all highlighted in popular chemistry sets of the mid-20th century. Many of today’s scientists and engineers trace their careers back to the excitement of that first set.

via Make: Online : Great balls of fire! Make your own Chemistry lab….

I smashed my finger in my door today. It hurt like hell, and I need to make sure I didn’t hurt it again.

But I had to type! So I built a splint/typing claw out of a Lego NXT kit I had sitting around.

Obviously it’s a short step to building a mechanized exoskeleton for my finger. So that’s what I did. One button lowers the finger, the other raises it. If I move it on my own, it will automatically bring it back to the resting position.

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