3 essential points for entrepreneurs

After consistent efforts to avoid it, yesterday I finally saw the Social Network movie. Don't ask me why I've resisted it for such a long time, I guess I was afraid to find out bad things about Mark Zuckerberg, whose work I highly respect, and I had to prepare myself for it. The recent news about the Winklevoss brothers court adventures convinced me to see the movie.

Anyway, let's discuss 3 essential points that you can find between the lines of the movie. Spoiler – I still have a lot of respect to Mr. Zuckerberg's work.

1. Personal involvement

The anomaly in the story is that the Winklevoss brothers got the money. There is a common believe in the entrepreneurship world that at the same moment you're working on something new, there are, at least, 3 other crews in the world that work on exactly the same thing. There are almost no exclusive ideas, there are only new ways to transform the idea to the real thing.
Let's get it straight, I'm not claiming that stealing ideas is OK, because it is not. I'm saying that the way from the general idea to the specific implementation is so long, that often it is hard to find too many elements of the original idea in the final product.

If you are giving to someone else to implement your ideas, while you're busy doing other things, don't expect to get something back. Even if you have enough money to invest in a startup company, you must be actively involved. Unless you have expensive dad's lawyers that will achieve 65M dollars for you.

Personal involvement is crucial for taking a part in a success of startup company.

2. Dedication

In the first stage of a startup company, you must dedicate yourself to it. It sounds simple, you're dedicating yourself to many things in your life – job, family, hobby… Here is the difference – you must dedicate yourself only to the company. 24/7, at least! You wake up thinking about it, you're going to sleep with it. You drink it, you eat it, you breathe it. Still, be prepared to find out that it isn't enough. Successful entrepreneurs sacrifice a lot. You must create a supporting environment in your private life, otherwise you may find yourself successful, but alone.

There are no accidental millionaires and billionaires, there are only people that were willing to sacrifice their lives to the implementation of the idea.

3. Think Platform

Obviously, facebook is not a social network application. It's not even a social network service. It is a social network platform. You can think about it also asa  social network operating system with a bonus – well over 500M active users.

I'm sure you've heard the expression "Think Big" many times, but it doesn't reveal the essence. "Thinking platform" will allow you to quickly respond to the user's needs that arise from the use of your product. At the beginning, ideas are a set of cool features that answers the need you've recognized. Try to understand what is common to those features and try to figure out how to implement the building blocks that implicate the features. At the end of the day, each feature is only one case of the use of the platform.

Here is an example. My facebook friends are located around the world. When I want to chat with one of them, I never know what his local time is. Certainly, 2AM isn't the best time to talk about business, while 2PM isn't appropriate time to talk about the movie I saw yesterday. So, I have a brilliant idea to show the friend's time in the chat window (I know, Skype already does it and it is, indeed, a great feature). "Think platform" means to implement the time feature in such a way that adding in the future the local weather won't require writing a code, than only configuring the system. It can be achieved by implementation of a system where time, weather, exchange rates etc. are only cases of the general ability to bring local information from one place to another. Such approach may take a little bit more time in a short-term, but it saves a lot in a mid- and long-term.

"Think Big" is "Think Platform". Prepare yourself for future requests, so when they come, you can respond quickly.

Summary 

We have discussed here 3 essential points required a success. There are more factors for startup success – focusing on one idea, facing problems in the real time without compromise and even luck, but without the active involvement, the dedication and thinking platform, the odds for success are extremely low.

3 important aspects of social gaming

The Social Gaming genre brought to the world very different gaming experience from what we were used to.
Let's see which 3 elements had the main influence in this gaming revolution:

1. Slow pace

In the "old world", the one before social gaming, the most successful games were highly addictive in the straight and powerful way. If you remember the Tetris-mania, surely you recall all those people playing Tetris for hours. You couldn't communicate with them during the game, they were totally into it. Even Minesweeper, the game that comes with MS Windows OS, is such. I've got under 100 seconds on the hard level. It took me weeks of everyday practice. Up today, I spent more than 1000 hours playing the game.

Social Gaming is completely different. You are limited in the time you can spend playing. In most of the games there is energy or equivalent that doesn't allow you to play more than 30-45 minutes at once. Than you have to wait. And you have to come back. It doesn't mean that social games aren't addictive - they are! But in another, much slower pace.

Of course, there is no problem to speed up the things. It will cost you just a few dollars.

This great idea have 2 consequences: you're coming back frequently and you have enough time to miss the game. You are not "having enough" of the game quickly, people plays social games like FarmVille for years!


2. Creativity


Or I shall say "the sense of creativity"?

The aim of most of social games is to build something. It can be a farm, city, mafia, garden, village or any other complex structure. Since not everybody have enough talent for arts, there are ready made building blocks. It turns the social games to sort of virtual do-it-yourself playing field. You feel creative, you choose where to put the house and where the store should be. There is also a game plot. You have tasks. So, the building blocks are prepared, you are well directed what to do, but still, the sense of creativity is there.

The main challenge here is to keep the balance between the freedom of player to be creative and directions that will keep the player on the track.

Let's take for example two similar games: FrontierVille by Zynga and Wild West Town by ClipWire Games. Both games are dealing with the Wild West, but FrontierVille has close to 14M monthly active users, while Wild West Town has just a little bit more thant 1M. There are lot of reasons for the difference, one of the main is Zynga's strength and huge amount of active users playing their other games. Nevertheless, there is another important factor. Wild West Town has a nice, but very demanding story. If you suddenly felt creative during the game and you have done something that is not part of the given tasks, you may find yourself doing it again in a while, in order to fulfill a new task that just arrived. It is frustrating and players don't like it.

So, give your players an opportunity to feel creative, but don't leave them alone to lose themselves in your game.


3. Playing with your friends

Of course, you will say, those are social games. You're right! But, the emphasis here is the word with, which is opposite to the word against your friends. You're helping each other, you can't finish your tasks without their help. Another important aspect is that places where your friends have an obvious effect to the outcome of your play are under your control. So, you're still the one that exploits your own creativity from the point 2, but you can't advance without help of your friends.

In this situation, you're sharing. It is the name of the game in the social world - sharing, and you are willingly doing it again and again.


Summary

There is no magic formula to make a successful social game. At least, when you're preparing your social game, you can make sure that the aspects we discussed here are there. They will make you closer to the success.