I haven't seen any successful MVPs out of games. What I have seen is gaming studios developing very good products (Angry Birds, Kingdom Rush etc) and releasing them for free, and then building a fan base to monetize off of it via mobile sales, in-game sales and sponsorships. Even if you are a one-man team, there are still others in your shoes that have done this successfully in the past, such as Jay at zeebarf.com.
Bottom line is you will want people to know your work before they want to open their wallets. Think of building a series of games, with the first few installments as freebies. If your product is good enough, people will want more, and then you can recoup the costs once you get traction.
If you want to get into the unity/flash gaming business, go to sites like armorgames.com, kongregate, maxgames to see what the popular game producers are doing. Look at their blogs to see their journey.
Based on playing your game so far, I'd say it's not ready for MVP. There are too many high quality free games out there for free.
Good luck!
Feedback:
1: Consider adding a loader screen. Your unity is taking over two minutes to load which is VERY long by browser game standards. Add a progress screen, show something flashy to hold/keep people's attention.
2: It's unclear what the objective of the game is. There are no tutorials, no HUD (heads up display), no context menu.
It would be more useful if you stated your specific interest of the body language / general cues.
Eg., Is it for...
dating women?
making sales / closing deals?
making friends?
spotting liars?
Understanding your intent will help.
Reading / communicating with body language is an art, much like learning to play a musical instrument or speaking a language. It takes study, practice and feedback to truly learn it well. While a book / written list of words cannot replace the actual body language, here are some general universal cues, just a few that came to mind:
Arms crossed: closed / defensive
Hand on chin: thinking / contemplation
Leaning in / touching you: signs of interest
Usually, it is a group of cues that forms a picture of what someone is really thinking. An individual cue by itself can be unreliable and should be taken with a grain of salt.
Nine months? Three or four companies in the particular space I was in? I talked with both the tech owners and the company owners in all but one case.
I had just come off of three years building a developer relations platform that drove one of their competitors basically out of business. The relationship was not smooth, however; it was financially successful for them, but I butted heads with them constantly, again, because they didn't want to change their culture or processes, and I had scores of customer evidence that they needed to. They wanted to finally bring it in-house, so I thought I'd try it again elsewhere.
One company realized, as they talked with me about it, they would have the same problem: they hadn't realized what "doing it right" actually entailed, and weren't prepared for an internal culture shift. They brought this up with me directly and I agreed, and we stopped talking.
The other three just stopped talking, and I inferred it was something similar from how they were behaving during the initial discussions (I only received feedback later from one of them).
I've had related experience talking with startups over the last couple of years. I don't generally try to help startups that don't already know they need customer development and product/UX design. It's not an effective use of my time to teach you the value of design when there are other startups who already understand my value. (In addition, unless you're talking exclusively with VC-backed startups, most startups can't afford to pay you.) As design includes user research and customer feedback, I feel these are the same issues you'd run into. I think you're underestimating the amount of culture change you'd need to effect.
Your business proposition sounds a little like a managed Get Satisfaction. You triage the boards and collect feedback and provide some UI comps... to whom? To the C-suite guy who hired you? And then he demands it of the product manager and tech lead, to fit it into the roadmap? The roadmap they previously had full control over? What is the priority of these changes over all the other changes that had been signed-off on? And that's how your changes get swept aside, and your contract doesn't get renewed because none of your changes ever made it into a release.
Every person in that company is used to doing their own thing, or they'd already be taking feedback in from customers and supporting them better. You may need to convince an entire chain of people to implement your changes, and then a whole other chain of people to implement instrumentation and reporting in the app so you can see patterns of use in the app, and then a whole other chain of people to implement servers to collect that data, and then a whole other chain of people to analyze that data, then then a whole other chain of people to let you go interview customers directly (because data can't tell you why they're behaving that way), and then back to the first chain to change the roadmap even more.
That sounds exhausting and expensive, why would anyone let you do that if they're already making a million dollars a year?
Perhaps there's a narrow niche of change you could effect, a very limited subset of non-threatening, incremental change, like Draft Revise does with its A/B-testing-as-a-service. But if the entire internal chain of command isn't banging down your door to help them change their culture and processes, I'm not sure I'd invest myself in the work, as it's not likely to stick.
Thanks for the feedback, particularly on the pricing.
Agreed with all of the first point. Based on firsthand experience working at 3 startups and with a handful of business owners, I hypothesize that there are a large number of founders who are indeed interested in acting on the suggestions. It's not every founder, but many that I've worked with are open to finding what works and trying along the way.
Problem #1: Some founders are not that good at understanding their customers. Working with customers is an art, just like sales, in that there's no cookie cutter solution or exact steps like assembling widgets on a factory line. Interpersonal communication is uniquely human and can't be automated. Of course persuading them to change habits can be hard, but maybe not when framed in the perspective of the bottom line.
If this is indeed a consultancy, how would you price it? Based on email/call volume or users?
I have used Amazon and Smashwords for over 2 years now. Both services have grown, expanded, and improved, in terms of my user experience (checking reports, accurate payments). I had up to 10 books available at one point, still have 7-8 in circulation.
70% of my book sales come from Amazon.
Smashwords gives me more $ per sale.
If you had to go with one service first, I'd recommend Amazon Kindle Direct. Once you get comfortable with how the process works, branch out to Smashwords if you like. It took me less than a day to get set up and they have pretty good documentation.
Another advice from a book, which stuck with me: "If you have the desire to do something, do it, because if you wait too long, you will find that the desire has left you long ago."
I have done everything I wanted to do in my 20s.
I have a technical/developer background but left my startup career, with no job offer or backup nets, became a SAG actor, and a whole lot more. I even wrote and published a bunch of eBooks on this too.
BEST MOVE EVER.
I now have professional resumes in 3 different industries. Acting, Sales, and Startups. Great diversification. I even joined another startup years later doing something much more fun. The career gap came up, but I just told it like it is. You will find open-minded people who want to work with you.
Now I'm in my early 30s, happily getting ready to settle down. Just follow your heart. It's healthy and normal to yearn for great things. That is because YOU are pure greatness. Those who take action will distinguish themselves from those who don't.
What do I want to do in my thirties? Be a life coach to share my experience to those who find value. Be a great father/life partner. Learn to surf.
Totally agreed. I think the biggest issue with the Gen XYZ (I am part of X) is that we as a whole (a big generalization, of course there are exceptions) tend to be too self-centered. We are always concerned with our goals, our aspirations, and we don't think about, care for, or appreciate others nearly enough.
Our parents' generations (baby boomers) had responsibilities that involved caring for siblings, raising children, tending aging parents, and they often put themselves LAST. Not to say that it's better, but after talking to friends my age who have started families, I think it really sheds light into why so many young people are lost, confused, and unfocused. People are wandering around wondering what their purpose is, why they're unhappy, this and that, when they just have to open their eyes to see how blessed they are, how good they have it.
I think at the end, the purpose that Gen XYZ seek is right around them - if they will look up from their smartphone devices - human connection. We need to appreciate more what we have, the help that people give us, and start to give more to others and the world around us.
Location: Washington, DC (relocating to San Diego OR San Francisco fall 2014)
Remote: YES, 90% of the time
Willing to relocate: No (see above)
Technologies: Mainly front end, but fast learner/not restricted by technology RoR, Redis, JS, ActionScript,HTML, Git, Linux
Resume: Ask
Email: See my handle (yuzshan AT google's popular email)
Elevator pitch:
MS Carnegie Mellon, BS CS/Economics University of Maryland, A++ Startup player, Super fast learner, Master pattern-recognizer/troubleshooter.
Strong background in web development, support engineering and customer success. Early hire for 3 startups since CMU: first was acquired, second is the #1 leader of the social web, and third became profitable this year.
Interested in Mid-Senior opportunities in Product Management, Technical Solutions and/or Sales Engineering at a startup with a strong leadership team, excellent product and good fit.
Our refrigerator. It is big and things easily go bad if we don't periodically go through and do an "inventory" of what's there, what needs to be eaten.
A fridge should, ideally:
Track counts of objects,
Have date of entry of objects,
Have a freshness meter for all objects,
and give me a map of the location of each object.
I have in mind how to visually display this info and have R&D insights to other ways to make this practical. Lots of innovation :)
@OP, it seems that @logicalmind has the exact opposite problem as you. You know, I could start a startup that is like "TradingPlaces", where you get to swap professions by getting first hand training from a master at his craft, maybe gaining access to each other's network and clients over time.
Except, to start a company I would need to be very business oriented, and I'm not (I'm product/sales/service oriented), and I'd need a business co-founder.
Bottom line is you will want people to know your work before they want to open their wallets. Think of building a series of games, with the first few installments as freebies. If your product is good enough, people will want more, and then you can recoup the costs once you get traction.
If you want to get into the unity/flash gaming business, go to sites like armorgames.com, kongregate, maxgames to see what the popular game producers are doing. Look at their blogs to see their journey.
Based on playing your game so far, I'd say it's not ready for MVP. There are too many high quality free games out there for free.
Good luck!
Feedback:
1: Consider adding a loader screen. Your unity is taking over two minutes to load which is VERY long by browser game standards. Add a progress screen, show something flashy to hold/keep people's attention.
2: It's unclear what the objective of the game is. There are no tutorials, no HUD (heads up display), no context menu.