Reviewing 2018

~ Simon Reisman ~ Leave a comment

I am always amazed by our perception of time. Not only our present time is experienced differently – sometimes it goes by really quickly, and other times it is painfully slow – but time becomes even more confusing when trying to look at retrospect.

A year went by since my last post. And on the one hand so much have happened and changed when looking at the details, and on the other hand when trying to think of it broadly, it feels as if just recently 2018 has only begun…

In a nutshell, it was a challenging yet fulfilling year, with great personal achievements and unique experiences. A year that I am very happy to look back at and derive the lessons I learned.

Career

On January 1st I joined SimiliarWeb as a Senior Director to lead the Mobile App Intelligence product. In spite of the big title, in practice the role didn’t involve any management of other Product Managers. I was a part of an agile team like any other PM, and was directly managed by SimilarWeb’s CPO. I wouldn’t have taken this role – as it was actually a step back in my career path – unless there were a few important factors that convinced me that this is a good decision:

  1. Company’s Culture. During the hiring process I insisted on meeting not only the people who hired me (the CPO and the CEO), but also other Product Managers, the VP of R&D and the VP of Design. I even unintentionally attended one of the happy hours in the company. And I got to a conclusion that the culture is positive and the people are A players. Even in hindsight, I am happy to say I wasn’t wrong 🙂
  2. My Manager. In my interactions with the CPO, during the hiring process, I felt a great connection with him. I felt that I can both trust him and learn from him. He was positive, energetic and clearly invested a lot of effort to bring me in. My first impression didn’t change even after a year. While I know now his cons as well as pros, I find him to be a great coach and even a friend.
  3. My Future. I was very clear about my ambitions before I took the role. I explained that while I have a passion for leading and creating products people love, my real passion in the last decade is creating product teams that create products people love. And while there wasn’t yet a clear path to a specific role when I took the role, both my manager, and the HR Business Partner in the company promised me that due to company’s dynamics, growth opportunities always appear, and the chances of me advancing in the company will be good as long as I show great results. And so it was. within the year, my role changed and grew 3 times, eventually taking responsibility for the whole SimilarWeb Platform and getting into the position of VP Product.

Although it wasn’t always clear during this year how my role will evolve, and there were periods I was wondering whether this is the best position for my career, towards the end of the year it became very clear to me that I was at the right place at the right time. The company is going through an evolution in its offering and the way we present ourselves to the market. Our platform is changing from a generic one-fits-all product to segmented experiences per persona. This is a very exciting opportunity to lead this change, while managing a diverse product team. I am looking forward towards 2019 to see our vision realized, propelling our company to a new level.

What did I learn from this experience so far? First I would like to put into a specific framework. Motivation is an interesting topic for me, as a leader, as product manager, and as as a game designer. I have been creating and teaching about motivation models in games, but I found Dan Pink’s model (appeared in his best seller Drive) to be simple yet powerful and I use it to evaluate my status in a job, as well as evaluate the motivation of the people I manage. The model has 3 pillars: Mastery, Autonomy, and Purpose. I won’t get into explaining it here, but you can watch this Ted talk if you need a summary. During this year I saw the misalignment in these pillars and my situation: My mastery wasn’t developed a lot in the PM position, my autonomy was pretty small, and I didn’t really see a big purpose in my role. But it evolved and changed to become a challenging, autonomous and purposeful position. What kept me in the role through this misalignment phase were the two important factors mentioned above (and should be added to the motivation model, in my opinion): The culture and the manager. They are the foundation of the other factors, and without them, it will be very hard to stay on your job.

Personal Projects

By the end of 2017 I managed to strike a deal with Appsolute Games, and in February 2018 Hit n Run was launched and featured worldwide. It was very exciting to see this side project that was initially conceived as a prototype in 2015 to be launched as if it was built by one of the “big boys” in the industry. Still, it wasn’t perfect and there were many lessons learned from this process.

  • Although the game was featured worldwide, it didn’t include critical countries like the US, China, Korea and Japan. Therefore, the game has reached about 200K installs on iOS during the week it was featured (by the end of the year it reached 250K). While this is quite impressive for a side project, it is far from achieving its full potential. I am not sure we could do better, as featuring games is not in the hands of the publisher, and we are competing with some big name game studios. Working with other publishers or controlling this relationship with the store are possible alternatives.
  • The game didn’t perform well enough from a financial perspective, reaching only about $0.1 per user (LTV) – way below any ability to run user acquisition campaigns with a positive ROI. There were different reasons for such a low LTV. Some of the reasons were just stupid errors, other reasons happened because we didn’t invest in more user testing. Since then, we fixed the errors and improved some of the game mechanics. Our last test yielded a result of $0.2 per user (in the US), which is now much closer to being a revenue generating product. I wish we did an additional soft launch before we actually launched worldwide, as we would probably generate twice the revenue we did. The decision whether to continue investing in the game or to stop is yet to be taken.
  • The Android version was a big disappointment. Not only Google Play decided not to feature the game, the retention, and the financial performance were very poor. Even after we took claim back of the game, the metrics didn’t improve, and we decided stop investing in it. In hindsight, we should have waited to see the results of the iOS version before investing in Android.

Beside the specific lessons about good game design and good game dev processes, I got to a conclusion that leading a 2-3 year project is just too long. While I am proud I managed to sustain it, it is still not the most efficient way to master this domain. Therefore, I decided it will make much more sense to build smaller games, faster. Faster to build, faster to test, faster to learn. So nowadays I am investing in hyper casual (one tap) games. The first one is called Crush Hero (prototype), and it is based on a concept ideated by my son, Jonathan. I already started working on the game art. Exciting stuff 🙂

Habits, Health and Fitness

This year I continued practicing my habit-forming system. I successfully kept my previous habits regarding sleeping, journaling, side project running, professional reading, and daily planning. But this year I decided to try the system to achieve one the hardest goals I had – to reduce my weight and become more fit.

During 2017, I got to my lowest point (and the highest weight): 82 kg. Moreover, I wasn’t training on a regular basis and I felt weak and out of energy. I had to change it.

For a long time I was looking for a sustainable way to not only reduce weight, but to use a habit that will help me keep a balanced diet. Eventually I stumbled upon the Intermittent Fasting. There are different variations of this type of diet, but I decided to go with the 8:16 rule, which means eating only during 8 hours of the day, and fasting the next 16 hours. From a habit forming perspective it was easier than I thought, and within a month I was doing it without any effort. Within 4 months I reduced my weight by more than 10 kg, and I keep my weight (70 kg) stable for the past 8 months!

When I reached my desired weight I decided I to gain my energy and muscle back. In the past, I was doing many types of sports (mainly Martial Arts 2-3 time a week). But in 2017 our group stopped training, and I didn’t want to start searching for a new one. But then I stumbled upon a new system – the HIIT (High Intensity Interval Training). I started training in the morning (after sending my kids to school) 5-10 minutes 3 times per week, and increased it as my habit became stable. Today I am practicing 10-20 minutes every day, 7 days a week (keeping the streak for 6 months)! Moreover, lately I decided to walk more and stopped driving any distance that is shorter than 30 minutes walk. Not only I am saving money on gas and parking fee, I am walking more than 10,000 steps every day.

I feel more energetic and fit than I ever was. Again and again, I learn that keeping daily – small enough – habits is easier than trying to achieve bold abstract goals. Through habits we can achieve big goals.

Family

It was a very intense year in my career. Moving up the ladder every 3 months took its toll. I spent much more time at the office, and even when I was back at home, I continued working deep into the night. It really consumes most of my wakeup time and my energies.

And yet, I managed this year to pull off the longest and most complex trip I did since my tour to China almost 20 years ago. Tammy lead most of the trips we had in the last 2 decades, but in 2016 we started a new custom – a child and parent trips. It wasn’t actually a well planned concept but a result of Tammy’s decision to have a girls trip with Romi (our daughter) to London for the Christmas. I thought that this is actually not fair – and decided to have a boys trip with Jonathan (our son) to Berlin for Christmas… and so it sparked an new habit 🙂

I had to plan the trip to Berlin by myself, and it was a great success. A parent and a child trip is so much easier to plan, as you need to compromise less, and focus on small group of common interests. But more importantly it was real quality time for more than a week – a rare experience.

In 2017 we planned to have a family trip to Tanzania and Zanzibar during the Jewish holidays. But unfortunately, Tammy broke her ankle (on our anniversary weekend on July!), and it was decided that Romi and me will continue with the plan. And boy… this was a great adventure. Again, a rare quality time with my daughter, experiencing exciting new places. Tammy and Jonathan followed our footsteps and did the same trip 5 months after us, when Tammy was back on her feet (literally).

But it was only the introduction for the BIG trip in 2018. Years ago, when I found that Romi shares my enthusiasm for Roller Coasters, I told her about the cool Coasters I rode in the US and I promised her that when she is 16 we will have a trip and will do all the cool theme parks. So a short while after we came back from Tanzania, I started planning for the big adventure. This time Romi was involved in details. We had to decide the timeframe (3 weeks, during the summer school break), the cities we will visit (New York, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, San Francisco), the parks (the Coney Island Luna Park, Disneyland, Six Flags Magic Mountain), the shows (Stomp, Cirque du Soleil, Harry Styles)… And the trip was absolutely amazing. So many experiences. A perfect balance of planning and spontaneity, nature and city, eating and walking, calmness and extreme. I will never forget this trip, and I hope Romi will not forget either.

I could write a whole blog about it (which I kind of did by posting daily on Facebook), but the important lesson for me was that even in the most intense times, we can – even must – set aside time for the people we love. And there’s something wonderful and unique doing these private experiences of one parent and one child. A custom we will definitely continue with.

Summary

All and all, it was a wonderful year. A year in which long term projects got to fruition, a year of personal growth and career advancement, a year of unique experiences with my family.

Looking forward to 2019, I am setting myself a few new (and old) goals:

Professional

  1. Transform the product, transform the team – I aim to bring our team to greatness so they can create an amazing product. I believe this will be done by changing and adapting processes and routines we have that will help us to focus and execute faster on the right things.
  2. Ship more games – while making Hit n Run was a fulfilling experience, I understand that the learning process is too slow, and the cadence is too slow to improve the chances of success. I need to ship in a much faster rate, by building smaller games. I can do that only if I will be able to invest at least 10 weekly hours.
  3. Note taking – I feel I am not doing enough good note taking. There are a few good techniques for note taking, and I would like to improve my skill in it. Hopefully I will be able to tell about it in my next post 🙂

Personal

  1. Mediation – Since I started with the habits system a few years ago, Mediation was one of those unstable habits. I really want to nail it this time and ensure it sticks with me. I prefer to meditate in the morning so I will need to connect it to the morning routine.
  2. Stop looking at screens 30 min before going to bed. Screen light is bad for us, especially at night time. Most of the time I go to sleep immediately after working on my screen. This is bad for our sleep quality, and while I don’t have any sleep problems, it’s always better to invest in the quality of your sleep. And I don’t have any night routine anyway – so this can be a good start.
  3. Reading Fiction – this year was really hard on this habit. I enjoy reading so much, but unfortunately I didn’t succeed in freeing the time for it. I will need to find the right existing habit to connect it to. Probably part of the night routine… 🙂

Family

  1. My last two parent-child trips were with Romi, so it’s time for a trip with Jonathan. I don’t have any specific destination yet. But if you want to suggest a good place to visit for 2 video game geeks – please let me know 🙂
  2. Plan and execute a personal trip with JonathanPlan and execute a family trip. Although the parent and child is a great format we need to work on the family relations as well. It will be a great adventure…

If something resonated with you, or you have relevant lessons to share, or you want to ask a question, just comment below.

2017 (+2016) reflections

~ Simon Reisman ~ Leave a comment

By the end of 2016, although I knew things were about to change in my life, I didn’t find the time to sit and write. But this year, an opportunity revealed itself, so I decided to reflect on the things that happened and derive the main lessons I learned during the last two years.

As always, the lessons are personal and used for my own guidance in life. Yet if someone will find them resonating with his situation then writing all these words was worth my time.

Career

If 2015 ended with a satisfaction of my product’s success, then 2016 took it to the next level. Supersonic merged with ironSource, yet we managed to almost not be affected by the process and continue pushing the product forward. If by the end of 2015 we had a great vibe of a good product and few interesting customers (including EA), then by the end of 2016 we were really kicking ass. We left all our competitors behind and the user base grew exponentially.

And yet, things were changing in the company and I wanted to use my success to take my career to the next level. By the end of March 2017, I left my role as Director of Product at ironSource.

In April I joined a company in the automotive industry (fleet safety and management software), that decided to make a bold shift from enterprise installed solutions to mobile app solutions for small and medium businesses. It was a risky situation from many aspects, but I felt ready to deal with the challenges and the opportunity to become a VP Product was a logical step in my career.

It didn’t take long before I the reality slapped my face hard. The CEO was fired by the board of directors only 2 weeks after I joined the company, and the small and medium businesses strategy was paused. The human interactions within the company were awful and probably the worst I have ever seen. The mobile app itself was hugely flawed, and we had big backlash from Enterprise customers who tried it. The new CEO that was brought to the company saw the SMB-related strategy and the mobile app, as less relevant to the company’s future. Soon it became clear that the reasons I have joined the company and the new strategy have too little in common. So after struggling with the situation, I decided to leave the company only 9 months after joining it. The hardest thing for me was to let down my team (4 product managers and 2 UX designers), but I knew I cannot stay in a situation I am not engaged in for so many reasons.

So I had to re-learn a lesson:

Smart people and good culture are better than hot industry and cool title.

And learn a new one:

Clarity of mission and passion for customers are more important than technology or medium of the product.

At the beginning of 2018, I will be joining SimilarWeb to lead the mobile app intelligence product. This time I did my homework and invested a lot of effort to ensure I am choosing a company that fits my personality and the latest lessons learned.

Personal Projects

Facebook-Web-Cover_31

From the 2 side-projects, I started on 2015, I decided eventually to focus only on one of them: the driving game later became to be called Hit n Run. Slowly but surely, it evolved from a prototype to a simple yet compelling game. Through consistent testing (friends and family, later usertesting.com, and then soft launched several times in different countries) and iterations, the game matured into a high-quality product which we managed to strike a publishing deal for. It is to be published and hopefully featured in a month or so.

It is hard to believe I managed to pull this off in my spare time. And it taught me another – well known – lesson:

Focus and persistency are crucial for success.

If I would have insisted on pushing both game projects, I would have probably failed both. Having only one side project enabled me to consistently work on the tasks almost daily, and push it up the hill to the point it is not only ready but feels a studio-quality game.

And yet, in 2017 I did start a new thing: teaching. I am a teaching Product Management in Games which is a part of Game Design and Development program. And while it might sound like a diversion, in many ways it embodies a lot of the knowledge I have collected and created in my career. Moreover, once the curriculum was defined and the presentations created, it is much easier to update the slide decks and run another course. Besides, teaching games and product-management is a thing I wanted to do for a long time, so I couldn’t just let this opportunity thrown. And it was a great experience as I expected.

Combine and recycle knowledge to create new value.

In 2018 I will continue pushing the game project. We might create another iteration, and potentially – if the game business will show positive ROI – it has the potential to become a bigger part of my life.

Habits

On my 2015 reflective post, I wrote about my success in acquiring new habits. It really works well. But I found it has its boundaries:

Adding more habits, is limited by the time we have.

Therefore, every time I thought of adding a new habit I considered the time it will it take, when should it be done during the day, and how can I combine it with the things I was already doing. In spite of my careful planning and focus-keeping I found that:

It is very easy to lose a habit, even if it was successfully formed before.

In 2016 and 2017 I added a few more habits, yet I also lost a few.

I am still very confident that adding habits is the best way to achieve our goals. We just need to find a way to deconstruct our big goals to smaller – habit-like – targets, and yet – we do need to consider the capacity we have.

In 2018 I am planning to mainly re-form habits that I lost and create groups of habits to make it easier to follow.

Summary

Here’s the gist:

  1. Work with smart, fun and positive people for customers you really care about
  2. Narrow your focus on a single project and be persistent in pushing it forward every day
  3. If you must add more goals, be smart and efficient about it – combine efforts to achieve several goals and recycle efforts invested in one project to use in a new one.

Disagree with my conclusions? Learned new lessons in 2017? Feel free to share your thoughts.

Here’s what I learned in 2015

~ Simon Reisman ~ Leave a comment

A year went by. Boy it was fast.

And yet, when I look back at 2015, a lot of things have happened in my life: I settled into a job (though I thought I won’t), I finally cracked a system for creating and holding to new habits, I started working on my own side projects, and my financial state and my general well being were improved.

A Job

After the shut down of my venture Stix, I had to find a job. Our financial situation was still solid, but it was worsened during the 2.5 years of being an entrepreneur. During my job search many opportunities popped, but I couldn’t wait for all of them to ripen – I had a deadline: a long-planned family trip. The holiday season was coming right after it and I just couldn’t see myself without a job (and a salary) for several more months. So when the deadline was about to expire, I had to choose. And I did.

The final decision was mainly between two options:

  1. Become the first product manager in an early stage startup that was trying to tackle an interesting problem in the search space, but didn’t finish its funding round.
  2. Lead a new product in a big and already successful startup in the mobile ad space.

Other options were either eliminated or not yet ready to give their verdict.

It was a tough decision. But eventually I chose the big startup. It was against my original intuition, as ad tech is one of those areas I am really not passionate about. But the vibe in the company was good, people looked happy, and I had a good interaction with my potential boss (the COO). For a few weeks I had hard time fitting myself into this world. My mind was rejecting the decision and I felt I made a mistake. I thought of leaving. But my boss didn’t give up on me. And I am glad he didn’t. Because after a 2015 strategy planning offsite, I became to realize there are challenges that I found interesting. My role was extended and I took the lead of the UX team as addition to my original role as the product manager of the flagship product of the company.

Looking back at 2015 it feels like it was a great decision:

  1. The product I am leading grew from inexistent in 2014 to a market leader by the end of 2015. This is a very satisfying experience. I had to deal with the insight that the success of your efforts is not just a function of how hard you try. There are so many other factors… and most of them are not controlled by you.
  2. My feelings about the vibe in the company were correct. No company is perfect of course, but working with smart people in a great culture is super important. I had worked in the past for a company with an inspiring vision but bad culture – and it sucked. I still miss the feeling of purpose, of doing something of importance for humanity, but I was surprised by the effects of good culture and good people on my overall satisfaction.

And finally, the role allowed me to curve out time and experiment with new habits and personal projects. These, in turn, helped me in regaining my self-esteem and improve my general well being.

A side note: I can’t exactly know how my life would look like if I had chosen the role in the small startup, yet it came to my knowledge that it was shut down only 9 months after our negotiations (in spite the fact they managed to raise the funding round).

Habits

Throughout the years I have been trying to set yearly (and sometime even longer term) goals for myself. And although I had pretty good success achieving long term goals, I always had a problem with creating good habits. I had a bunch of new habits that I wanted to pick up, and then I tried to make them stick.

These year – I think it was after I read a few articles about habits – I decided to try a different approach:

  1. Each habit had a daily or a weekly goal
  2. I didn’t try to achieve all of them at once. Instead I focused on acquiring a single habit in a timeframe of 4 weeks (some call it “the 30 day challenge”).

The first habit I selected was pretty small and easy – to floss my teeth daily – but I wanted to start this new system with an easy win. And so I flossed for 4 weeks without missing a day. And then I selected to add a habit that was important for me (and my wife) – to wash the dishes every day.

And so, step by step, habit after habit, I was able to make real changes in my way of life. The habits I acquired include:

  1. Daily flossing
  2. Daily dish washing
  3. Daily weight measuring (which I did in order to balance my diet)
  4. Daily planning
  5. Daily journaling (to reflect and be greatful)
  6. Daily mediation (goal: 60 minutes/week)
  7. Practice Aikido (goal: 120 minutes/week)
  8. Work on personal projects (goal: 10 hours/week)
  9. Read fiction books (60 minutes/week)
  10. Read (or listen to) professional literature (60 minutes/week)
  11. Sleep more (42 hours/week)
  12. Walk more (70,000 steps/week)

The approach isn’t perfect: some habits needed more than 4 weeks to stick, some of the habits still create a challenge in meeting their goals. And yet, this systematic approach is the best I used so far. I find it works because of these factors:

  1. It focuses on a single habit. A single challenge makes it feel achievable, even easy to do.
  2. After 4 weeks most of the behaviors were easy to do, almost automatic. It feels like it rewires the brain.
  3. Every new habit I acquired (right from the first) created a feeling of achievement that pushed me further in acquiring more habits.
  4. Although it takes time to make a habit stick, during a single year you can easily gain at least 10 new habits.

I feel that habits are a great way of changing your life. It’s like hacking your brain into doing things that might be damn too hard. All you need is 4 weeks of focusing your energy on a single challenge.

I already have a list of new habits I am going to pick up in 2016.

Side Projects

One of the most important habits I created is working on side projects. I managed to remove some procrastination habits (like consuming content) and started utilizing the free time I had after 9:30PM. Since acquiring this habit I am able to have 10-15 productive hours every week!

I used the time to pursue my passion – game design and development (Yes, closing Stix didn’t reduce my love for the domain).

I started working on 2 projects:

Goldilocks

A game that was originally planned to be an interactive story for kids, but transformed into an endless runner-shooter game inspired by the classic fairy tale and the cold war era. I work on the project with a friend and a Global Game Jam counterpart, Omer Nainudel.

I deep dived into prototyping the game (using Construct 2), and iterated the concept with dozens of versions until I have arrived to a unique and fun gameplay. Lately, implemented the cool art Omer has created, which makes the prototype feel like it’s almost the game itself.

Here’s the prototype: http://goldyultrasliderart.site44.com/
Tap on the left side too shoot. Swipe up to jump. Swipe down to slide. Hold (or swipe and hold) to get into Supermode. Better play it on your mobile.

Too lazy to play? Just watch the trailer on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/goldilocksgame/

We want the production-level game to be built in Unity or Cocos2D, but we are missing a developer, so if you are a game developer or you know one – drop me a line.

Hit n’ Run

A game inspired by the classic Spy Hunter:

I wanted to recreate the same experience of fast-paced driving action that includes hitting and blasting cars, but can be easily played with a single thumb even while walking.

I had this game occupying my thoughts for some time already, but now that I had the time and the ability to demonstrate my vision, I worked and iterated this game as well.

This version has has better steering model: http://drivertests.site44.com/

And this one expands the game design with virtual currency and powerups: http://drivercoins.site44.com/

Since then I created a partnership with a good friend of mine, Danny Livshits, who covers the development cost of the game, while I’m responsible for everything else. We have a game with 90% of the functionality ready for soft launch, but we are still searching for an artist/designer, so if you are one or you know one – drop me a line 🙂

Beside these two I have more game concepts I would like to work on, but I’m actually restraining myself from starting too many projects at once.

Well Being

The combination of the economical safety, the success of the product I lead, my systematic approach for acquiring new (and healthy) habits, and my ability to envision, demonstrate and execute my passion-driven projects transformed the way I feel.

While the shutdown of Stix and the months that led to it, left me exhausted and powerless, questioning my ability to create successful products, then my Supersonic experience proved me that I can create world-class market-leading products.

Although after closing Stix, I wasn’t sure whether I can execute my own vision, always dependent on others abilities, my side projects proved I can take an idea and make it a reality.

And although picking up new habits was a constant struggle in my life, the fact I finally cracked the system, made me feel that any goal is within my reach.

Summary

It was a year of recovery, a year in which I found and reinvented myself. It was a year I learnt some new things about life, and some new things about myself. It was a good year.

I already have goals for 2016, but what would I achieve, and learn, and discover is still to be seen.

Mobile OS suck!

~ Simon Reisman ~ Leave a comment

The problem

It’s been bugging be for some time now.

How is it we are already 7 years into the smartphone era, and yet we still use operating systems that are based on the same old metaphor of the desktop.

Actually, while this metaphor is pretty solid for a person sitting in front of a big screen with keyboard and mouse, it feels clumsy and irrelevant for a a person in motion with a minute to spare. All this swiping gestures to move between the various desktop screens, searching for a specific app are just a waste of time. Folders make it even worse. It’s way to much work to find the app or the content you need in a context of mobile use. We’ve got dozens and dozens of apps on our device, remembering their location is way too hard.

Scenario 1: Focused task

Tell me if this scenarios sounds familiar:

  • You need to do something and you remember there’s even an app for (that you already installed some time ago)
  • You open your device, unlock the screen and right away start swiping between screens
  • After swiping left and right, and even checking a folder or two, you decide to use the search
  • You open the search type a few characters and then finally – you found it.

I know, there are people, who will invest the time, and manage their smartphone apps, move apps between desktop screens and folders, and will have a clean and tidy “system”. But I believe most of us don’t. And why should we?

Scenario 2: I’m bored

While the task-focused scenario is relevant for mobile, there are also other common scenarios. For instance, I’m waiting for a bus (or to the doctor, or the train to get to my destination), and I open the device, just because I’m bored. I want to be entertained, view some content (we have so much potential content). What happens? I start swiping back and forth, see the notification badge on Facebook and open the app… and that’s it (we all know what happens after that).

The solution

We live in a world of almost endless apps and endless content, therefore we need to build new OS on endless-content solutions.

Mobile operating systems don’t need more upgrades, they need a paradigm shift.

Principles

The new concept should be based on 3 main principles:

  1. Focus on search – creating order in endless content is close to impossible, searching in almost endless content is much more feasible
  2. Focus an endless content scroll – that’s the way to go. We are used to scrolling down to explore more content
  3. Focus on relevancy (context) – our smartphones are the most intimate piece of technology we ever had. It can – and it should – learn how be a smart companion, be aware of context, understand our patterns, and help us with the best possible suggestions.

Concept (Wireframe)

New OS

The concept is made our of 3 main pillars (click on the image to see it in full size):

  1. Content – This is an aggregator of content that is shown as a feed of interactive “tickets”. It contains post from Faceook, tweets from Twitter, news from my favorite blogs and news site, email messages. No notifications that redirect the user into an app, but the content right there. Not only a user can consume content in this screen, he can also Like, Retweet, enter a comment, and maybe even write a new post. This is the main “screen”.
  2. Apps – This is a list of my installed apps. Many of these apps might not be opened, and only appear as a widget in the content screen. And yet, some apps need full immersion (specific games, spreadsheet, etc). This will be the place to search them. Moreover, this is also a good place for app discovery. If I don’t have the app I am searching for, how about showing relevant apps to download?
  3. Settings – I hate settings. Both in iOS and Android. I never remember the exact structure. This screen will be based on expandable items, that make it easier to navigate and search for the setting I want to change.

There might other pillars, that are not depicted here. For instance, productivity focused pillar, where you can see tasks, schedule meetings, etc.

Switching between pillars is easy – just swipe left or right. We are already used to this interactions, only now we can move between different modes, and just wonder around to find a specific icon.

All pillars have several common features:

  1. Search box –  this is a critical functionality that should always stay at the top of the screen. This should make it easy to filter out the content, the app, the setting or the settings item.
  2. Sorting – this is a secondary feature, but it should help the user who prefers to scroll through the content, to do it his way: alphabetical, category-based, or by relevancy
  3. Relevancy – this is a background feature, that should learn the user behavior (based on geography, time, and more), and be able to sort the content in the most relevant way: to show the content or app that the user will be most interested in right now. This will save us time in searching what we want.

Conclusion

It’s a rough idea, and far from being a validate concept. I didn’t get deep into researching all relevant users, most common scenarios, but based it on my own pains, and my own patterns.

And yet, although this is not a final product in any way, it might be a starting point to rethink, redefine and redesign the old and problematic model we are so used to working with.

Think this is a bad idea? Have a better one? I will be happy to hear your thoughts.

What if…

~ Simon Reisman ~ 2 Comments

It’s over.

After reaching out to the vast majority of the investors in Israel (and even some abroad), after 3 attempts to have an aqcui-hire deal (the last one almost came through), we are forced to shut down Stix.

It isn’t easy. We tried (and tried and tried), and yet – we failed.

Now we need to overcome the failure, take the lessons we’ve learnt, and continue each with his own adventure.

TL;DR

If you don’t have time to read, just go straight to the Summary section.

If you’d like to know more about the trenches – continue reading.

Introduction

I know that asking “what if” is usually unproductive, but I decided to run this theoretical experiment in a systematic way – not to blame myself (or worse blame my teammates), but try to derive crucial lessons for the next time I will be faced with this kind of situations. The main problem is that I will never know what could have been the consequences of the alternatives. But I do know that the path we chose was not successful. So the alternative – probably, though not definitely – had chances to succeed.

I decided to go back in time (starting June 2014, the launch date of Loonies) to critical decision points, which we encountered about every 3-6 months.

Before starting the journey, it should be mentioned that we achieved pretty good results with our game, Loonies, regarding retention: 45/15/5 (though not as high as we aimed for). Unfortunately, we didn’t have any time left to optimize its monetization model (as we spent almost all the time we had to enhance the retention). This resulted in a very low ROI, making any investment in user acquisition very problematic. So we were left with no time/money and a very underperforming game regarding monetization. It was a very hard situation to get an investment. Moreover, we had our share of problems working as a team, and were pretty exhausted when we finished our beta (with 2 months of money left in the bank). It was hard for us to even think of still working on Loonies in the same way we worked in the last few months, and we had to split the team into 2 sub teams. For the time left until we closed the company this work model created the best results, although it raised internal questions regarding the reasons of being a founding team of 4…

June 2014 – right before launch

We decided to raise funds that will enhance Stix’s valuation (and enable all of us decent salaries). To do that, we decided we should launch Loonies, tell its story in the most positive way, hope for some luck, and start working on new projects to show our creative and execution abilities.

We could have acted differently:

  1. We could have tried raising smaller investment from private investors in the promise that we are close to making Loonies a financially successful game.
  2. And, we could have started working on improving Loonies’ monetization model, and the ability to show progress in this domain.

In practice, we were exhausted from working together, and we started to believe Loonies cannot become a successful game because of internal design flaws (e.g. its turn-based nature).

March 2014 – 3 months before launch

The retention profile of Loonies we managed to achieve until March was 45/12/3. It almost hasn’t changed in the last 3-4 months, although we have added several retention-focused features.

We decided to continue working on Loonies. Moreover, we decided to take a risk and implement big changes in the game design (in an “all or nothing” strategy). Also we decided to add content exposure model that was always prioritized low (more content, more work, big risk). The end result? We did improve the retention a bit, but monetization got worse.

We could have acted differently:

  1. We could have started looking early for a small investment ($100K-$200K) from private investors, mainly to prolong our runway and enable us to optimize both retention and monetization (and leave some money for marketing). Actually, we had exactly that opportunity with an investor,  but we passed. In practice, our investors (and part of the founders) didn’t want to take the new investment (as valuation wasn’t high enough) and we thought we might have better opportunities down the road.
  2. Without any relation to the first option, we could have shifted our focus to monetization instead of retention. This would leave most of the time we had left to try different options with the monetization model. We might have succeeded in achieving (or at least nearing) positive ROI (per user).

December 2013 – 6 months before launch

We managed to overcome the activation hurdles and achieve pretty good retention results on iOS. We had much worse results on Android. We decided to focus on enhancing the Android version results and continue working on retention-focused features. Also, we got to a conclusion we won’t have enough money to invest in marketing, therefore we started working on a publishing deal.

We could have acted differently:

  1. We could have shifted our focus on adding a single player mode for Loonies (or even focus only on SP), instead of working on enhancing the turn-based multiplayer game experience. Actually, this was exactly the feedback we got from several publishers (and later some game experts). This might have created new opportunities for Loonies to enhance both retention and monetization.
  2. Alternatively, we could have decided that our retention is good enough as it is, and start focusing on optimizing the monetization. In practice, this was a very hard decision to make, as we got a lot of recommendation to achieve retention goals first, and only than move to monetization. Also, we didn’t have yet the information (revealed through a research we read) that most of the conversion to paying users, and the payments overall are made in the first few days of user activity.

September 2013 – 9 months before launch

We were very close to soft launching the game, but some of us became very concerned with the lack of diversity in the game (that would affect retention). We brainstormed for solutions and decided to deepen the power up model. This resulted in a month of delay.

We could have acted differently:

  1. We could have just soft launch the game without delays. After all, our main lessons and meaningful iterations started after we had a big amount of users trying to play our game.
  2. Assessing our situation early enough, we could have started approaching publishers even before the soft launch. If we got their feedback early enough, we might have acted differently, and maybe even had more chances to sign a deal.

June 2013 – 12 months before launch

In June we still didn’t have an asynchronous version of the game, it was still being built in Unity. During our user tests in June and July we got a lot of feedback, that indicated we didn’t achieve the “fun” yet (after 3-4 months of iterating the prototype!). Still, we decided that their feedback is not conclusive and we should continue to production phase. The time we have already invested and the theoretical launch date that looked so far away (missing the planned launch date by months), created the pressure to continue with the game as it is.

We could have acted differently:

  1. We could have re-estimated the work-plan and understand we will not be able to run a good enough beta until the end of the year. It could have created more realistic expectations, and might have set different business goals for the next 9 months (for instance, get good beta results to be able to raise funds to bring the game to market).
  2. We could have continued iterating the game features, and even adding fidelity as needed until we got excited feedback from players (and get more confidence in the project). If we didn’t get there, dump the game and start a different project (with a plan to achieve good initial results, not to launch successfully).

Of course, the problem was we “promised” to build and market at least 2 games with the funds we got, so it would have been really hard to pull these decisions back then. Continue iterating the game (after investing more than 3 months)might have sounded like a crazy things to do. Dumping the project – although sometimes is the best decision might have sounded even worse.

March 2013 – 15 months before launch

From mid January to mid March we have made the most critical decisions, that would affect the product we have worked on and the way we worked on it.

To enable us work better as a team (that had its internal struggles the passing 6 months) we tried to clearly divide the responsibilities between the team members, but we couldn’t agree on the most important parts, and so the product definition, the concept of the game, the features, the work plan and the priorities, was left to be a team effort. We paid a very high price for this decision, as we had hard time in agreeing on the audience, the concept of the game, and the priorities of the different features. We managed to decide what to do, but not always with coherence with previous decisions.

The other important decision was the game we would develop. We decided to continue working on the turn-based model (as our analysis suggested it can be a profitable genre, and it will be easier to create a bigger user base in the casual market), but instead of continuing our work on the President (or some derivative of it), as we originally planned (and shown investors), we decided to dump the concept of 2 layers and start a totally new project.

Moreover, based on our previous experience (in building the mobile game in HTML/JS), it was clear we had to change technology (later it was decided to be Unity).

We could have acted differently:

  1. We could have insisted on diving the responsibilities. The truth is this could have created a clash, that might have broken the team apart.
  2. We could have suggested 2 man work teams (like we actually did in the last few weeks of Stix).
  3. We could have continued working the 2 layer game concept (as we knew what works and what improvements are needed). Making us much closer to soft launching and learning.
  4. We could have chosen a different (either simpler or better monetizable) game model for our next game. Although we actually didn’t know how bad performing turn-based games were.
  5. We could have simplified some of the requirements. For instance, develop a 2 player game instead of 4 player game (a decision we were forced to do several months later). This affected a lot of our original decisions, including the chosen game itself.

November 2012

By the end of October, we have launched our first game, The President. We decided to make it available in all App Stores, and we treated this (effort-wise and state-of-mind wise) as a real launch (although the product was far from being “well done”).

We could have acted differently:

  1. We could have treated it as a soft launch, without trying to market it, and focus on learning and iterating. We originally wanted to use the 2012 US presidential elections as a boost, therefore we could release the game only in the US and learn from that.
  2. We could use our next 3 months not only to get an investment but also show how we learn and improve our game metrics (by fixing the on-boarding experience, enriching the game diversity, etc.)

In reality it wasn’t easy to do. The product was still very far from being good enough (therefore, did not meet our own expectations – even though, originally, we planned to develop minimal viable game and iterate it). Also, the feedback we got after the pitch event in The Junction was pretty devastating for us. This resulted in one of our worse times as a team (getting the investment in January 2013, was actually a big surprise, as it was pretty much against all odds, in my opinion).

June 2012

June and July were very intense months, during which we have done some of the most critical decisions that defined Stix’s strategy, work plans, funds and projects.

  1. We decided to follow our (and Guy Gamuz’s heart) and pivot into a game company (instead of a B2B service company).
  2. We quit our jobs (as we were about to get funded by Guy Gamzu), moving us for the first time to be fully dedicated to Stix
  3. We defined several game concepts (first game mechanics, and later creative concepts) – deciding to continue to work on a 2-layer game model that was derived from the B2B model

  4. We decided to stay in the B2C game company model, although Guy Gamzu withdrew his proposal after few weeks
  5. We joined The Junction, thus creating for us an adequate workplace (though not very relevant knowledge-wise)
  6. We decided to develop a minimal viable game, that will help us learn and get funded (within 6 months)

Later, we struggled a lot with the creative concept of the game: we were “traumatized” by the original concept we had (Space Sheep) because of Guy Gamzu’s reaction, which led us to testing several new concepts, getting feedback (from Oren) that the concepts we created are not good enough, leading us to create another concept, that was found to be too complex to be implemented in the timeframe we had. We finally created a simple, yet problematic (Election theme) concept that was implemented to become our first game “The President”.

I still believe most of our decisions in this phase were good (quit our jobs, continue as a game company despite the changes, develop a minimum viable game). The problems were with executing the plan and managing our own expectations.

I believe we could be in a better situation:

  1. We should have continued working on the Space Sheep creative concept. It was cute, funny, “timeless” and mainly very developed. We literally wasted months of creative work and weeks of development, in implementing, arguing and changing concepts. And all because of one person feedback. This would definitely help us achieve a more mature game at the (soft) launch date (and it would feel less time-specific as the feedback we got about The President), so we might not have dumped it later on.
  2. We could have simplified the game complexity (making a 2 player game instead of 4 player). We were pretty sure this is part of our uniqueness, so I am not sure we could have decided this anyway.
  3. Alternatively, we could have rolled back to being a platform company. We probably would have needed to find a unique model that would set us apart from the competitors (that were all ahead of us, and we got a lot of feedback that the market felt crowded). For instance, we might have developed a unique communication app, that would become a distribution platform (and maybe a bit more) for games. It should be mentioned that we had more experience in designing applications than games and the technology we used (HTML/JS) would fit an app much better than a game.

Earlier times

I could have gone even farther into the past, and ask myself if there was any logic in trying to build a desktop app (for almost a year, during 2011) in our spare time (it was hard and inefficient), or should we waste so much time on defining a product for desktop and for such a long time (during 2010), when the emerging trends were Facebook games and mobile games.

But all of that happened when we dedicated a fairly small portion of our time to the venture (and we had so little experience), therefore I see this whole model as problematic. We really started learning when we started getting feedback, which made us move (by the end of 2011) to a b2b service for mobile game developers.

Another interesting point in time is back in 2009, before Stix was conceived. We were 2.5 people working on a game toolbar project with 2 operating games, when we already had an early alpha version, several testers and some metrics.

Summary

So what were the main problems or the main causes to our failure?

  1. We were – almost always – too optimistic about the time / effort needed to achieve our goals.
  2. We threw away efforts (and achievement) in favor of starting something new, even though we didn’t have valid information to make these decisions.
  3. We had a hard time making decisions, especially for Loonies, as each of us wanted it to be a different game, and we let it continue for a long time, without trying to drastically solve this way of work.
  4. We fully launched products before they were “ready” for this stage, not meeting our expectations and making the case of a valuable investment very problematic.
  5. We didn’t always get early enough and detailed enough feedback regarding the game (though we became better in this). Even when we got feedback we failed to use it to make the right decisions.

But when I look at these problems, I think there are actually only 2 root causes to our failure:

  1. Bad team structure – I have already wrote a lot about the problems we had with our founding team in my previous post. I think this is all still very relevant.
  2. Lack of experience – none of us worked in a game company before, nor did we have experience in building startups. It led us to take a lot of bad decisions (e.g. optimistic effort estimations, problems identifying the big challenges, selecting bad monetization models, plan the right time to raise funds, etc.)

Lessons learned

My conclusions:

  1. Have a balanced and experienced team. Balanced team is much more critical, as experience can be gained by doing, or somehow hacked by getting an experienced mentor.
  2. Have a clear vision for your game, that you believe in (don’t build something you don’t believe in), but have a solid business case for its financial success (if you are planning on doing business out of it).
  3. Reduce complexity, not quality. Game are entertainment. More game features is not necessarily more fun, bad quality will backfire badly.
  4. Test the game early, learn and iterate (from prototype to alpha to beta to launch). Have clear conditions to moving forward for each stage.
  5. It is important to know when to quit, but it is not less important to know when to continue pushing. Throwing away hard earned efforts before exhausting the relevant options, might take you back months in the process.
  6. Time fund raising efforts to the point when you are able show achievements, but before you have fully launched the game. This enables you to still sell a dream – and have more time to perfect the game.

Alternative paths

So was there a realistic path we could take that would eventually lead us to success?

I am not sure. Our team structure created a lot of problems and tension. That, combined with our lack of experience in game development and entrepreneurship, resulted in unrealistic expectations and bad decision making.

If somehow we could create the balance within the team (hard definitions) without breaking the team, or create a workable process (that manages to work around the lack of balance), and if we would have found an experienced mentor to help us make less mistakes, we might have executed this plan (starting June 2012):

  1. Raise pre-seed ($50K-$100K) money for art / sound / small salary
  2. Design (including monetization) and develop a game based on Spacesheep – iterate its prototype and alpha to achieve fun (3-4 months)
  3. Soft launch the game and iterate to achieve good retention (deal with activation, add SP mode, deal with diversity) (3-4 months)
  4. Raise seed money ($250K) to make the game ROI positive
  5. Continue with the soft launch until good monetization (3-4 months)
  6. Raise A round ($1M) to scale the game and create a lot of revenue
  7. Market the game aggressively, generate revenue (6-12 months)
  8. Raise B round ($5M+) to create a bigger company (with several teams)

There could be several sub options of course (for instance, create really small polished SP game that will show what can we do instead of developing a more complex game prototype), but this is the main structure.

This plan would not only mitigate risks for investors, it would also mitigate our own risks (for instance, create a good MP game or even good enough beta is almost impossible within 3 months, but creating a detailed prototype / alpha) within the same time frame is much more achievable). If we couldn’t create good results in each step in this plan, we would understand pretty early we are not up for the job.

Even if didn’t run this kind of plan from June 2012, we could come up with this kind of a plan when we started Loonies (after we got almost $300K) and focus on creating good retention in soft launch and raise additional money ($200K) to make the game profitable and launch it.

Another path might have been going back to the platform model. Still I don’t believe we would do better as a B2B company with so much competition. If we could find a different path to become a platform (like Tango), maybe we had an interesting chance.

A totally different path, would have been starting a partnership with the CTO by the end of 2009, without adding any founders. Back then, we had a basic (though not scalable) application, and one (and later) two games, and even alpha testers. We could have left our jobs (or at least work part time), pay for a designer (from our own pockets) to create a simple brand and enhance the user experience, to stabilize the app and run beta tests. By 2010 we could have enough information to take it further: talk about the achievements in beta and about the future (mobile app, which we designed already) and raise our first round. This path would create a founding team of 2 (instead of 4), and focus on what was already working, instead of generating detailed new concepts without any empiric information regarding the original idea. This is very theoretical option, as I was not yet ready to make the jump to full-time entrepreneurship in 2009, and we had even less experience…

Last words

Hoping your first startup / business will be a success is not very realistic. Most startups fail. I don’t think there was any different way I could learn all that I have learnt – first hand – beside being the CEO of Stix. It’s priceless.

So it is very unlikely our story would have ended in a different way.

But maybe

  1. If I was more courageous in the early stages , or
  2. If we found a way to work around our problems as a 4 member team, and
  3. If we found a successful and experienced mentor 

This venture would have developed to a success.

So if you are a newbie and you are starting a new venture, make sure you have a well balanced team, and if you lack the experience, get someone on the board that has lots of it…

What I’ve learnt about startups and games so far

~ Simon Reisman ~ Leave a comment

When 2012 was about to end, I couldn’t find the energy to summarize the year, and didn’t have any clear view of my next steps. It was one of the hardest years I ever had both financially and mentally. I was very pessimistic about the future.

The only text that somehow resembled a summary or reflection was the post I wrote for the Junction, the accelerator we participated in (July – October 2012).

Now, in the last days of 2013 and the beginning of 2014, although I am far from being a successful entrepreneur, and Stix is still far from a financial success, I can reflect upon this year (and the year before) without fear, with healthy criticism but also with a lot of satisfaction.

The Hardest Thing Ever

Most of my early life was pretty easy, from my point of view. I was fortunate to have caring, hard-working and stable parents, who didn’t have a lot, but never deprived me of anything I needed. I was a good student early on, and continued to excel all the way to my graduation. Even my bachelor and master’s degree were fairly easy tasks. I was always a valued employee, I had interesting jobs, and my salary was pretty nice. It all was very easy.

I always felt it’s not fair. And somehow, I figured, that running my own business will challenge this “unbearable lightness of being”. Well, it seems I was right about that. Running a gaming startup is the toughest thing I ever did.

The moment you leave your safety net (as an employee), it becomes an ever running emotional rolling coaster. It’s all up to you and your team, you call the shots, but you also get the hits. There’s no one to tell you are great. The only metric of success is the results of your business – did you create something that others value? have you succeeded in getting an investment? is there traction? revenues?

And yet, it might be a clichĂ©, but I am certain – today more than ever – there’s nothing of real value, that can be created, without real, hard and sweaty work.

So, would I do it all over again if knew how hard it is few years ago? Would I recommend it to other people? Certainly, if they are really, really passionate about an idea, a way to improve other’s life, a problem they want to solve, a life-changing product they just must build.

I would also give them some piece of advice.

Start

Start Early

I left the Israeli Air Force at age 35 (it was 2008). Most people don’t leave the army at that age, they either quit before they are 30, or they stay until the retirement (~45). I realized I want to become an entrepreneur, build products and companies. So I left, even though it was a bit “late”.

But I was afraid to take a deep dive in. I knew very little about entrepreneurship, business, marketing, consumer product or game development. Even worse, my social network was mainly irrelevant for my new career. So I took a safer path – I became a full time employee (in UX and Product positions), and in my spare time I ran several game projects. Only after 2 years (2010), I chose to focus on a single project, and only after another year (2011), I partially (50%) left my job. Only after 4 years after leaving the army (2012), I fully quit my job to lead our venture.

During this time, we’ve seen the rise of the mobile devices and the decline of the personal computer, casual games shifting from portals to Facebook to smartphones. Our initial venture was a multi-player browser toolbar, which shifted to a Skype-like gaming platform, then to a cross-platform mobile service, and finally to become a social-mobile game company…

Looking back, I am not totally sure if I could do it in a different manner. But I know that during the 4 years I worked as an employee, I learnt a bit about business, and marketing, building consumer products and even games. But I have learnt 10 times more in the last 1.5 years of running a company full time.

My advice – start it as soon as you possible. Don’t wait for the right moment, as it might not come at all. Drop your your excuses and just start.

You think you don’t have enough experience? Bullshit. Entrepreneurship is a totally different career path. The most relevant lessons for building your company will be acquired through the process of building your company, not by being employed by others.

You don’t have the financial security yet? Tough. The older you get, the harder it will be for you to take financial risks. When you are young and don’t have a lot, but you also don’t need a lot.

Markets change, you change. What is relevant today, might become irrelevant in 2 years. Make your move, and when ready commit 100%.

Start Small

Building a customer-worthy product is not an easy task. Especially, if you haven’t really led the design and development of a full consumer product before. It takes time (usually more than you’d expect), it needs iterations (usually more than you’d expect), and managing, designing, developing, and testing the product becomes an ever growing complexity.

My initial projects were fairly small – stand-alone single player games. A multi-player game, and especially a platform for mobile multi-player games, is a totally different league. The complexity of this thing is much bigger than I expected.

Looking back, I think I should have tried to transform one of my smaller projects to a real product, try to market it, monetize it, etc. I would have learnt so much, and would have been more ready for taking bigger, bolder projects.

No matter how small the product in size, you will have to go through all the main steps: building a team (unless you are doing everything alone), planning, testing, iterating, shipping. The smaller the project, the more chances you have to make it better (though never perfect…).

At first, learning should be your main goal. So choose your first project as small as possible. Even smaller. Tiny.

After making it for the first time, you can constantly challenge yourself with bigger, bolder projects. One of them might become the “one” you’d like to commit yourself to.

Founding Team

Size

We are a founding team of 4.

I always heard investors are more likely to invest in team of 2-3 people. A single person might not have enough skills or the mental strength to run a startup, but teams bigger than 3 have hard time in making decisions.

Based on my experience, they are right. We found ways to deal with this problem, but it’s not easy. The group dynamics are more complex and tedious. I felt it many times, that in sub-groups of 2 or 3 we have faster progress and better decisions.

So I would advice on a team of 3. I presume 2 could be enough if you hold all the critical expertise diversity needed to run your business. Later, as business grows you would hire employees, but they won’t be critical decision makers as the founding team members.

Diversity

Our founding team is product-oriented. All the four of us. Most of us had previously worked as product designers and/or product managers. Although we possess an excellent software engineering capabilities, it’s the product that we are all passionate about. Sometimes, maybe too passionate.

We spent hours discussing different issues regarding the product, from high level concept to the smallest details. The biggest disputes were about game design.

Everyone thinks his idea is the better one, and that it is critical for the success of the product. And although having lots of ideas is usually great, this model (of many people owning the same area) has it costs: time wasted, bad vibes, slow decision making process, and more.

I think diversity is a key in the founding team. The founding team should cover: business, marketing, product and engineering. People may have experience in several, and overlapping in some parts is not a bad thing, and having opinionated team-members is important, but people should feel ownership on their domain. They should feel super-heroes.

Leadership

Leadership is not an easy task. I found it easier in the past, when my leadership also came with a title (e.g. Major or Team Leader), but leading people has much more in it. It’s about showing the way, making hard decisions, but also about doing the dirty work, being a professional, a person that others trust.

I know I made a lot of mistakes as a leader. I didn’t always make the hard phone calls or sent the emails I needed, I let discussions continue instead of stopping them and taking a decision, I wasn’t always nice to my team members, I wasn’t always optimistic about the future, I wasn’t always solid as a rock.

And yet, I definitely lead the team. Most of the time I make the hard decisions, most of the time I try to do the hard and ugly tasks, and I try my best in being nice and optimistic. It’s not easy, especially when I feel bad and pessimistic.

So my advice – build a good, diverse, and small team, and lead them by showing the way, making hard decisions and helping your team members achieve greatness.

Endurance

This might be the most important ability of your team.

It’s not the idea (that changes during the process), not the market size. It’s your team, and mainly its endurance.

You need endurance because you will get hit, because you will be down, because there are going to be really bad moments. And the one thing that will save your team is endurance.

Our venture almost died. Actually, it did die, but right at the next day, our (future) investor called in to ensure our offer is still relevant…

If you stay long enough in the ring, get the hits but always come back, you will probably win (or at least give a good fight). Never loose hope.

Process

Plan

I already wrote about planning in my previous post. Planning a long-term project is hard. It’s even harder when you are doing it for the first time.

When we started planning our first commercial game – Loonies -  we had only one relevant experience: The President, which was a pilot game we have developed to test our conceptual and technical assumptions. So we knew how much it takes to develop a game, but not how much it takes to develop a commercially successful game…

We estimated it will take us about 6 months to launch. We even had good industry references telling us we are about right. We were wrong.

Initially, we estimated  it would take us about 3-4 months to get to a public beta (soft launch). It took us 9 months. And we are still building critical features.

Initially, we estimated it would take us a month or two to tweak all parameters, and achieve good metrics. We are 4 months in beta test and expect it will take us at least 2 more months to achieve these numbers.

So I will advice – again – to always plan, and then multiply your estimations. If you already have experience in this kind of project I assume multiplying it by 2 will be enough. The less experience you have, the bigger the number should be. Project will never run as planned – people become sick, go out on vacations, time will be wasted on discussions, meeting people, updating plans, learning new tools, and iterating and iterating and iterating (more about that later).

You might have read about startups that built a product in 3 months and had tremendous success. I don’t know any person who did that, and I am pretty sure these stories don’t tell everything. And if it happened to someone, he is the outlier. You shouldn’t build your expectations on these kind of stories.

Test

Your first idea will probably suck. And if it won’t suck, the initial implementation of the idea (aka product) will.

The only way to learn whether you have a good idea, a good design, a good product is to test it. And you probably can start testing it much earlier than you believe. At least some parts of it.

With a need-based product you can probably start validating the concept even before writing a line of code. There’s a lot of writing regarding the Lean Startup, which is a scientific-based approach to building products and companies (therefore experiments are in the heart of the concept). If you haven’t had the chance to learn about it yet, go and educate yourself. It is practical and important.

With games, it’s not different, at least regarding the state of mind. The only problem I found with testing game ideas, is that it’s much harder to validate them early enough.

When your product solves a need, you can find people who are your target audience to validate the idea with them, to show them some mockups of your product. But games don’t solve problems per se. They are entertainment, even worse, they are interactive entertainment. It’s very hard to know if a game idea is a good idea only by talking about it, or even showing some game art. Videos do a better job, but still not perfect. So you need to find the way to create a prototype of your game as fast as possible and test it.

I didn’t have the chance to try it myself, but in a away Kick Starter and Steam Greenlight, are closing the gap (by validating the interest and generating funding for your game), but it feels to me as if they appeal to niche audience (and we were trying to develop a game for the big general market).

So in our case we focused on prototyping. But there’s still a catch – while a crude prototype could be enough for your team (and other industry experts) to evaluate the game (is it fun, balanced, etc.), it will be very hard to test it with users, as their expectations of a “game” is of something much more polished, live and juicy.

It’s like a pilot show on TV. Although audience might watch only 2-3 chapters, these chapters still need to be well produced, or it might affect the audience’s opinions, you can’t just read them the script or show them a rough sketch.

While your team can evaluate the fun in the game pretty early by playing the game (a lot), all team members will be totally blind to usability problems, the learning curve, the level of difficulty, etc. These issues mustn’t ever evaluated by your team. You must test these things with new users (If possible do it face to face).

Only after you found the fun, and your game teaches the rules clearly and easily (based on the tests you made), you should start testing your game in the wild, with large audiences, data gathering and analysis tools.

I found multi-player even harder to test, as you need several people to to play every game. An a-syncrhonous turn-based game (like we did) is even harder, because the real gameplay experience is revealed only by playing it a-synchronically over a period of several days, at least. On the other hand, we found multiplayer games have some benefit in learning about your players behavior and gameplay styles, because we were able to really play with our users.

So to sum it up:

  1. In the prototype stage, test with experts (your team and other industry experts). Your main goal is find the fun.
  2. In Alpha stage (when the game should look, sound and behave much closer to the final product), start testing with your audience. Test mainly for usability (general UI, tutorial), but you can learn about fun too. If possible (sometimes you have to) let your testers the chance to play in their natural environment (in mobile games this means an installed application).
  3. In Beta stage, you need to start testing with a lot of people (hundreds, thousands). Target your audience. Statistics start to be more important than the individual feedback.

Test early, Test often! And learn how to test properly before you start. Good testing (which will bring meaningful learning) is a matter of design too (the audience to target, the tools to use, the data to collect, the metrics to evaluate by, etc). 

Iterate

Testing is the first part of your cycle. That’s the part where you learn about your product. After the learning stage, you need to implement what you’ve learnt. Design solutions to your problems, prioritize, update your product, and go back to testing.

This process will not only increases your chances of creating a good product, it also eliminates much of the arguments and fights over different concepts or priorities. It’s much easier to prioritize features, after you have results based on real user behavior.

Ship

I don’t know a lot about shipping a product. But I know shipping is critical.

The first time we “shipped” a product (The president), it was half-baked. But we committed to shipping, and so we did. It was painful. We should have treated it as an Alpha, but we didn’t have the runway back then. We just weren’t aware of how much time we really need in order to create a good product.

The main question is when is your product ready to be shipped? Based on my experience, your product will never be perfect, and if you are time constrained (you should), than your dilemma becomes clearer but harder. 

So how to overcome this problem? Again, it is wise to build the smallest valuable product (see Start Small above). The smaller it is, the less testing and iterations it needs, the more chances it has to become great (even through your own eyes) and be shipped. Just don’t forget that for the product to be shipped, you’ll need at least twice the time you originally estimated.

To sum it up: plan to ship and commit to shipping (or else all your work might not be ever seen by anyone else), define a small product (especially, if you never shipped before) and multiply your original estimation to get a more realistic goal.

Product

A Game Company vs. Product Company

I already mentioned that games are different from need-based products. And yet the bigger problem is the difference between a game company and a product company.

Startups get money to grow a successful company. Product startups focus on a single problem and try to solve it. They sometimes pivot, but they don’t usually create several different products, at least not in their early life.

But game companies are different. They are usually expected to build several (or 52) games with which  they will have some rate of success, as games (like other entertainment endeavors) are still regarded as hit-based industry. So game companies should usually plan to ship several games in the time they got (the time they got based on their founders’ financial situation, investments, etc.)

Games vs. Products

Games are a type of product, but they are different from the need-based products.

Like in any product your need to know your audience, and you need to understand what is the product concept, but it’s much harder to validate the acceptance of your product by your audience early enough.

You can always innovate in the same genre, so in a way competitors are not a direct problem, but there is a big competition on users time.

Games are entertainment, so the polish level is pretty critical early on – it’s impossible to get “early adopters” if your product is not fun enough (and fun is comprised of  both features and art).

Games are usually played for a short time (days, weeks, sometimes months), because it’s very hard to create games that are diverse and challenging for years (unlike a need that usually can be served for a very long time), so you can’t launch the game and iterate it after that. If players had bad experience or already tired of your game, they won’t come back.

And yet there are similarities too. You still need to validate it as early as possible (though in games it’s not as easy), prototype, test, iterate, find product/market fit (meaning the exact audience, good retention, and maybe even good monetization), and than launch. Moreover, there are games that are played for years, because they diverse enough and challenging enough even after a long time.

Either way, to become a successful game company you need a strategy that will capture specific audience and create value for a long time.

Games as a platform

So this is it. If you are planning on getting funded as a game company, you should have plans to create a “platform” (and I am not talking about a service company that provides technological solutions for other game developers). I see 3 ways of creating a platform as a game company:

  1. A game that is designed to entertain people for years (Clash of Clans, Candy Crush)
  2. Develop a creative-based franchise (portfolio) of relatively short-span games (Angry Birds, Cut the Rope)
  3. Develop unique model-based (portfolio of) games, e.g. multiplayer games. Even better – own a technology to support it (like Newtoy, the developer of Chess with Friends and Words with Friends who was bought by Zynga).

Each of these paths – if successful – can be transformed into growth (developing more games, partnering or publishing for smaller game studios, buying companies).

Conclusion

Tips and lessons learned are great, but the best lessons are the ones you learn by yourself. So as always, my best advice is go out and start.

Building a startup? Five Obvious Things You Will Probably Do Wrong

~ Simon Reisman ~ Leave a comment

This post was originally published on the Junction blog (http://thejunction.co.il/blog/).

 

Doing a startup is really REALLY hard. It is much harder than you expect. Trust me.

We have learnt a lot on our journey: about ourselves, about our domain, and about building a startup. Boiling it all down to a readable post is not easy. Nevertheless, I can highlight the most important lessons I’ve learnt:

Commit 100 Percent

Our venture started off as a hobby. For a long time, most of us worked on it in our spare time. And then we switched to part time jobs and worked on our venture 50% of our time. Only at the last 4 months we fully committed ourselves to our venture.

Our progress during the first stage (the hobby) was painfully slow. Even worse, only when we switched to 50%, we understood we were working on the wrong product all along. Working at 50% was much better, as we met more and worked more, but we still deprived ourselves of important things like a working space (“why pay for a place when you are not there 50% of the time”?). Working together, on a daily basis, positively affects your team’s mindset, focus and efficiency.

So my advice is work on your startup 100% of your time. If you are not sure you are willing to do this, than do whatever needed to be sure, or don’t do this at all.

Going slow is bad. Not only because markets and technology change, but because at the end of the day, what your mind really remembers is the time-span you are working on your project and not the amount of hours you invested.

Have a Plan

By having a plan I don’t mean just the milestones for development. If you are a part of the “makers” community you will be able to craft a product development plan (although it will be 2, 3, or 4 times too optimistic than the reality). By having a plan I mean understanding your business plan, thoroughly. I am not saying you need to write a business plan document, but you need to understand your customers and their needs, your market (size, limits, regulations, and competitors), and how will you make money. Your product should give an answer to all of these things. Ignore one of them, and you might be building a piece of software that is doomed to fail.

On our first iteration we were creating a cross-device (Desktop and Mobile) multiplayer gaming platform. We haven’t invested too much time in understanding the market (and its limitations), nor did we really understand how are we going to generate income. We sometimes told ourselves we would open our platform for 3rd party game developers (though we never spoke to them at the time) and users could download games and we would share revenue. So after we invested in building a desktop version of our product (WTF?!), and started thinking of creating a mobile version of it, we understood our whole product model was wrong because one cannot create an app that behaves as market/store on mobile devices.

So, have a business plan. Only after you formed this plan thorough enough, you can design your product, create a development plan and build it (don’t forget to multiply it by 2, 3 or 4).

Have Rigid Deadlines

After you have multiplied your work-plan, set a milestone and commit to it. And I am talking about important external milestones: installing to beta testers, launching the product. It would be even better if the date is external (like a holiday), so you cannot postpone it.

Having a rigid deadline will create focus – what are the most important features to be developed, what are the really important bugs to fix. Having a rigid deadline will create commitment – you and your team will do everything to achieve the goal.

Hitting milestones according to plan is hard. My advice is work iteratively. Some part of the product can (should?) be designed and built in a waterfall method, but most of your product development plan should be iterative.

It enables you to continuously test your product and reflect on it, prioritize features and bugs better, and have an ongoing sense of accomplishment. You might not have the perfect product at launch (yet). But you will have more chances of having a product that is good enough to be shipped on time.

We are a quality driven team, and it’s very hard for us to ship a product that is not perfect. So we have committed to an external deadline: the US elections. Our first game, although not directly related to the US elections, would benefit a lot from the hype around the event. We knew we must ship before the elections, and totally changed our work, our decisions and level of expectations.

Mind Your Potential Customers Not Your Potential Investors

I found it is hard to get funded, especially because we are a team of first time entrepreneurs. Nevertheless, during the last 12 months we were trying to do exactly that. Obviously, reaching investors, require specific tasks that affects your decisions and priorities.

Not only talking to investors takes time (setting meetings, getting prepared, meeting them, following up, etc), if you are not careful you might make bad decisions regarding the product development. For instance, investing (way too much time) in an irrelevant feature only to demo or impress potential investors.

We made this mistake twice (a bad habit for itself). Once, we started building a demo, and found ourselves building the wrong product (because we never stopped to think about the whole business plan); and second, we implemented a design that we knew we won’t ship, mainly because we thought it will be impressive enough for potential investors.

At the end of the day, most potential investors are (said to be) more impressed by traction than by a cool product. So whatever makes your customers happy, will probably make your investor happy.

Get feedback. ASAP!

No matter at what stage your venture is, talk to people. Talk to people about your product, talk to people about your business model, talk with potential users, talk with fellow entrepreneurs. Just talk. And if you having something to show already, than show it (mockup, demo, beta…)

So many times we live in a “world” we have created, that we start to believe it is true, or perfect. It’s not as if every feedback should immediately change what you are doing, but having many opinions will give you a wider view of your venture.

We have been building our first iteration for many months, and didn’t get any real feedback during this time. Only when we started talking about it (and showing it) to people, we got to the sad conclusions we were building the wrong thing.

Bonus: Be ready to make mistakes. A lot!

Nothing will really help you not making mistakes. Not this post, nor TechCrunch posts, or TNW, or any other blog posts. People don’t learn well through other people’s mistakes.

I know, you probably read these lines and say to yourself that you are different, or maybe you even think you are implementing these tips. But it’s only after you make the mistake and understand you did them, you might really learn something.

Therefore, you should just start doing it. It won’t be easy. I promise.

Good luck!

Massuah – Website Design

~ Simon Reisman ~ Leave a comment

Almost two years ago (wow, time passes by…), when I just joined Emara as the Director of Interaction Design, a big project was just kicked off. It was an ambitious plan to completely re-design the Massuah website.

Massuah is a museum dedicated to the Jewish Holocaust that happened during the 2nd World War. The project was ambitious not only because of the website’s size, but also because of their progressive view of the issue. Massuah Museum approached this delicate subject with nothing less than boldness.

The museum states: “The Massuah Institute for the Study of the Holocaust is a museum and an international seminar center designed to evoke discourse on the significance of the Holocaust in our contemporary society and culture.”

In the same spirit we wanted to create a different experience, not dark and depressive but updated and fresh. We wanted to create an experience that will attract young people, we wanted to provoke thought.

In this project I acted as lead interaction designer and information architect, and later on as the project manager too. Managing the project wasn’t an easy job: a mix of stake holders, aggressive customer, and even few consultants from the the customer side, who believed and acted with no alignment with the customer, led to many disputes and dozens of iterations. There were times I was sure the project will never come to an end. Just before the project’s deadline Emara was sold to Time to Know (where I still work today)…

Despite all the pitfall we managed to deliver the wireframes and the visual design,but the disputes continues for about 4 more months. After another 12 months of work by CDTech Massuah’s website is live.

The implementation happened with us out of the loop (after all the Emara was sold already), so there are many nuances that weren’t developed as designed. Nevertheless, I think the final result is pretty good, and the main objectives of the project were achieved. I’m especially proud with the virtual exhibitions: What was the word Holocaust, and Stories.

 

Here are few examples of the website design:

Home Page

This page had so many iterations I wanted to cry. These 4 cards (initially designed as only 3, but the customer insisted on 4), were designed to be implemented with Flash: the cards should roll and reveal their other side when rolling the mouse over them, to call for action and to expose the users with relevant content right in the Home Page. Unfortunately this page was implemented with HTML only, so the experience is not at its best. If we knew they won’t develop it in Flash we would designed it differently.

image

image

 

The Museum page

This page was planned to be a simple revolving banner, to expose museums exhibitions.

image

The customer insisted on a design she wanted, and this is the result: A more complex and noisy experience, as we expected (an alerted) it to be.

image

Simple list

The events page was designed to be a generic list that would be used in several page in the websites. It worked well. Nothing interesting to say about it.

image

image

An Event Page

Each item in the event list was designed to be a link to the event page. This page contains some description, optional video gallery, photo gallery, documents and even comments mechanism for after even discussions. I went through all the events and the only one that contained most of this objects was this one. I haven’t found the comments anywhere though… still the pages look nice and clean.

image

image

Complex List

A simple list was not enough and although we wanted to design simple clean pages, our customer seemed to add more and more content and requirements every meeting. This page was required to hold a title, functions (like print, send a friend), and two kinds of list (one above the other): a two column list and a generic simple list that was designed above. Each list item should have been a link to another page… Sounds awful? Well, it was implemented much simpler (this is good), but with no care for details (that’s not so good). See for yourself.

imageimage 

Stories

This is one of the 2 virtual exhibitions implemented with Flash. I feel they are the pinnacle of the website (and it’s bad they are not so visible on the homepage). This exhibition is supposed to be a strip puzzle created of hundreds of personal stories. I think the navigation works well,  and although there are some implementation errors, it creates an interesting user experience.

image  image

image

image

What was the word Holocaust

This was a virtual representation of a physical exhibition. In the design we used the 3rd dimension as the timeline, thus creating a feeling of movement inside and outside – the past and the present. I think it was designed and implemented pretty well (not without flaws of course). Looking at it now, I would add some music and sound effects to make it more intense.

Conclusions

This was not an easy project. Although the political complexity was much greater than the design complexity. Still I think every situation is an opportunity to learn. After all, blaming others won’t help you much, but learning and changing your ways might produce better results next time. These are my main lessons:

  1. Choose your customer. It’s not always possible, but there are situations that you should decide if that customer is really a good business. Sometimes, loosing a customer is much better than painfully serving one…
  2. Be precise about the customer needs. Talk to your client, look at his current website, understand his plans for the new website, understand what he really needs (to understand what he wants is not enough).
  3. Don’t work without requirement docs that both sides agreed about. It’s better to write them together, after you understood his needs (see previous bullet). This is especially important in a big project. There are clients that will continue pouring new requirements on you.
  4. Define your rules of engagement. Define what is allowed and what is not. Communicate it to your customer clearly. Hold to these rules. Having rules without the ability to implement them is like no having rules at all. Rules are important. Where there are no rules, there is chaos…

Global Game Jam 2010 – Evil Pigeons

~ Simon Reisman ~ Leave a comment

Last weekend (January 29-30th, 2010) I participated the Global Game Jam 2010,a 48 hour event of game development with a bunch of guys you may never worked before. It was my second time (and here’s the post about the Global Game Jam 2009 event).

This year’s theme was Deception, and the game should have incorporated at least one of these elements: a room, a broom, and a loom.

Evil Pigeons is the result: A 2-player game between an evil pigeon master and a mad car owner.

 

 

Although it was an exciting experience, I felt kind of disappointed. It is not the event that disappointed me, it was myself, my own experience. There were things that bothered me, irritated me, and I was mainly angry with myself.

When things like that happen I try not to drown in the bad feelings. It’s better to use these feelings to learn a lesson in life. So the experience was not as good as I expected. The question is why? And what can I do to make it better next time?

Let’s start with the good things:

  1. I developed (another) game. The core mechanics are operational, it has great art, and it delivers unique (and even fun) game experience. It still amazes me how much can be done in such a short time with focus and a great team.
  2. I lead the team that consisted of a programmer (Alon Levy) and 2 artists (Omer Nainudel and Ori Cohen).
  3. The game concept is (loosely) based on the initial concept I suggested:
    • Originally, it was a one player game where you needed to identify a target (a fat rabbit) out of other dummy figures (fat cardboard rabbits) and shoot it.
    • Later the idea transformed into a 2-player game where one of the players controls the real target (now became an elephant riding a broom) and the other figures, that look the same, are controlled by the computer. The competition is between the player that tried to identify the human-controlled elephant and shoot it, and the human that controls the elephant, and need to eat – together with all the other elephants – all the peanuts in the screen.
    • This idea later was transformed again into our game (Evil Pigeons) and another game (Fake Out, which is a competition between a thief and a cop).
  4. I wasn’t dead tired. As last year I had even the time to get a good rest during the night.

Sounds great right?! A good result, I lead the project, influenced the game design, had a great team, and it didn’t kill us… but there were few details that made the experience not as good as I expected. Here are the bad things:

  1. The brainstorm
    • In retrospect I feel we didn’t do enough brainstorm. Too early I pressed to have a decision and go for the execution. I think we could invest a little more time in it.
    • I wasn’t productive enough during the brainstorm. We had only one good idea, and I already learnt from Pixar’s CCO “Never to come up with just one idea”.
    • I wasn’t prepared enough for the occasion, and trusted too much on getting a great idea without any technique. And there are some simple and easy creative techniques that can be utilized to generate ideas.
  2. The team
    • Team members – this time I worked with people I knew before. I even worked previously with Alon (the programmer) on a different project. I know, it’s not a bad thing, but I felt I took the safe path here… 🙂
    • Team spirit – most of the time we didn’t work together. We worked as a full team only until Friday afternoon. After that I worked face to face with Alon and through Skype with Omer and Ori. It worked well, but it wasn’t as intense and as fun as it was last year.
  3. Original assets
    • We created the game concept and the art, but we didn’t have any sound designer, so I used free music and sound effects that I found on the web. It wasn’t bad, but still it wasn’t as fun as creating the sound effects by yourself.
  4. Game presentation
    • This is the main reason I am so pissed off. I just blew the moment. I could touch so many human moments there: the common memory of pigeons shitting your car, or the game experience that has some dare feeling.
    • But I didn’t. I came to the stage not ready enough, got stage fright, forgot my team mates names, and presented the game like a teenager (I felt like I was again in my Bar Mitzvah).
    • The game concept also was not clear enough because we didn’t rehearse, so when people so us shooting pigeons they didn’t understand the unique experience of the game.

That’s it. Few issues that damaged my feeling of achievement.

So what should I do next time (I’m planning on going to the Global Game Jam 2011 of course):

  1. Don’t rush the brainstorm. It is the most important phase, and the most fun. It should be managed and focused, but it is important to get to an inspiring idea.
  2. Use creative techniques. You might stumble upon a great idea just by yourself, but there’s no reason to be ashamed of using techniques to help you think.
  3. Mingle. It is, after all, an opportunity to work with people you never met before. As we saw at the presentation event – there are a lot of talented people who want to create games.
  4. Work together. Try to work as a team, together, on site. Bring your PCs. It is much more fun to work together, to see the game developed right in front of your eyes, to get feedback in real-time from all team-members, for smoother communication.
  5. Make your own sound effects. If you have the time – do it. It’s fun. It’s original. Of course, you can use free sound effects, but you will be more proud of the result.
  6. Get prepared for the presentation. Pitching your game is important. After all, you worked for it. And everybody are watching. I know it is important for me. So you better understand the strength point of the game, its uniqueness, find where it touches people and use it to deliver the message. Also if you are using team-mates to present the gameplay, better let them do it at least once before the presentation itself…

A week after I wrote these words, I can say the experience wasn’t as bad as it sounds. Still, the lessons learnt are good. Also I played Evil Pigeons with many friends since than and got great feedback. The experience is unique and fun. So I am proud after all.

Productivity Tools

~ Simon Reisman ~ 10 Comments

As promised here’s a summary of my survey. Hope it will help somebody…

Solutions

After the long survey I found few distinct categories from a feature-list perspective.

The categories are:

  1. Reminders
  2. To-do lists
  3. Classic project management tools
  4. Calendar-based task management tools
  5. Collaborative project management
  6. Total Solutions

Reminders

This is, probably, the simplest solution on the web. Actually it is so simple I was surprised when encountered it. Yet, they have some productive value. All you have to do is drop a line (a task) and an email to someone (even yours). That’s all. Until the recipient replies that the task is done, the service continues to remind about it daily by sending him an email.

I found two services here: the ultra simple Please notify me (by Paste interactive, really cool firm) and Monkey on your back. Both are easy to use, free and appealing.

Please 

Monkey on your back

To-do Lists

This is also a group of solution I was amazed anyone actually developed it. All you have is a simple list of categorized tasks. Usually all you can do is update the tasks status. In some solutions you can add a bit of info (target date, for instance).

In this category of solutions there are few free web-based solutions (Just todo list, the online CEO), but there are also not-so-free desktop solutions (todopaper, tudumo), which cost 30$. I can’t understand why to pay so much for such a simple (and local) solution. They don’t do much more than a notepad… and notepads are extremely mobile while these solutions are not…

Just to do list

The online CEO

TodoPaper

Tudomo

These two last desktop solutions are GTD (Getting Things Done) oriented. At first, I thought that GTD solutions should have a category of their own, but after surveying so many solutions I understand that GTD can be incorporated in a big range of solutions. GTD is expressed by it’s own language, pre-defined statuses and task views, but doesn’t define the set of features.

Classic Project Management

This set of solutions support the classic project management capabilities: task and milestone planning against timelines, and resources allocation for each task. Usually these solutions support some progress reporting. To name a few: Milestone Planner (web-based, free), TeamEffect (web-based, paid), Gantter (web-based, free), and GanttProject (desktop, open source).

image

image

Gantter

image

You can say these are simple and inexpensive replacements for Microsoft Project. Their main advantage is their visual presentation of the project on a timeline. You can build Gantt charts with less specific tools (like PowerPoint, Word, or Visio), but it would be much harder. Especially, if there’s a need to update the project plan data from time to time. So I can understand why it is worth paying for, though most of these solutions are free…

As these are good tool for defined projects, I would not recommend using them for daily task management. So these tools are nice, but they are not very comprehensive, at least according to my needs.

Task and Time Management

This category incorporates the to-do list with some kind of calendar option integral or external (via standard protocols like ical). The calendar allows managing tasks by date. It is good for fine-grained daily to-do list. I wouldn’t use it for a long-term project planning (no Gantt view, no resource management). Most of these solutions allow some kind of task and calendar sharing, but they don’t usually support interactive collaboration or even basic communication. Few of these solutions have some kind of document management capabilities and progress reports.

The amount of solutions that fall into this category is huge. Could it be because most people need these kind of solutions or maybe they are still simple enough to build?

Anyway, here are some applications in this category: reQall, HiTask, Remember the milk, Todolist (Desktop), Tracks, Toodledo, Vitalist, Skoach (unique approach, paid), Chandler Project (Desktop)… and many more.

Most of these solutions are free (or have good free account option) and are web-based (I mentioned if otherwise). Some solutions support the GTD methodology. Many web services in this category enhance their solution through desktop and mobile clients.

Most of these solutions are nicely done. Though it seems Remember the Milk is the most popular, I found the Toodledo solution much more effective for me (though I would redesign its GUI).

Collaborative Project Management

This is also a category many services try to solve. It’s pretty close to the Task and Time Management category with a big distinction of collaboration. These solutions have usually discussions, blogs, commenting etc. They also incorporate file management and sharing. Some of them have progress reporting generation and some kind of integration with a calendar (standard protocols) and event management.

To name a few in this category: Central Desktop, Teamwork, Manymoon, No Kahuna, Staction (nice concept, by Paste interactive), Verb, Who Does 2.0, Huddle, SantexQ, OnStage, ActionThis, ActionMethod… and many more (Nozbe, Scrybe…).

All of these solutions are web-based and have some kind of free account option (usually with limited number of active projects). I found this category very affordable – good features, good UX design… and (in many cases) free.

Total Solution

These are the heavy guns. They are comprehensive and they try to tackle the whole problem of project management: tasks, events, time, resources, and file management. They also support collaboration and include some kind of reporting mechanisms. The total solution is sometime based on 3rd party integration (which is paid separately).

Some of the solutions in this category are: Basecamp, 5pm, @task, iPlanware, Clarizen, Zoho Projects, Veo Project (Free), daptiv.

All the solutions I mentioned are web-based and are not free or have impossible limitations in their free account (except Veo Project). I admit that this was a big turn off for me (I don’t run a business I run 2 hobby projects…). Usually I didn’t have even the motivation to check their trial version. So if anyone had some experience with these tools, please add your 2 cents.

Anyway if you start a small business and you need a total solution these seem to be good candidates. By my opinion Veo project was the most affordable – great features, great user experience, and (free up to 5 projects).

Other productivity tools

Unlike the solutions mentioned above it is common enough to find services that try to address only small portion of the productivity problem.

For instance, there are many solutions for time tracking. Each solution has it’s unique approach. See: Toggl, SlimTimer, ForceDo, Tick, Klok, gCalTasks gadget. These solutions are free (at least to some extent) and usually incorporate web services and desktop versions.

Also some good solutions in the area of file management, sharing and backup can be found. These are really basic services if you want to easily collaborate with others. It seems they are usually designed for different purposes.

I’d recommend checking this list: Dropbox, iDrive, SugarSync, and Mozy. All have free accounts up to 2GB. All based on desktop clients and a remote server. All have some webapp to reach the on the web. A different solution is box.net which is totally web-based.

These are great tools to share files. I prefer the Dropbox myself.

MS Outlook Add-ins

For those who use MS Outlook (most of you don’t have a choice, right?!) there are lot’s of interesting add-ins that can help outlook become a bit more productive and even a bit more fun.

If you want to boost up the categories (tags) in Outlook to make some sense and order in your emails, you should try Categorize Plus (has free version), or Taglocity (has free version).

ClearContext is a great solution to manage all your data in Outlook. It takes a more project oriented view of the data, which is by my opinion a good idea (in the personal, free version, you’ve got fewer features).

If you want to transform Outlook into a social network you should try Xobni. It’s is a well designed application which is integrated into Outlook and nicely communicates with LinkedIn, Facebook and Skype.

Conclusion

Although I’ve mentioned here more than 50(!) products and services, it’s far from sketching the whole picture of productivity tools. There are probably much more than 100 of them… and I suspect the number is growing, because people continue to search for the best solution to become  more productive, meaning investing less effort to achieve more… meaning being lazy, right?

Anyway, if you’re interested in other productivity solutions I recommend looking at one of these sites:

And one word about the future… if Google Wave will live the promise, I presume it will spawn dozens of new collaborative productivity tools. Even now it looks very exciting. We’ll just have to wait…

Next time I will share how I mixed and matched some of these solutions to create my (free) personal management system.