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I just came back from a very interesting meeting with 2 of the founders of @minshdotnet. Minsh is a game like virtual fish world formed by your tweets. A fantastic concept that has the potential of significantly reducing the text based burn out that happens for many tweeters by making your twitter life visual, fun, and playful.

The beta version for Minsh launched a few months ago and the founders have since been refining the concept. As more and more feedback flooded in they realized that they need a more structured approach to testing. When I met with them I put my “I love Minsh fish” hat aside and put my business hat on. I gave them an hour of coaching that will help them begin figuring out how to test, with customer development and monetization in mind.

Many more startups reach out to me for similar feedback then I have for so here is a quick blog post with some ideas that will get you started. I am illustrating the coaching I gave to Minsh. Keep in mind that this was the result of a conversation that involved building on their answers and thinking, and is therefore analogous to peeling of the layers of an onion.

Who are you asking for feedback?

Many entreprenuers in Silicon Valley as well as visitors from elsewhere are fascinated by the level of technological sophistication of people here.  This makes founders think that  its best to conduct informal customer meetings and gain product feedback from sophisticated tech users.

The reality is that hard core techies are generally power users who are very tough to keep happy. If your business is based on monetizing small groups of very demanding users trying to do this would be fine. But if your business model relies on mass adoption, the sophistication of the SV user will make you create a large number of  features that are not needed and too complicated for a less sophisticated user elsewhere in the world.

The ultimate question goes back to who is your target market and is that market the best one for you, your team, and your offering?

How do I know who is the best target market

You have to start with the end in mind. Imagine:

here we are in the future, 1 year from now or however long before you need to monetize. You have just the right number of users and those users are monetizing. What does this look like? How many users do you have? How are you monetizing them? What do they like about your product?

Chances are you had a hard time imagining what this looked like.

Before you panic, lets take a step back. Here are a series of questions you should start exploring, as you do so you will start beginning to form plans of action.

1. who are all the possible customers?
2. how can you segment them? Geography, usage, behavior, mindset, sophistication, penetration of the technology you are relying on (in Minsh’s case twitter)?
3. which of these segmentations has a meaningful impact on your game design and monetization plans?
4. what are some existing business models out there i.e. how do others make money? Look at competitive, complementary, and distant but related products. In the case of Minsh this includes European virtual worlds and Asian pay for feature games.
5. Can you use any of these business models? What is the potential payout? What would you have to modify to use any of them successfully?

Remember all of this may or may not apply to you depending on where your game concept is. The advice was specific to Minsh since I have been following them for a while. But hopefully this will serve to get you started. And if you hit a hard spot contact me and we can set up some structure for you to get more customized coaching from me.

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