We have our employees submit at least 1 idea a month and after 4 months we have already implemented 6 ideas resulting in a new product and other cost saving measures.
Mine is to fix some crappy MMORPG from the outside, by making a fansite. This post is structured thus: Description of the game, description of the problem, description of the solution (= my startup).
The Game
The game is french only. It's a freemium model: the game is free, but you can subscribe for 10$ a year for a couple additional services, and you can also pay 10$ each time you want to relocate your kingdom on the map (normally you can only do that by paying a fair amount of resources in-game). There are 4 "primary" races (mystics, elves, dwarves, humans) and 12 units per race, which you can unlock by building the tech tree. Each unit is of a certain type (melee or ranged or air) and may have some special abilities (ex: +33% power while defending). You can attack or defend people to gain population (and fight armies), which gives you more production power. There are 4 basic types of resources (mana, wood, ore). You choose your race when you register for a "round" (length: 6 months). There's a tick every hour where for example, fights and the moving of armies are calculated. People can group in alliances of up to 30. You have some amount of population that you can assign tasks to (gather each type of resource or build buildings).
The Problem
1. The game shows all kinds of information in one and only one way, and sometimes you even have to cross-reference with the manual of the game that's in a separate section (and the manual sucks, too). You even have to make some quite tedious and boring work to know how much your army is worth. Overall, there's not enough flexibility of information display. You often find yourself "between" two pages, for example if you want to know what your stuff is worth in resources (buildings + army), and many, many other "cross-page-concerns". The game, overall, only presents a page for resource management, one for building management, one for army management, etc. That's just not enough.
People are so desperate to have the slightest idea of the situation in the game that they rely on fucking crappy and boring Excel sheets to make some calculations. Data entry is painful and it doesn't give much information and it displays it in a crude way.
2. That game is pretty stagnating, there hasn't been much development in the last 5 years, and it shows because the number of players has declined to record lows, and the situation is getting worse, overall. I think the makers of the game are to blame. They're just incredibly lazy, they won't fix their stuff, their code is obviously a big unmaintanable PHP mess (they won't refactor), for example at some point I discovered that 2 different pages with some information that should have been exactly the same, and hence should have been managed by the same module in the code, displayed the information differently (so they were coded separately after all). Also they use 1998-style HTML, not only do they not use CSS correctly and they use table-style layout, but their HTML is not semantic at all. It even has lots of font tags...
They won't honor the most reasonable and easiest of feature requests/bug fixes. For example, right now when you send a message to someone via the internal messaging system, you don't get a copy of what you sent. It's been this way for YEARS, even if there has been REPETITIVE requests by MULTIPLE people to fix this fatal flaw. Their response to that kind of justified whining is that there's always a workaround. For example, you could use some exterior means (ex: Word) to save your outgoing messages before you save them. And if the proposal is to put a new link to go directly to a related page in 1 click instead of navigating through 2 other pages first, then their "solution" is to... make those extra clicks!
3. They have some messed up mentality, they won't automate anything because they want their players to be forced to play the game longer unnecessarily. There's also an elitist attitude, it's so hard to follow the game that those who dedicate massive amounts of time to it feel re...
RescueTime! (Okay, I'm biased)
Versionate has really grown on me.
Wufoo is pretty neat, though I think the inability to have ranking questions ("rank the following features") is pretty painful.
Joost is pretty cool.
There are a couple of cool YC08 companies that I'm jazzed about but I can't talk about 'em yet!
It may be a nice satirical tagline, but it's by no means a good tagline according to Steven Krug (http://www.sensible.com/). I'm by no means a Steven Krug fanboy, but if you've read "Don't Make Me Think" you'll kringe at "Humanity's Only Hope." It doesn't tell you anything about what the site is or does.
Of course you could go a step further like my site and many others and pick a domain that leaves nothing to the imagination. e.g. ratemyprofessors.com or ratemystudentrental.com or bookdealfinder.com
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[ 1.7 ms ] story [ 67.5 ms ] threadWe have our employees submit at least 1 idea a month and after 4 months we have already implemented 6 ideas resulting in a new product and other cost saving measures.
(Should be a good answer for most of us)
The Game The game is french only. It's a freemium model: the game is free, but you can subscribe for 10$ a year for a couple additional services, and you can also pay 10$ each time you want to relocate your kingdom on the map (normally you can only do that by paying a fair amount of resources in-game). There are 4 "primary" races (mystics, elves, dwarves, humans) and 12 units per race, which you can unlock by building the tech tree. Each unit is of a certain type (melee or ranged or air) and may have some special abilities (ex: +33% power while defending). You can attack or defend people to gain population (and fight armies), which gives you more production power. There are 4 basic types of resources (mana, wood, ore). You choose your race when you register for a "round" (length: 6 months). There's a tick every hour where for example, fights and the moving of armies are calculated. People can group in alliances of up to 30. You have some amount of population that you can assign tasks to (gather each type of resource or build buildings).
The Problem 1. The game shows all kinds of information in one and only one way, and sometimes you even have to cross-reference with the manual of the game that's in a separate section (and the manual sucks, too). You even have to make some quite tedious and boring work to know how much your army is worth. Overall, there's not enough flexibility of information display. You often find yourself "between" two pages, for example if you want to know what your stuff is worth in resources (buildings + army), and many, many other "cross-page-concerns". The game, overall, only presents a page for resource management, one for building management, one for army management, etc. That's just not enough.
People are so desperate to have the slightest idea of the situation in the game that they rely on fucking crappy and boring Excel sheets to make some calculations. Data entry is painful and it doesn't give much information and it displays it in a crude way.
2. That game is pretty stagnating, there hasn't been much development in the last 5 years, and it shows because the number of players has declined to record lows, and the situation is getting worse, overall. I think the makers of the game are to blame. They're just incredibly lazy, they won't fix their stuff, their code is obviously a big unmaintanable PHP mess (they won't refactor), for example at some point I discovered that 2 different pages with some information that should have been exactly the same, and hence should have been managed by the same module in the code, displayed the information differently (so they were coded separately after all). Also they use 1998-style HTML, not only do they not use CSS correctly and they use table-style layout, but their HTML is not semantic at all. It even has lots of font tags...
They won't honor the most reasonable and easiest of feature requests/bug fixes. For example, right now when you send a message to someone via the internal messaging system, you don't get a copy of what you sent. It's been this way for YEARS, even if there has been REPETITIVE requests by MULTIPLE people to fix this fatal flaw. Their response to that kind of justified whining is that there's always a workaround. For example, you could use some exterior means (ex: Word) to save your outgoing messages before you save them. And if the proposal is to put a new link to go directly to a related page in 1 click instead of navigating through 2 other pages first, then their "solution" is to... make those extra clicks!
3. They have some messed up mentality, they won't automate anything because they want their players to be forced to play the game longer unnecessarily. There's also an elitist attitude, it's so hard to follow the game that those who dedicate massive amounts of time to it feel re...
RescueTime! (Okay, I'm biased) Versionate has really grown on me. Wufoo is pretty neat, though I think the inability to have ranking questions ("rank the following features") is pretty painful. Joost is pretty cool.
There are a couple of cool YC08 companies that I'm jazzed about but I can't talk about 'em yet!
I guess greed and innovation don't match very well.