SaveDave-The Game
INVESTEUR
From 0 to 100 at Startup Weekend 2016
Pitching
For most people the week ends somewhere around 18:00 pm on a Friday. As an entrepreneur I am not very often able to keep to that planning. Whenever it is necessary duty calls. Startup Weekend is a whole different ballgame however, also for guys like me. Me and my team worked for about 30 hours straight between Friday night 20:00 and Sunday afternoon 16:00. And that excludes travelling, eating, toilet visits and things like that.
I pitched my idea for developing an online game to help solve financial illiteracy in Singapore Friday night together with about 40 other enthusiasts with a whole range of cool, smart and even outrageous ideas. I pitched before, but never really get used to it. Nervous as always I used my 60 seconds and with success fortunately. When the participants got to vote for their favorite ideas mine came in first with 25 votes. Pretty cool to start like that.
The dream team
Nice to win the popularity contest, but getting a team together is off course the main thing for being able to realize something good. I learned from the Startup Weekend 2015 edition there is much to learn from anybody so the background of your team members is not that important. I went for motivation and welcomed in everybody on a first come, first serve basis.
That might not be the wisest way of getting my team for INVESTEUR together, but for Startup Weekend it was golden. What a team we wound up with! During Startup Weekend participants are usually divided in three categories. Designers know how you can make something in such a way that customers will actually be willing to buy or use it. Developers make whatever you come up with work, often IT. And the hustlers like myself, we try to come up with the business plan or focus on marketing. Within these stereotype participant groups we had Franz and Romaric as the tech brains, Weiren as our games developer/designer crossover genius, Marco as the design master and Vanessa and myself handling validation, presentation and coördination.
The game
Idea? Check. Team? Check. Game? Oeff. When you start thinking about how to make learning about financial products a fun game it becomes quickly difficult we learned. Games are played because they are fun. So it needs to look good, quick and preferably not to serious. Which is kind of the opposite of teaching something. At some point we had at least 20 game ideas, about 10 business idea versions and 10 financial products to explain. Try bringing that together. We did. At some point we just picked a way we thought was feasible to develop over the weekend and would get the point across. SaveDave was born.
The game is very simple. In order to live long you need to plan how you spend your money with keeping in mind that you will need some savings on the side which will help you through tough times or enable you to buy bigger purchases like a car or house. However, only saving money is not the way to go. You only live once, so it is important to enjoy it. Dave needs to spend for the travels he likes or get the clothes he wants. The learning point of the game is finding the right balance. And if you don’t? Well, like in real life, Dave dies……
Development and presentation
Once we had the setup and flow we went like clock work. Everybody had their own thing they were good at so we checked in for status every 2 hours or so, see if anyone needed extra help, discuss what came up and back to work.
The result kind of speaks for itself I think. It is not a full fledged game yet, but the idea is there and even more impressive, it really works. No mockup or slides, but a real working game in less than 2 days!
The business case was a different issue unfortunately. After a lot of options and discussion we decided late in the afternoon on Sunday to go for a white labeled version we could sell to banks or governments to teach people about financial products or to use for product testing. It didn’t fly with the jury. Although we received a lot of compliments from people in the room about the presentation and our game, the jury wasn’t convinced. And quite honestly we weren’t really sold on the business part of the idea ourselves. We needed to get a presentation done and ran out of better ideas. But who cares. I had an amazing weekend, I worked with some of the most talented people I met here in Singapore, we had a lot of fun and although the monetization might be an issue, I think SaveDave really is a way of improving financial literacy in Singapore and other parts of the world which was my goal from the start.
SaveDave to the future!
The great thing about having smart and talented people in your team is that you can do a lot and have a fun weekend. The downside is they aren’t unemployed nor out of things to do. So for the moment we won’t be proceeding to develop SaveDave due to other obligations. I intend to keep SaveDave archived till either INVESTEUR starts generating enough revenue to justify investments in SaveDave or till I meet people who are willing to put in energy or money to take it further. So keep liking https://www.facebook.com/savedavegame/?fref=ts and check out the demo at www.savedave.co and let us know what you think.
Robin Teurlings, founder INVESTEUR