A New Journey — why we pivoted, and where we’re going from here
“A pivot is a change in strategy without a change in vision”. Eric Ries.
In his must-read book, “The Lean Stratup”, Eric Ries makes the analogy between running a startup and driving a car. While driving a car, the driver uses the steering wheel to either make small adjustments (maintaining the same course), or a sharp U-turn (plotting a new course). Similarly, startup life is full of hypothesis and tests that proves or refutes them, making small adjustments along the way and big strategic changes when those are called for.
From the book:
Throughout the process of driving, you always have a clear idea of where you’re going. If you’re commuting to work, you don’t give up because there’s a detour in the road or you made a wrong turn. You remain thoroughly focused on getting to your destination.
Startups also have a true north, a destination in mind: creating a thriving and world-changing business. I call that a startup’s vision. To achieve that vision, startups employ a strategy, which includes a business model, a product road map, a point of view about partners and competitors, and ideas about who the customer will be. The product is the end result of this strategy.
Products change constantly through the process of optimization, what I call tuning the engine. Less frequently, the strategy may have to change (called a pivot). However, the overarching vision rarely changes. Entrepreneurs are committed to seeing the startup through to that destination. Every setback is an opportunity for learning how to get where they want to go.
We’ve been working on Simplay’s Cloud Gaming PC concept for a while now, making small adjustments along the way and learning a lot. During that time we were able to greatly improve our streaming technology, double the graphic power of our Simplay PCs and substantially reduce costs and price. We’ve put in a fair share of work and sweat, and achieved some good results. And although progress has been made, the time has come to make a U-turn.
Grow fast or die slow
Most startup prioritize growth above everything else. The reason for that is that time (and not money) is the most important resource in a startup’s life. Some companies can do fine without focusing on growth, but that’s these are usually the exception to the rule. A fast growing company is like a tornado, carrying everything in it’s path — investors, capital, employees, PR. In contrast, a slow growing (or stagnate) company is like the walking dead — not quite dead yet, but not exactly alive and kicking either. In fact, it is said that startups don’t actually die, they just sort of stop trying and dissolve. It’s either grow fast or die slow.
The truth is that Simplay wasn’t growing fast enough. It wasn’t for lack of trying, or lack of demand — but due to difficulties to scale up our operation. The heavy costs of GPU servers made it difficult for us to bear the expenses of expanding our infrastructure to serve more users.
To put it differently, I’ll use Paul Graham’s words:
For a company to grow really big, it must (a) make something lots of people want, and (b) reach and serve all those people. Barbershops are doing fine in the (a) department. Almost everyone needs their hair cut. The problem for a barbershop, as for any retail establishment, is (b). A barbershop serves customers in person, and few will travel far for a haircut. And even if they did the barbershop couldn’t accomodate them.
Writing software is a great way to solve (b), but you can still end up constrained in (a).
You see, even though Simplay is a software company, our particular business model introduced barbershop-like challenges of scaling growth. And since we have no particular interest in dying slowly while we watch our vision goes to waste, it was time to make some hard decisions.
From the book:
(it comes down to ) a seemingly simple question: are we making sufficient progress to believe that our original strategic hypothesis is correct, or do we need to make a major change? That change is called a pivot: a structured course correction designed to test a new fundamental hypothesis about the product, strategy, and engine of growth.
A Structured Course Correction
We went back to the drawing board. When it comes to pivots, one thing rarely changes as Ries puts it — our overarching vision. Our vision has always been to make gaming available to everyone. We believe every gamer should be able to enjoy gaming to its fullest on any device, without relying on expensive hardware or platform constraints. And no matter what changes we end up doing in our strategy or products, that vision should stay steady and stable — our north star.
We searched for a new path that leads to the same vision, and discovered a growing need among game devs. Cloud gaming is on the rise, with major players as Microsoft, EA and Ubisoft making moves to offer their games in hardware agnostic delivery methods (notably streaming). But medium-sized and indie devs don’t have the resources to offer their titles to the growing audience of gamers who don’t own dedicated gaming hardware.
For the past weeks we’ve been working with game devs like these, designing a new set of tools to build device-agnostic versions of their games. We’re confident it would make high-end cloud gaming a viable solution for game devs, and we’re happy to finally announce it today. We call it Simplay’s Cloud Gaming SDK — a set of tools for game devs to build and publish cloud-streamed versions of their games.
The Best Community We Could Ever Hoped For
The B2C (business to consumer) part of Simplay’s life is soon ending. In late September we’ll shut down our Simplay PCs service. It’s been an amazing ride, and we’d like to thank the amazing community of gamers and cloud gaming advocates that gave our product a shot. As a beta product it’s been a bumpy road — with some downtimes and some ‘server full’ queues, but you guys stuck with us and supported us all the way. And there are now thousands of you, which is humbling and flattering all at once.
We couldn’t have gotten to where we are today if it wasn’t for your tremendous support. We’re fortunate to have had this great community of kind and helpful gamers (which is usually a myth). We love you all, and are working with other similar service providers to find an alternative service for you to use once Simplay shuts down.
One Chapter Ends, Another Begins
As this new chapter in Simplay’s life begins, we’re super fired up to blow it off the park. The tech is amazing, and we can see how much value it delivers to game devs. We’re absolutely certain that in 3–5 years device-agnostic games and game streaming would be ubiquitous. And we’re now at the perfect place to steer it in that direction.
To any game devs or publisher out there who wants to make their graphically demanding games available to any gamer (and double their audience in the process) — we’d love working with you! Here’s where you can learn more on our tech and business model.
A new journey now begins.
