If you build it, would they come?
Over the past few years it has become widely known that the “right way” to go about launching a new tech product to market , is to just ship it as soon as possible. The reason for that is to expedite learning — basically until your product meets real live users, everything is considered “guestimates”.
So this was our state of mind during the early days of Simplay. Being the analytical founders that we are, we tried adhering to these “laws of entrepreneurship” as best we could — which wasn’t easy given the technical complexity of our product — a virtual gaming desktop. In a nutshell, our basic product includes a GPU-rich server array, virtualization protocols, centralized storage, a game streaming app and a Windows/Mac client. So how could we deliver our product’s value to users without building the whole thing first?
What if could avoid building a streamer..?
We then came across this blog post, explaining how to hack a game streaming setup by using a free streaming app, and our eyes lit up. We thought — hey, we have an AWS wiz on board, let’s patch up a quick demo product and invite users to try it out. So we did just that! We patched together a Windows client that would connect the user’s local device to an AWS g2.large instance. Once the two devices were connected, and shared the same home network — we could use Steam’s in home streaming feature and voilà!
We shipped our demo product (which we then mistakenly called our “beta” product) on early January to a group of supporters who have been amazing in validating our business concepts, design and performance. The feedback was amazing — our testers really liked the product, and pretty soon we couldn’t keep up with the request for additional product invites. Even though there was still plenty to be learned, we decided we’ve learned enough to move on and start building our product.
Minimum shippable product
The next stage was a significantly harded. Building a gaming streamer is no easy task (which is also good for us, as less guys would go through the trouble of building one). The more we dug in, the more we learned — and the bigger the task got. First, we built a more robust cloud infrastructure — one that would be fit to serve hundreds users. A good systen design practice is to design for the next order of magnitude from where you’re currently at — which for us meant desining for 1,000 concurrent users. Next, we designed and built the streaming app — one that could deliver great performance. Seeing as the streaming app handles the core value we deliver to our users, we invested significant time and effort to get it just right. And now, a couple of months later, we can finally see it all coming together.
Just ship baby, just ship!
We’re glad to announce that we would be releasing the beta version of our product this coming May. We’re also glad to announce our partnership with Team Dragonpunk, in which they would provide 100 of their gamers a free month of Simplay’s beta product — to support their amazing XCOM2 co-op mod, played at top graphic settings. The team at Dragonpunk have just released this video, showcasing their superb mod played at top graphics, running solely on Simplay!
To try out our product for yourself, head over to www.simplay.io and sign up for beta access.
Follow our journey building Simplay on Twitter at Simplay
