groupwrite.io week 9 — the chicken & egg problem

Ron Gross

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Feb 25, 2017 · 2 min read

So, we launched our alpha last week! Yay!

Now what?

We don’t have any users yet, which is exactly as expected. The MVP of GroupWrite is hard to define. Because we are developing a multiplayer-only game, we run into a chicken-and-egg problem: In order to provide value to a user (user has fun and writes a good story), we have to have other users already in the system for him to play with. It’s a great system once it picks up, but there is a large gap from “enough features to be fun” to “actual users are in the system, so user n+1 will have fun as well”.

How do we bridge that gap?

These are the things we’ll be focusing on in order to reach actual users:

1. Improve the product “enough” to achieve positive retention and engagement.
2. Focus our launch marketing efforts on a particular time — get lots of players to use the product at one particular instant, as a way to bootstrap our player base.

We still need to plan #1 and #2 in more details. We have some ideas, which we’ll elaborate on here later. For now, here are some things we’ve accomplished over the last week:

1. Onboarding our new team member, Guy Warburg. Guy is a fellow burner who is joining Yaron and me in the core dev team. His starter task was adding Terms of Usage (important because players contribute content that we need to use), and he’s now working on adding Titles to the stories.
2. Added Mongo DB for persisting stories. Despite originally thinking to use mysql, I decided to go mongo because A) Lots of free hosting from mlabs, and B) It’s time I finally learn how to Mongo.
3. Persisted written stories, and expose an API call to get them (no page that shows them yet)
4. Added encrypted config using config-leaf (let’s not store our secrets in an open source repository!)
5. Added an option to End stories! Finally, games don’t go on forever, but rather will end when a player suggests “The End” and that suggestion is chosen.
6. Started working on a “submit button” for suggestions — we don’t want a player’s half-formed line to be selected to continue the story before he signaled that he’s done with it!

I’ll finish by saying this is scary. The gap between “just writing code” to having a player people actually play looks daunting sometimes. It’s the gap between Zero and One, and takes persistence and creativity to bridge.

We’re on the motherfucker.