I’d like to have a way of sharing my concrete plans with ya’ll. This post is an attempt to explore a way to do that. Please let me know whether you did or didn’t find it interesting.
Goal
I want to jump Shmeppy’s userbase about 1 order of magnitude. Currently there’s about 30 people using Shmeppy off-and-on for actual games. I’d like to get somewhere in the 100-500 range.
Implementation
My straightforward plan to achieve my goal is: advertise to potential users. In order to make sure that people who engage with my ads turn into users, a number of product changes are also required.
High level tasks
- Settle on a landing page for the launch.
- Create a tutorial/onboarding experience.
- Determine final feature-set for launch.
- Ensure I’m able to extract the metrics I need from my logs.
- Negotiate and pay for any paid advertisement slots I need.
- Ensure Shmeppy can handle a reasonable load of users.
- Figure out ToS and privacy policy stuff.
Status
(1) is completely done, I have a landing page I’m happy with (go to shmeppy.com while logged out to see it).
(5) is essentially done. I have not actually booked the slots, but they are scoped out and negotiated so I can pull the trigger whenever.
The rest are in various stages of done-ness:
- (2) still has a small task outstanding (I am going to add some arrows to the interface when you first jump into a game).
- (3) has only one feature under consideration: allowing logged-out users to join games as players. It’s an awesome feature that will likely change the entire perception people have of Shmeppy, so I might stall the launch to get it in.
- (4) is half-done. One of the metrics I need can be extracted (how many users have used Shmeppy for an actual game, and when). Another metric is not yet done: how many users make it through the “landing page -> sign up -> play an actual game” flow and where do they drop out.
- (6) is in an unknown state. I don’t know Shmeppy’s current maximum load. I think it’s roughly there though.
- (7) is the only piece that hasn’t had any work done towads it.
Higher-level Timeline
I’m hoping this launch will be over with and Shmeppy will be at-least making its way to achieving the goal by the end of May (ie: the ads are running, but maybe users are trickling in slowly).
At that point I’ll be once again focusing on improving the in-game experience. My first major goal there, I think, will be allowing users to upload map images. The UI additions this feature will need will help pave the way for other improvements like variously-sized tokens and a configurable measuring tool.
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