

Ask HN: Review my startup - HTML5 game creator - AshleysBrain

Hi HN,<p>I'm 23, just graduated from uni, not on YC.  I've been working on a HTML5 canvas game creator for Windows (a desktop app).  There's no programming - we have a click-and-drag event system, so in theory anyone can make games (which has been said before, but we reckon we've nailed it).  Co-founding with my brother who did the website.<p>Based in London, UK.  Finding it fairly hard to get noticed, I guess because we're outside the valley.<p>Site: www.scirra.com<p>Some HTML5 demos made in our tool (all pure HTML5, not a whiff of Flash): http://www.scirra.com/construct2/demos<p>This is my first startup.  Any comments from the pros on what we're doing right or wrong would be much appreciated :)  Thanks!
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glimcat
I got bored before being able to find anything that adequately illustrated the
workflow.

The site's visual design is nice, but the content for a site promoting a tool
should focus on communicating the experience and utility of the tool.

Compare to the site for Scratch.

<http://scratch.mit.edu/>

While the site is very cluttered and not nearly as pretty as yours, one of the
first things you see is an illustration of their visual block programming
interface.

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TomGullen
Hi Glimcat, thanks for the comment we appreciate it! I think that's a fair
comment I'll have a think about it!

The front art is great in my opinion but you're right that it doesn't
communicate the product directly, but I do think it does communicate the
experience and utility of the tool.

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ig1
How are you trying to promote it at the moment ?

Also what's your current conversion funnel look like (how many people come to
your site, how many people download it, and how many people publish a game) ?

(btw if you're going to the HN London meetup on Thursday feel free to come and
say hi)

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TomGullen
We are admittedly rather new to promotion although we do have a few ideas,
we're definitely white hat SEO so we're investing a lot of time contacting
relevant sites and people but it's extremely slow and time consuming!

We have a very small budget to advertise but we are going to run some small
highly targeted campaigns on Adwords, Reddit and a couple of other sites to
see how they go (closely monitoring them though).

If you have any ideas we're all ears! It's an exciting time for us!

~~~
ig1
I wouldn't recommend adwords, they're not cost effective for what you're
doing. Reddit's probably worth a shot, especially at the "we're looking for
feedback" stage.

You should also be A/B testing everything, from your front page to the emails
you're sending out to bloggers. Test radically different messages and see how
they work out, try offering free licences for bloggers to give away.

Comparing yourself to other products is an approach that works well, "Ever
wanted Shoot'Em-Up Construction Kit for the web ?", etc. might work well.

Also don't be afraid to look at what competing products are doing to promote
themselves and doing the same things.

You should get feedback from your users as well, consider installing something
like kissinsight and emailing users a few weeks after they've downloaded it to
get feedback. Have you looked at the analytics for your search box to see what
people are looking for ?

Something else you might want to consider is why not remove the technical
limits from the free version but instead just insert a promo for your tool
into the game ("this game was constructed with x") and include a link back to
your homepage. Lack of publicity is more likely to kill you than anything
else, if someone writes a popular game with the free version then the
promotional value of that is worth far more than the $30 you'd get from a
sale.

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TomGullen
Thanks for the advice! We have ~£100 of free AdWords credit so might as well
use it, see if we can get any value out of it. I'm curious why you think
Adwords isn't cost effective though? I've heard this before and find it hard
to believe (but then again my experience of running ad campaigns is minimal!)

We have identified a couple of techniques our competitors used effectively and
fairly cheaply so are going to explore those as well. Search was one of our
weaknesses, but I did a lot of reading on SEO and think I applied it pretty
well (technical aspect), we're starting to see results from that but it's a
slow process :)

We did explore a lot of options about technical limits/nag screens etc, we are
going to be tweaking it and seeing what works and what doesn't! A/B testing
landing pages is a great idea. I am keeping close track of it on Analytics and
making small tweaks here and there constantly, we got the bounce rate from
~50% down to 25% which is good.

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ig1
Back of an envelope calculation, assuming a CPC of $1 and a conversion rate of
1% (say 10% download your app and 10% of those decide to purchase) it'll cost
you $100 to make a $30 sale. You can plug your actual numbers in to give you a
better estimate though.

For search have a look at the data, use google adwords tool to figure out how
many people search for the terms you're targeting and check out how
competitive those terms are. Remember even the top ranked search term only
gets 20% of the clicks from that search and it drops rapidly as you go down
the page.

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ddrmaxgt37
clickable: <http://www.scirra.com>

