

Ask HN: What's wrong with our Purple Cow promo page? - davidcann

While our iOS game was in review for a week, we built (what we thought was) a Purple Cow page that would spread through twitter and techies.  The app went live over the weekend and we released the page on Tuesday (and of course contacted many people/blogs/twitter).<p>We were inspired by benthebodyguard.com and their use of long-scrolling and fun storyline.  We intended to take it to the next level by using WebSockets/Socket.io/Node.js to make it a multiplayer-page.  Our storyline:<p>1. You and the hero (Xachi) start watching the demo video<p>2. An enemy comes in and breaks the video into 2 pieces (using -webkit-mask-box-image for jagged edge and fallback to overflow:none for other browsers).<p>3. The enemy runs off with half the video.<p>4. You long-scroll right to chase him, but the enemy is safe inside a bubble<p>5. You "splash" the bubble to pop it - but it's not enough.<p>6. You're prompted with a link to get a friend to help you pop the bubble.<p>7. Your friend joins the page and you both splash the bubble together.<p>8. The bubble pops and you each rescue the video and scroll back left to repair it.<p>We got some "wow how can you do that??" comments from the first people we showed, but it hasn't spread.  Is it too complicated?  Not well-designed enough?  Not enough wow factor?<p>We know that "going viral" is hard - so what's your Monday-morning-quarterback analysis?<p>http://xachipet.com/command/
======
retroafroman
That is a pretty cool idea, but because it's not really been done before, I
would imagine that it's hard to get people to follow along with actually
getting a friend to help out. I didn't want to read the whole page of
instructions here, so I just clicked the link and tried to figure out, but it
wasn't very obvious, and I ended up coming back to try and read what was
supposed to happen. It might be too complicated. It would be even better if
you could forgo finding a collaborator and just go on alone. I know that seems
like it would lead to less 'virality' but I personally think that's actually a
big bother to a lot of people. If they go on alone, and enjoy it, then they'll
start telling others.

------
davidcann
<http://xachipet.com/command/>

