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).

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:

1. You and the hero (Xachi) start watching the demo video

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).

3. The enemy runs off with half the video.

4. You long-scroll right to chase him, but the enemy is safe inside a bubble

5. You "splash" the bubble to pop it - but it's not enough.

6. You're prompted with a link to get a friend to help you pop the bubble.

7. Your friend joins the page and you both splash the bubble together.

8. The bubble pops and you each rescue the video and scroll back left to repair it.

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?

We know that "going viral" is hard - so what's your Monday-morning-quarterback analysis?

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/