3 ms·

Ask HN: Review my startup - HTML5 game creator

8 points by AshleysBrain 15y ago

Hi HN, 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. Based in London, UK. Finding it fairly hard to get noticed, I guess because we're outside the valley. Site: www.scirra.com Some HTML5 demos made in our tool (all pure HTML5, not a whiff of Flash): http://www.scirra.com/construct2/demos This is my first startup. Any comments from the pros on what we're doing right or wrong would be much appreciated :) Thanks!

ddrmaxgt37 15y ago
clickable: http://www.scirra.com http://www.scirra.com
glimcat 15y ago
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/ 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.
- TomGullen 15y ago
  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.
ig1 15y ago
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)
- TomGullen 15y ago
  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 15y ago
    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.
    - TomGullen 15y ago
      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.

8 points by AshleysBrain 15y ago

ddrmaxgt37 15y ago

clickable: http://www.scirra.com http://www.scirra.com

glimcat 15y ago

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/ 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.

TomGullen 15y ago
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.

ig1 15y ago

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)

TomGullen 15y ago
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 15y ago
  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.
  - TomGullen 15y ago
    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.