We launched on the 14th of October what we call eRepublik V1 (our public version) as opposed to eRepublik beta (that was invite only) on the 14^th of October. 

This was a very hard pre-launch and so was our public launch on the 21^st of October. Things are just starting to get back to a manageable level (ie: the 21 people in the team get to sleep 6 hours instead of 3 hours per night), so I can write a few lines about it to share some of the stuff that happened and some learnings. 

The first learning is that I agree with my co-founder George, we launched V1 to soon but it was the right thing to do.

I won´t go into the reason of why it was the right thing to do and all the other very good things that we did because I’m of the school that you learn more from your mistakes so I guess its more useful to share those.

eRepublik beta had been going just under one year (since we launched a simpler version of it on November 20^th 2007) and although we had kept it “invite only” to manage its growth, it quickly had become much bigger than we expected. eRepublik beta wasn’t really built to scale, since it was a simple prototype to get a proof of concept, gather feedback from the community for what the fist step of the real product V1 should be like and start building the new world. 

Just to throw a few stats, we had 35,000 citizens that visited the site daily with their inventory of virtual goods and a history of achievement and actions going back months, over 3500 companies, 13,000 newspapers and over 150,000 pages of content created by the community in the beta.

All of that had to be transferred to a new platform seamlessly. Needless to say we had more than a few hick ups in the transfer with many users loosing part of their inventory temporarily along the way. We also had many bugs we had not spotted or thought we had fixed in the testing phase that appeared when we opened up V1 to the 35,000 citizens.  This, along with server fine tuning issues that meant that the site performed poorly for a few days made for a few hairy moments, where again most of the team was to use my favourite expression, “running around like headless chickens” just to fix stuff.

Now for those of you of have been involved in Internet start ups for a while, you know all of this is pretty normal and that although it’s possible to minimize the above issues it is virtually impossible to completely avoid them.

The thing is I believe that no matter how much planning you do, the shit is always going to hit the fan and then it’s a question of how quickly and efficiently you can clean it up.

But it’s a little more complicated when you are dealing with a community, as we are with eRepublik and there are clearly a few things that we underestimated or could have done better.

1)      We should have communicated more: We really value our community, we know how important all the citizens are. We are building this new world for them and with them. We are providing the vision, concept, basic tools and functionality of eRepublik, but they are the ones creating the content and showing us what stuff they want and in many cases how to improve the game. In certain cases with external sites or our upcoming API, eRepublik citizens are even building themselves improvements to the game. So what we did is, 2 months before the launch we started telling them what was going to be in V1 so they could prepare. One week before the pre-launch we let 100 citizens from the community test V1 for final de-bugging and extra feedback. A lot of the 100 people in the test phase wanted us to change major things there and then and delay the pre-launch.

a.       With our testers: Our first mistake was that we did not explain to testers well enough why it wasn´t possible to delay the pre-launch. We were to busy fixing and correcting things based on their feedback. It wasn’t possible to delay it, because we actually needed to get V1 out so the team could concentrate 100% on improving it, rather than manage 2 sites at the same time (V1 and Beta). Plus we had other external pressures I can´t talk about here.

b.      With enough resources: When we did pre-launch and the problems 100 people can find became the problems that 35,000 people can find, we went into fixing overdrive. This was the right thing to do and I want to thank again the team for all the sleepless nights. The community saw how quickly we were fixing things and the direct feedback we got was priceless, a normal game would have probably needed months of testing to gather the information we gathered in days. But we waited to much time before acknowledging the community feedback in a coherent manner and letting them know exactly what we were doing and fixing. As a result many citizens made it very clear they were unhappy with that. When you do such a major shift one should expect that there will be a crisis and a crisis communication plan with the appropriate resources is therefore in order. We are now communicating with the community on a daily basis about the transition and things are much better, still we should have started earlier and planned this better.

2)      We underestimated how attached the community was to the eRepublik beta version: V1 had to be a big step from beta technically and functionality wise. It didn’t necessarily have to be from a design and UI perspective. In order to prepare for the mobile version “anywhere any device” and accommodate some of the necessary new feature we did need to make a few major changes and in the process broke a few rules we shouldn’t have.

a.       Fact there is nothing better than live fine tuning doesn’t mean you can do away with focus groups: Our main design objective was to make V1 easier to understand and simpler in appearance (although in reality there is a lot more stuff hidden under the hood). I know it will be much better when we fine tune it and we did the right thing medium to long term.  We had 10 months of fine tuning with beta so clearly our first throw of V1 wasn’t going to be as good from day 1. Still more use of focus groups would have helped iron out some UI and design issues that we should not have had in pre-launch, although that is always a trade off with time.

b.      Change as little as possible in appearance: Also specialists keep telling you that you should always try to minimize visual changes and UI to something people already like and use. I always had that advice at the back of my head but clearly should have made that point clearer with the team. Also we were struggling with how to make the experience familiar to old users as well as easy for new ones (something beta was clearly not). With insight we went too far in the design changes and will now have to work based on our community feedback and the help of focus groups on the design not just for UI but also for atmosphere. There a few no brainers of course that we already implemented and others that we are still working on. 

c.       Only do the “revolution” if its your only option and if it is (it was in our case) try not to break what ain´t broken: Good news is that the community is getting familiar with the new design, we are improving it quickly and from now on its all about natural evolution rather than revolution in that respect. There were also some modules that we removed (mayors being the biggest one) because we felt we had not designed them well in beta and they were not used much, but then realised that people that did use them cared deeply about it. We felt the right solution there is not to just give them the same thing again but to give something that is really well designed and useful so it works for them but also for many more. Still in the first instance of V1 we could have just left it there until we had something better. We broke something that did not need to be broken.

3)      Communities don’t like surprises: 90% of what came in V1 we shared with the community and was welcomed because it is things that the community had requested. The other 10% we kept secret. We didn’t keep it under wraps to protect any trade secrets (although some of it is quite innovative), the main reason we did that is we felt we had found the solution to one of the main downsides of the beta and wanted to surprise everyone with it.

a.       The Trivia: The main secret we kept was the fact that we gave the option of replacing all “repetitive tasks” such as clicking a button for working with a trivia (that you can skip) that consist of five questions that are contextual to what you are doing in the game and give a skill based bonus to the default result of your action depending on how many questions you answer correctly and how quickly you do it. Now this does replace a repetitive tasks with something that can be fun (as long as the questions are good and contextual, not always the case right now), requires skill and can also help you learn something new. So that is good. Also if you look at the market share of online games, a whopping 50% is online puzzles and Trivia so this seemed a good way to make eRepublik interesting to a wider audience. Finally, 90% of eRepublik users are male, it’s a strategy game after all but we are keen and making it more friendly to women and we know that this goes through more social & personalisation options and that Trivia is extremely popular for women. What happened is that a big majority of new users love the concept of the trivia, although they feel and I agree with them that it needs work and we need to improve considerably the quality of the questions, something we have already started to do. On the other hand some of our most influential citizens just hated it and basically told us to take it off or they were walking out. Now as most people who manage communities know although a lot of “hard core” users can often use this as a tactic to pressure you in going the direction they want but not really mean it and not having really the support of the majority of users, this is scary. In the end we simply couldn’t scrap the trivia, it’s just to ingrained in the gameplay (plus the first step of something larger) and although very few users actually walked out (our user base growth actually accelerated) I’m sorry for the ones who did. We should not have surprised them with this because their problem was not really just with the trivia concept, they were mad because we did not tell them about it in time for them to give us the feedback of what was wrong with it so we could make it better (ie: for example implementing it in the new war module in a way that did not reduce player vs player confrontations). We are now getting that feedback and improving it progressively plus looking at were it should really be. But had we avoided the surprise, we would probably not have lost some important users and launched a better product.

4)      Don´t call it V1: MMOG’s such as eRepublik have numerous advantages over classical games that you buy in a box or download. One of the main advantages is that they really are internet web sites and as such they can be updated, improved on, fine tuned almost on a daily basis as long as your code is clean and you have good processes. This means that your product is always a work in progress and not a finished product. Of course there comes a moment when you can’t call it beta anymore and your platform must be free of large bugs but that is clearly not right after a major new platform launch.  There is a lot more stuff that we learned but this is the stuff I think might be most useful to others and I hope sharing this will help you avoid repeating some of the mistakes we did.

In any case I wanted to give another big thanks to the team and our citizens because in spite of all this we still managed to fix most of the issues and we now have close to 60,000 active citizens in eRepublik almost double the number we had 1 month ago as well as a very clear vision of what we need to do going forward.

The past weeks have been really crazy at eRepublik with the all team working round the clock not just on pre-launching our public version (more about that later) but also behind the scenes. One of the results is that I simply haven’t had the time to update the blog on stuff that has happened. On a nice train ride now so not good for vblogging (probably the one thing that is more annoying on a train than having the person next to you talking on the phone…) but I can at least type a few words.

First of all we were really thrilled to be recently selected by Mike from TechCrunch UK and Ryan from Carsonified and FOWA for their European Start Up pitch competition. We were chosen with 5 other finalists who posted a 60s pitch online. In a previous blog post I go over the unusual circumstances of how I posted ours from my hospital bed.

We were thrilled to participate, especially because the panel of judges was exceptional, including: Jason Calacanis, Mike Butcher, Ryan Carson and Brent Hoberman. As soon as we found out that Brent was on the judging panel we contacted Ryan and offered to retire from the competition, luckily for us, Ryan solved that issue by removing Brent´s vote for our specific case. (Disclosure: Brent is a friend and angel investor in eRepublik).

Having to pitch in 60 seconds a company that you and your team have been working on non stop for the past 18 months in front of hundreds of people from the industry and a very smart group of judges is super nerve wracking. But it’s an experience I really recommend, the great training and exposure from participating as well as the questions and feedback we got from the judging panel have proven extremely useful. Of course winning the competition was also quite a nice feeling and didn’t hurt for all the stuff we are doing behind the scenes :o)

You can see the video here, you can use the timeline shortcut if you just want to see the eRepublik part.

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/* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:”Tableau Normal”; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:””; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:”Times New Roman”; mso-ansi-language:#0400; mso-fareast-language:#0400; mso-bidi-language:#0400;} I had some surgery this summer (nothing particularly dangerous and all ok now) and had to stay about 2 weeks in bed after that to recuperate. It was great to catch up on email but not ideal for much else. Still at that time I saw that TechCrunch US was launching its 60 seconds pitch site so I decided that since I had not much to do I might as well do one. Thing is I was stuck in bed, could hardly move, was taking pain killers and all I had was my laptop so I worried it would be a disaster.

Anyway what I liked about it was that they made it clear they weren’t after Steven Spielberg production values plus, I could do with some fun. So I decided to still do it and after 2 or 3 takes I had something reasonably ok (although my mum said I look terrible and should have used make up… tks  mum :o).

To be honest I don’t feel I did Erepublik justice in the pitch but it quickly became one of the most popular ones in the site (until some users we had to ban a few days before from Erepublik for cheating and bad behaviour decided get back at us and to try and bury it with negative comments and votes… better to be hated then ignored :o).

Not only that but thanks to it we also got mentioned twice on the main TechCrunch website, once by pure chance (for an article about the YouTube video counter) and yesterday we were the pitch of the week: Erepublik brings strategy games to the Web

Moreover, early last week TechCrunch UK announced that there was going to be a pitch competition at FOWA London (that I had already planned to attend) and that all you needed to do was submit a 60 seconds video pitch.

We submitted again the pitch and I just heard from  Ryan Carson (the organizer) that we have been selected along with five other start ups to pitch Erepublik in front of a panel of judges including: Jason Calacanis, Kevin Rose, Ryan, Brent Hoberman (disclosure, Brent is an Angel and advisor to Erepublik, he knew nothing about our application and did not participate in the selection but I have warned Ryan of course and he won’t be able to vote on our pitch) and Mike Butcher.

So this one is just another proof that every little thing counts when you are trying to push your start up forward. Even if what you do is not perfect (I’ll think of the make up for next time mum… or maybe not :o) the important thing is to just do it and have a little fun.

You can find all details about FOWA (Future of Web Apps) London here, I really recommend you go. We will be pitching on Thursday (9^th October) at 17h00.

I was asked to do a 60 seconds video pitch of Erepublik today. Not easy and not particularly happy with the result but I think I cover the main points and gets the message across. Still clearly for once I should not have followed my rule of 0 preparation, 0 editing, 1 shot only and publish. You can find the video below as usual hit play at your own risks :o)
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erepublik 60 seconds pitch
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On another subject, there was a really good article in les Echos today about the French Economical mission in San Francisco who have a special program for start ups led by Aymeril Hoang. Its a great program that was very helpful to Erepublik and that I really recomend. I left a comment in the article

I go in a bit more detail about how the round came about. Obvious common sense stuff for most so pass if you are an experienced entrepreneur.

Main shared experiences:

– It helps if you have been around for a while and know potential angels
– Usually a good sign for investors if your ex boss invests
– Networking and going to conferences is not a waste of time if you do it properly and are selective
– Easier if you have a great product.. ;o)

I’ll try to do another one soon about some of the problems we did have during the round.

As usual unedited video first time I record I publish click play at your own risk, this video stuff is not easy ;o)

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Angel round Shared Experience
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