This past summer we uncovered a key difference between Joystick Labs and tech accelerators such as Tech Stars and Y Combinator. They help startup companies get something started, we help startup studios get something finished.
In hindsight it is pretty obvious, and it has led us to doing a few things differently.
If you’re a startup in a tech accelerator, those three months are mostly spent on getting a plan and maybe a prototype done, with the objective of raising a seed round of several hundred thousand dollars. When you come across a really hard problem, that’s not such a bad thing. You think up a few possible solutions and write into the business plan that you are best equipped to solve this incredibly hard problem using one of these potential solutions. You point out that’s one of the reasons that you need to raise the money. It’s pretty easy to punt the problem down the field (and easy, and safe, and often the right thing to do).
All of our Joystick teams to date have been building mobile games with schedules of 3-15 months. When they come across a tough problem, they’ve got to solve it – they have to finish their game.
Our next insight follows directly – finishing that last 10% and knocking out that tough problem is a whole lot harder than writing a business plan – specially for relatively inexperienced teams.
Two changes resulted.
Our initial funding and 3 month program is enough to get 1/4 to 3/4 done. You don’t need a lot more resources to finish – certainly not enough to spend the time required to raise money. So we took some funds we had intended for new teams and instead put them back into the teams that were getting closest, and in the future that will be part of the plan. We realized that solving those tough problems required a little more hands-on advice than mentors can provide, and brought in an experienced producer to help find that fund and polish in a game that can make the title stand out.
That brings us to tomorrow. Lab Rats Studio is the first of our teams to finish a game. M.U.S.E. will be in the App Store tomorrow.
I’ll save the accolades for tomorrow’s post when I see it live!