The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
00:38:50 · Harry Stebbings, Federico Simionato
[00:38:50] S1: Was it immediately apparent that it wasn't working? And do you think when you have a product that isn't working, you can tell very quickly? [00:38:57] S2: It depends on how much you're lying to yourself. If you're very truthful and you have a plan for how do I validate that it's working with metrics, then it's easy. If you're like, let's put it out there and see what people do, it's a bit harder because then you you would be hopeful you invested a lot in it, and you'll try to find signals of usefulness and signals of retention. And so, yeah, you should be very ruthless with yourself before you start and and say, these are the metrics that we'll look at when we launch to determine if it's a good product. And, like, I'm the first one who's guilty. I I often lay too much hope behind the product launch. [00:39:35] S1: Okay. So when we look at, like, play on this, like, Netflix but for games, what did we not see that we should have seen? Like, what's our takeaway from that to prevent that happening again?
00:39:35 · Harry Stebbings, Federico Simionato
[00:39:35] S1: Okay. So when we look at, like, play on this, like, Netflix but for games, what did we not see that we should have seen? Like, what's our takeaway from that to prevent that happening again? [00:39:43] S2: I think one... A big part of it that we learned is that when you watch a movie, you you watch it two hours, and then you're done. And the next day, you want to watch another movie. And so it makes sense for Netflix to exist because people want to consume different content. When you're playing a game, you get passionate about it, and, generally, games have a much longer lifespan. Yeah. And so you can you can definitely pay for a game for a month, two months, six months, even a year. I've been... I I have a mobile version of Risk, the game, the board game on my iPhone. I downloaded it when I was in high school. I paid for it, and I still play it when... Like, yesterday, I was in an airplane, and I and I played it. It's been fifteen years. [00:40:23] S1: And you paid once? I [00:40:24] S2: paid once. Yes. It was a single time purchase. Wow. Yeah. The lifespan of that of that experience is much longer in time. And so it doesn't make sense to [00:40:32] S1: pay a subscription for something that that gives you that much runway. As someone who's invested in gaming before, there is this beautiful retention, flatlining. Actually, when you get to a three to five year line, which is insane to say, but when you look at your games like Candy Crush, they still have this insane flatline three to five years in where it almost becomes like habitual usage every single day.
00:40:32 · Harry Stebbings, Federico Simionato
[00:40:32] S1: pay a subscription for something that that gives you that much runway. As someone who's invested in gaming before, there is this beautiful retention, flatlining. Actually, when you get to a three to five year line, which is insane to say, but when you look at your games like Candy Crush, they still have this insane flatline three to five years in where it almost becomes like habitual usage every single day. [00:40:57] S2: Yeah. I've never worked on a game. I worked on an entertainment app that was very close to a game. It was called Live Quiz. It was... Do you remember HQ Trivia? [00:41:05] S1: Dude, do I remember HQ Trivia? I'm not that... Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely, dude. [00:41:08] S2: It's one other. A few years ago. [00:41:10] S1: Yeah. Smart mechanic. Yes. Getting everyone together at same time. I I think any behavioral change in product is exciting.
00:41:10 · Harry Stebbings, Federico Simionato
[00:41:10] S1: Yeah. Smart mechanic. Yes. Getting everyone together at same time. I I think any behavioral change in product is exciting. [00:41:18] S2: I worked on a clone of HQ Trivia as my first project at Bending Spoons when I joined. It went hyperviral in Italy. We we did 2,000,000 registered users in Italy only. Italy is is 60,000,000 people in total. So one in 30 people used to play that game. Hyper viral. Incredible virality. And it was so fun. It wasn't a good business. I I think HQ Trivia wasn't a good good business either, but super viral mechanic. But I'm a bit scared of games. It... It's very hard to make them work. It's even harder than a product, in my opinion, because it's it's about taste, and it's about feelings and emotions and experience. Utility, you... As we were saying earlier, you can somehow proxy utility. You know? You can try to guess how useful a change is going to be in the future. With games, it's about the experience and and the emotions that it gives you. It's completely qualitative. It's... There's there's no... I mean, of course, you can look at metrics and and and analyze them. But beforehand, before you launch, it's very hard to to to say if you're working on a good game or a bad game. [00:42:18] S1: What did you learn from doing the HQ Trivia clone?
00:42:18 · Harry Stebbings, Federico Simionato
[00:42:18] S1: What did you learn from doing the HQ Trivia clone? [00:42:21] S2: How intoxicating working on a successful product can be. It's just the experience of a lifetime to work on something that goes hyperviral. We literally launched as a beta test with friends and family. I I remember literally telling people, don't tell others because we can only support, I don't know, 50 users simultaneously, a 100 users. I I don't remember I don't remember the number, but I literally remember asking people not to tell others. And we never, never, never did anything else to to make it grow. It it just... From that moment, when I when I told my family, my friends, don't tell others, it just went viral from there. We we even set aside some money, I think, a few tens of thousands of euros to do marketing. We never touched them. It's... It just it just took off. So sometimes you can see when a product works immediately. [00:43:09] S1: Does Bending Spoons do clones today? [00:43:11] S2: No. We we don't launch new products. I mean, we probably would if we were decently convinced that we have a good shot at making something very good, very useful, successful, impactful. I'm not saying that that we we wouldn't, but, no, it's been a while since the last time we did.
00:43:11 · Federico Simionato, Harry Stebbings
[00:43:11] S2: No. We we don't launch new products. I mean, we probably would if we were decently convinced that we have a good shot at making something very good, very useful, successful, impactful. I'm not saying that that we we wouldn't, but, no, it's been a while since the last time we did. [00:43:27] S1: Play On was one big project didn't hit in the way that you thought it would. What did you not expect to hit that suddenly did hit? And what did you learn from that? We were chatting earlier about never studying your successes, which is why we don't actually attribute lessons to them often. Yeah. Can you take me to what you didn't expect to hit that did in the lessons?