HackFwd Blog

Jason Goldberg, founder and CEO of Fab.com is passionate about design, and he made the decision to shutdown a prior startup and retooled to follow his passion in Fab.com. In this talk he explains why this bold move was the path to success. Fab.com recently raised a $40 million venture round.

Jason spent 2010 building his latest startup, Fabulous. By early 2011 he realised it wasn’t getting the traction he’d expected.  “In the current internet climate if you haven’t gained traction in a year’s time, the advice I give folks is to try something else. You can only iterate so far,” he explains. “And you can’t iterate your way to a business model.” He shut down the company over night and started again. 

It sounds like a tough decision but to Jason and his team it was self-evident. They asked themselves three questions about their business: was it something that could be really big? Was it something they were passionate about? And was it something they could be the best at? They decided that Fabulous didn’t fill those criteria and, that if they could pick one thing and be the best at it, it would have to be design.

“It wasn’t a pivot, it was a restart,” says Jason. They walked their investors through their reasoning and those investors wisely chose to stay on board.  In February 2011, Jason decided to focus exclusively on Fab.com. They spent three months building the product and launched on the 9^th of June.  

The strategy paid off. From launching in June 2011 the site now has over 1.3 million users and generated over $20million in revenue last year. Jason ascribes the success to the fact that they focused exclusively on building a product that they were passionate about, that there was a market for, and that they could be the best at. 

That passion transmits itself to the customers. Over 50% of Fab.com’s users come from social sharing.  “That’s not something you can force,” says Jason. “It has to be because your users love your product and tell other people about it.”

In the talk, Jason offers 21 lessons they’ve learned over the first nine months of Fab.com’s existence. The advice ranges from the managerial (“Measure everything”, “Focus on your core”) to the philosophical (“Maintain perspective”, “Make mistakes”). 

There are some surprising insights along the way, such as why Fab.com stocks products that they never thought they’d sell (but did anyway), and why Fab.com isn’t in the design sales business. Watch the video to find out how Fab.com went from zero to hero in nine passionate months. 

For more talks by founders for founders, go to Passion Meets Momentum.

Marco Börries has built three successful startups, including StarOffice (later known as OpenOffice). He shares his experience on how founders can be better leaders, and what he is doing differently now that he is running his fourth startup. 

Here are summaries of the three of Marco’s six insights. If you are a founder, or want to be a better leader, watch this video.

“You are it.” Everything starts and ends with you. As a leader, you have no excuses, nothing else to blame or to default to, no ‘but’. Being a leader means it might get lonely sometimes, but it all starts and ends with you. 

“Trust needs to be given before it can be returned.” Trust is important, but you need to entrust people with something before you can expect them to trust you. The problem with startups is that when you start, everything is unknown. Trust is therefore possibly the only thing that you start building on in the beginning, and as a leader you are responsible for creating that trust.

“Ask the questions that you do not want to hear the answers to.” You need to go out of your comfort zone to do this, in a big way. Trust your gut, and if it seems difficult, make sure you ask the questions about it. It is painful but it is much easier to ask difficult questions upfront than to get your face pushed in the mud.

Watch the video for the examples and the insights. And watch more videos from our expert talks at Passion Meets Momentum. And if you have - or want to have - a startup, see Pitch in Berlin for your opportunity to come and pitch to HackFwd at our next Build event.

Pitch in Berlin is a pitch contest organized in connection with our Build events in Berlin. The next one takes place March 10th, and the applications are now open. The audience consists of top investors, startup veterans, future stars and members of the press. 

Application window remains open until 10. February, 23.59 pm GMT. Check out the TechCrunch TV coverage from the previous event, with a focus on Pitch in Berlin, and read about the first pitch event to get an idea of what you can get just just by getting invited to pitch. And if you want to know more about what HackFwd offers to startups, check out the HackFwd Experience.

Apply here, or send a friend you know to apply, too.

Torsten Reil, CEO of NaturalMotion, spoke at HackFwd’s Build 0.8 event on how to create a hit iPhone game.

NaturalMotion Games started out as a game technology company, and their Euphoria-technology has been used from Grand Theft Auto IV to Pepsi TV ads (check out the Pepsi ad 3:00 into the talk). With the introduction of the iPhone, Natural Motion moved into creating new types of mobile games and among them, have created multiple big hits for the iOS. NaturalMotion’s five paid games have had over 12 million downloads. In this talk, Torsten shared his 15 tips for creating a homerun. Watch the video for a discussion on all of them, with some great examples and numbers.

Game idea

1. Be unique. There are lots of games out there, and you need to differentiate with your game. Torsten’s example is My Horse, a free-to-play virtual pet-type game that’s seen over 5 million downloads.

2. Let them snack. Cater for players who play for a few minutes at a time. Many mobile users play for short amounts at a time. 

3. Play together. Also cater for social, asynchronous gaming, even where the device is passed around or the gameplay is shared online.

4. Know your audience. There are huge amounts of ideas, but you have to understand how your (potentially very large) audience relates to the game idea.

Design and gameplay

5. Simplify. Don’t make people think. Things you think are obvious may well not be. See Torsten’s examples starting at 10:20 from Natural Motion’s Backbreaker (5.5 million downloads) and how they iterated the design, and, how introducing a tutorial to My Horse increased first-day retention from 38.5% to 44%.

6. Make them feel good. People don’t like to suck. Especially the iPhone audience likes to play to succeed in the game. Especially the casual gamer needs a “success event” early on in the game to convert into users. 

7. Click! There’s a magic point where you realize that it just works - but it’s hardly linear, says Torsten. With the hard work, it will come.

8. Polish! Once the core gameplay is there, you will spend enormous effort in polishing it. Don’t ship it until it is ready. This is especially important in games.

9. Polish more! Once you’ve polished it, do it more. You are not hitting diminishing returns doing this, says Torsten, but you are creating the experience, the flow that will make the users stay.

10. Optimize. Use analytics to test and improve everything in the game and around it.

Distribution

11. Get featured. The hard work is done. The key to getting featured is doing the hard work described before, Torsten says. Apple and other distribution channels will want to feature the highest quality

12. You name it. The name of the game is incredibly important. But you can let people name it instead to ensure you use a name that gets people interested in downloading and playing it. Torsten shows how Natural Motion names their games, using My Horse as an example (from 20:00 in the video).

14. Icon = packaging. The icon drives the downloads from the App Stores. You want to have an icon that stops people and stands out on the store shelf.

15. Go viral. The best way for a game to go viral is the old-fashioned way, where people show the device and the game to their friends. Try to create a “word of mouth moment” in the game that the player wants to show other people, Torsten says. 

16. Be ready to adapt. Keep an eye on the market, see where the business models are shifting and be ready to move based on that.

You can follow Torsten on Twitter here, and watch more great talks on Passion Meets Momentum.

Delta Strike has been busy over the last days of the year, pushing their latest Santa release two days ago. The new release sees the introduction of two new characters, Commander Kozel and Sergant Noemi, who will guide the players through the new missions. In the end, the player may face the ultimate Shar’dal boss adversary, and upon triumph, receive a pretty special item.

The game also added more items to the shop, more social features such as gifting, and better notifications and effects. The team keeps releasing better and more refined iterations of the game, and Delta Strike is shaping up to be a great social gaming experience. Read the team’s blog here and check out Delta Strike the game.

They are also adding local film festival support, serving the needs of film buffs on a local level. At launch, Filmaster is the official app for ten festivals in the UK and Poland, where the team is based. If a supported festival takes place in your town, you get a new tab in the app with showtimes, recommendations and reviews from this particular festival only.

The key benefits Filmaster brings users with the new release are:

• Relevant movie suggestions that match your personal taste and current location thanks to the powerful social recommendation engine 
• Local movie showtimes always in your pocket
• Check-in to movies and screenings
• Read movie synopses & reviews 
• Watch trailers of latest releases 
• Interact with friends and other movie lovers
• Login with your current Facebook or Twitter account & share your ratings and reviews with friends and followers

The app works best in United Kingdom, United States and Poland. You can download it from Android Market (just search for “Filmaster”) or on Filmaster’s site. Beta was released in September 2011 as the official app for Raindance Film Festival in London, and a stable version of the app was released on December 4th. 

An update to Filmaster’s iPhone app was also released last week and you can get it for free from in the App Store. The iPhone app also supports TV recommendations, which are coming to Android later this year.

Tom Hulme, IDEO Design Director and HackFwd Referrer, talks about entrepreneurship being a form of mad science. There is much chaos and uncertainty, but there are also great formulas for succeeding.

We have more computing power in our smartphones than NASA had when they put a man on the moon, “so you have to start feeling guilty about using that to fire little birds at pigs”, Tom says. Throughout the talk Tom challenges our thinking about where we currently are and how the contexts where we operate in as founders are changing. 

The world is in flux, it’s unpredictable. Pretty much anything can be reverse engineered, fast. Technology is no longer a constraint, we are. The cultural latency is approaching zero.

What is our job as founders in this kind of a world? “We want to make cool stuff that drives great human experiences”, Tom says. “For us founders, business models are our units of design and we should always view them from the perspective of the customer. All the value in the business model flows from the customer.”

“As founders, our task is to navigate a series of unanswered questions. If you don’t have a set of hypotheses in your mind right now, you’re not doing your job,” Tom continues. “And we can now answer these questions of high uncertainty much better than before.” The key is picking the right questions, the right hypotheses to experiment on. Great experiments are hypothesis based, testable and important to your business. 

To be efficient, the experiments we construct to test our hypotheses have to be accurate, low cost, and controlled. Accurate means making it as real as possible, preferably doing it in the real world. Low cost means using existing technologies and networks where possible. And since premature scaling is the number one reason why startups fail, control means being on top of your virality and ramp-up rate, so that it makes sense to what stage you’re at.

“It’s kind of like setting up minimum viable experiments”, Tom says. So, think about what’s your minimum viable experiment? What gets you to the end goal of testing your hypothesis most efficiently?

Tom finishes off with a step-by-step analysis of example experiments pertaining to different parts of the business model. From hacking your funding to faking a backend to testing product versions in the physical world, Tom’s examples show that there is nothing that is beyond smart, scrappy testing and validation. This is powerful and inspiring watching for all entrepreneurs and founders. Follow this advice to radically improve your chances of success.

You can follow Tom on Twitter here.

Last night YieldKit was awarded the WebFuture first prize in Hamburg. Selected from among 10 finalists, the judges valued YieldKit’s innovativeness, execution and marketing prowess in their appraisal. YieldKit took home 10,000 euros in prize money and another valuable milestone. You can read more about the event here (in German).

YieldKit recently launched YieldWord, a semantic page monetization technology that looks for relevant product names in the text and creates clean, trackable optimized affiliate links out of these. This added to YieldKit’s reach makes it a winner in effortless website monetization.

For startups, time to market is the time from having an idea to having that idea out in the market making money. In this talk Stephan Schmidt imparts his experience in this key product development concept.

“If a feature is worth developing, it is worth getting to market sooner”, Stephan posits. Short time to market is a huge lever that you can employ to the benefit of your bottom line. 

Often time to market in startups is quite short in the beginning, due to small team sizes. As companies grow time to market tends to grow as well, Stephan argues. To escape from this you must start by measuring time to market, and you can do this in discrete steps as you go along. Time to market in development is a solved problem, but most of the time is used before development starts. 

Stephan also makes the case for not working in parallel, but rather working in serial. Scrum and Kanban and other project management tools concentrate on the serialization of development, but serialization of work before development starts and outside of development has still not caught on, Stephan says. And since serialization gives you the advantage of releasing earlier, this also means money in earlier and a shorter time to market. Stephan’s slides in the talk show this well geometrically.

Watch more great talks from our Build events at Passion Meets Momentum.

Jonas Echterhoff works on the Mac browser plugin of the Unity 3D game engine, and in this talk he outlines what he thinks is the future of 3D games technology. 

Unity 3D allows developers to develop a game on one framework and port that to multiple platforms quickly. Jonas discussed the future of 3D gaming in the browsers from a technical and platform perspective and gives an appraisal of the various platform and development environments. 3D technologies for direct use in the browser are quickly growing area of interest, and given our portfolio at HackFwd contains a few game studios, having a talk and an expert on the technologies was fitting. 

While we are getting ready for Build 08 in mid-December, we post two more talks from the previous Build 07. Stay tuned.

In tune with their roadmap, team at Delta Strike has just released an in-game shop for decking out those starfighters. Keeping with the high visual standards, the items look awesome and surely those hard-earned credits will go into good use. We’re definitely grabbing a few droids to go on the side.

Read the team’s detailed blog post on the milestone here.

HackFwd alumni YieldKit has just launched a powerful addition to the website monetization arsenal. YieldWord converts keywords on page into affiliate links – fully automatically and cleanly, while giving the publishers control over the category and even exact matching of products. You can take a look at the various examples in this blog post introducing the demo.

With YieldWord, YieldKit has a strong proposition for website monetization. It is especially suitable for sites with lots of user-generated content such as forums and blog networks, but also provides additional revenue streams to professional publishers, bloggers and news media. Installation is of course straightforward - just a code snippet on the page, and you have access to over 10,000 affiliate programs, out of which YieldKit will dynamically choose the highest-converting and highest-yielding ones for your content, and take care of the rest. Take a closer look at YieldKit here.

Huge congratulations from HackFwd to Chris Prescott and the rest of the Fantasy Shopper team. Check out the AWSChallenge Twitter stream here and stay tuned for more news.

Have a startup? Want to have a startup? HackFwd announces Pitch in Berlin v2! 

At our previous Build event in Berlin, we ran a pitching contest called Pitch in Berlin. The event was so successful and the pitches and startups of such high quality that we want to do it again. You can read about the some of the contestants in this TechCrunch article or on the HackFwd blog. If you want to know more about what HackFwd offers to startups, check out the HackFwd Experience.

So, if you want to have a startup, or know someone who does - characterized by a good idea, ambition and technical skills - here is the chance to apply to pitch to HackFwd and an audience of investors, tech luminaries and press! The deadline for applications is November 11th and the event will take place in Berlin on December 10th. Check out Pitch In Berlin!

AroundMe is a location-aware search iPhone app, and one of the biggest ones.  Marco Pifferi is the man behind the hugely popular app, and in this video he shares his learnings from building and releasing an app that has been downloaded over 30 million times with 5 million monthly unique users who have 6-8 monthly engagements on average. Apple also used AroundMe in their TV ads, which certainly helped the awareness about the application.  Marco also notes that the app is doing very well with only one small ad banner placement as monetization. In the video, Marco goes through other thoughts about monetization, too.

In addition to the above, Marco goes over the datasets used in building the app, the high-level architecture of the app divided roughly into the database engine and the ad optimization sides, and the required core competences in building local apps. Valuable watching for anyone wanting to build a popular mobile app.

Watch more inspiring talks at Passion Meets Momentum. And to make sure you stay in the loop with news from HackFwd, sign up for our newsletter.

User testimonials:
“Amazing graphics and visual effects”
“What? This is a Flash Game, are you kidding?”
“The Trailer video is so awesome, I tried out the beta right away!”

“Delta Strike was showcased at MAX and was playable in the entertainment lounge. We wanted to have the game online at that time to let players continue their DS experience after the conference and spread the word,” says Michael Plank, CTO and one of the co-founders. “Releasing the beta together with Flash Player 11 is a great PR story.” Delta Strike has played a role in the developer community around Flash 11, by for example publishing performance benchmarks of different systems. This community is the beachhead of Delta Strike’s launch strategy. 

Delta Strike wants to challenge the existing notion of Facebook games. “So far, popular FB games are rather dull and unchallenging and have boring 2D graphics. Delta Strike brings 3D action with the visual quality of the PS3 and challenging gameplay to casual gamers on Facebook. Without having to install any additional plugins, players can fight entertaining missions in space from everywhere right in their browser.” Another big differentiator is a deep and engaging storyline the players can dive into, which will also be rolled out over the coming months.

Delta Strike is also a nominee in The Europas - vote for them here!

User testimonials:
“It’s amazing and addictive and my new favourite thing.” (link)
“I actually LOVE Fantasy Shopper.” (link)
“Hi, my name is Rachel and I’m a Fantasy Shopper addict.” (link)
“I think fantasyshopper.com might be similar to what happens in very good dreams.” (link)

Fantasy Shopper is a social shopping game and a fashion discovery platform rolled into a compelling user experience. The startup, based in Exeter, UK, launched to the UK audience last week’s Tuesday after extensive closed beta-testing during which they polished the customer experience. 

On Fantasy Shopper, players use Fantasy Money to create outfits and stock up their virtual wardrobes, all with real-world clothing and accessories from real retailers. There are badges to be won, events to create outfits for and friends to help in picking the right styles, and all the while the hourly Paydays keep replenishing the Fantasy Money account of the players. At launch, there were over 100,000 items in the shops included by Fantasy Shopper. Since launch, users have already spent £2.5m on Fantasy Shopping, attesting to the traction of the completely new experience provided by Fantasy Shopper.

“Fantasy Shopper is not a social game with e-commerce bolted on to generate revenue, nor is it an e-commerce site with social or gamification layers added on to increase engagement,” says CEO and co-founder Chris Prescott. “Fantasy Shopper centralises, socialises and gamifies online shopping and has each of these three elements tightly woven into its DNA to create a unique and highly addictive user experience”

The launch was covered by TechCrunch, GigaOm, Grazia Daily and numerous other tech and fashion news sources alike. Fantasy Shopper is nominated in The Europas in the Best Social Platform or Networking Startup category, and you can place your vote in the category here.

We are pleased to have a strong representation in The Europas, as already mentioned above in some places. The Europas are the main European Awards for early stage Internet and Mobile technology startups. Seven of our portfolio companies are nominated in their categories! The Europas is shaping up to be a promising event (here’s the event registration, only a few tickets left at the time of this). Here are the HackFwd nominees – go ahead and vote for your favourite!

Best Advertising or Marketing Tech Startup

Yieldkit - vote here

Best Mobile or Apps Startup

FlockOfBirds - vote here

sharypic - vote here

Best Entertainment, Audio, Video, Music Startup

Watchlater - vote here

Best Gaming or Social Games Startup

Delta Strike - vote here 

Best Social Platform or Networking Startup

Fantasy Shopper - vote here

Filmaster - vote here

…and finally:

Best European Startup Accelerator

HackFwd - vote here :)

User testimonials from Facebook:
“Fun Fun Fun!! Perfect!! Thanks for this great game!”
“Best browsergame ever ;D”

Reign of Steel is a 3D tank multiplayer game, in your browser. It has yesterday seen a complete relaunch and is already getting a lot of love from the players. The game is relaunched primarily on Facebook and Bigpoint. In addition to the new maps, new tanks and game modes, the game is especially launched for social playing.

“We’ve received a lot of enthusiastic feedback from our players”, says Helge Wieding, co-founder of Reign of Steel. “The best is when people say we’re more fun than World of Tanks. We want to be the best gaming experience you can have in a browser - especially if you like blowing things up. “

Being a browser game, Reign of Steel has the instant appeal to casual gamers, but can also sustain longer gameplay and returning players. Customizing and developing your tank is of course an important part of advancing in the game, and Reign of Steel has a wide range of virtual items in the game - including perhaps the most expensive weapon ever sold, The Nuke. You’ll have to find out more yourself, but here’s a video to give you a taste.

Reign of Steel is developed by Yoone UG, which is a family business based on high-tech tank warfare, founded by the brothers Arne and Helge Wieding in 2010. You can also check out the coverage (in German) on Browsergames and Gamessphere.

This is the second in our series of launch news this week. We will be updating you on two more recent launches from the HackFwd camp, and to get them first, you can sign up for our newsletter here!