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Hey, let me ask you a question: when you were a kid, after a game of Mario Brothers, did you ever take out a pencil and paper and try to draw your own video game levels? The idea of creating video games from a kid’s imagination is something that today’s guest is working on.
Show Notes
Hey, let me ask you a question: when you were a kid, after a game of Mario Brothers, did you ever take out a pencil and paper and try to draw your own video game levels? The idea of creating video games from a kid’s imagination is something that today’s guest is working on.
Highlights
- “Growing up, playing Mario Bros and Donkey Kong, I would draw my own video game levels.”
- “A lot of us that grew up in the 80’s, we’re in our 30’s, we grew up dreaming of creation our own video games.”
- “Sometimes the press can pick up on an idea that isn’t really viable as business.”
- “We’re seeing other games that have been successful in this niche, like Minecraft.”
- “Monetizing through education markets is really challenging.”
- “A Kickstarter campaign is really time consuming.”
- Why didn’t you get Angel funding? “If one person gives you $100,000 it doesn’t really validate your product idea. Having 1,000 paying customers validates your idea.”
- Does Kickstarter give you the contact information for backers? “Yes, there’s an export button: but you have to be backed, or your campaign has to be over.”
- “It doesn’t always take a big budget to test out your idea.”
- “What was that conversation with your wife like?”
Show notes
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Hey, let me ask you a question. When you were a kid after a game of Mario Brothers, did you ever take out a pencil and a piece of paper and try to draw your own video game levels? The idea of creating video games from a kid's imagination is something that today's guest is working on. Stay tuned. First, I want to tell you about some great sponsors.
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Speaker 2:Hi, I'm Justin and this is Product People, the podcast focused on great products and the people who make them. Today we have Robin Rath on the show and he's going to tell us about a Kickstarter he has going for a product that would allow you to draw your own video games. Robin, welcome to the show.
Speaker 3:Hey, Justin. Thanks for having me. It's great to be here.
Speaker 2:Well, I'm glad you're here. Now, can you give our listeners a little background on this project you're working on? What is it and what's the story behind it?
Speaker 3:Yeah, definitely. Pixel Press, it's a game for mobile devices available on iOS and Android in the near future. It's on kickstarter now. Something that we came up with about three months ago and between my time as a product manager full time for a company in St. Louis, Missouri called Coolfire.
Speaker 3:We've been working on this project in our free time. Basically working on developing the idea, trying to understand what people would like about it, what they wouldn't like about it, building that marketing campaign and been gearing it up for launch on Kickstarter to continue to drive the marketing message. That went up a couple weeks ago and then we've been working the marketing since.
Speaker 2:Yeah and anyone that wants to check this out it's pixelpressgame.com and if you watch the video you'll see kind of the idea behind it. Can you explain Robin, just what is the idea? What makes this product unique?
Speaker 3:Sure, sure. So the idea comes from something that I did and was inspired by when I was a kid which is growing up in the eighties I used to play a lot of the games like Mario Brothers on Nintendo and Donkey Kong and Zelda And something that my friends and I would do when we weren't playing games, we would draw our own video games. So we would use the inspiration of the games we were playing, take a piece of paper and draw out levels and platforms and imagine ourselves playing through that game. Recently I was talking with some friends in the technology community about some of the things they were doing with optical character recognition. And that's the process of dictating something that's on a piece of paper or offline and allowing a computer to interpret what that means and then turning it into digital format.
Speaker 3:So just reminiscing about drawing video games as a kid and tying that to character recognition, we came up with this idea for PixelPress. So the idea is we've built a kind of pre formatted grid sheet of paper. You can draw lines on it in a short hand system that represent the aspects of a video game and then you can take a picture of that with your mobile device, your tablet or your iPhone. It'll actually turn that that drawing into a game that you can play. From there you can do things like customize the look and feel, customize the character and ultimately this creation that you've built, you can share it with your friends and you can share it on the community for everyone to play.
Speaker 3:So that's the ultimate vision of PixelPress and we've started a prototype already and the idea now is to gauge the level of interest out there through a platform like Kickstarter and continue to build it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And this seems like the perfect type of campaign for Kickstarter because I actually ran across this before I'd even met you. And it's one of those things, like you watch it and it kind of pulls on the emotional heartstrings because I think a lot of people, especially my age, you know, we're in our 30s. Grew up playing these platform games and we grew up wanting to create our own video games. And I immediately had this emotional connection with your story.
Speaker 2:While you were kind of thinking about doing this, did you talk to other people first before kind of launching the campaign? How did you gauge kind of initial interest?
Speaker 3:Yeah, definitely. I mean you know I'm a big fan of Eric Reiss and the Lean Startup. Those are principles that as a product manager for other products not just this product that I try to follow as closely as possible. So when we did start kind of developing this idea in January it was always a you know go slow type approach. So the first thing that I did was you know I just you know fired up Photoshop and created this grid sheet and started drawing shapes and coming up with you know what what how could you we make this work?
Speaker 3:How could we come up with a system that's very simple and memorable to draw these levels? And then I started sharing it with friends and family and that's what really got me excited right away because you know I was showing this to my friends and they're like of course this is amazing. I mean how could you even ask me if this is amazing? This is this is exactly what we used to do and now you're talking about I can actually play those levels? You need to make this happen.
Speaker 3:So that was inspiring on the onset and was a very low cost prototype at that point. No code had to be written at that point. We can move forward. The following month we expanded that reach out to individuals within the press. So I created that short one and a half minute video, did that all myself you know with Friends Help and we put that video behind a password and shared it with actually Andrew Webster over at The Verge was the first person we shared it with.
Speaker 3:And right away I was a 100% hit rate, know, one email, one bite, we've got the press already lined up. So right at that point, we kind of slowed down a little bit too because we were worried about, you know, too much information getting out and we were still trying to sort through whether we're going to go with Kickstarter. But something you identified you know just a minute ago was you know you grew up in the eighties. A lot of the people that are covering this also get it instantly. So I think we combine a simple idea with something that people really enjoy and like and that's attributed to a lot of our success so far.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. I mean in my mind it kind of makes sense. Like there's a lot of these things from the '80s especially that have come back. And now that a lot of people that grew up in that time period are parents, you know, like the first thing I thought about when I saw your project was my kids and thought, This would be so cool for my kids. Obviously the people in the press felt the same way.
Speaker 2:But how did you know, because sometimes the press can pick up on something that's not really a viable product or a viable business. What were the indications that you were getting back that people would actually you know might be interested in paying money for something like this?
Speaker 3:Yeah, there's a lot of aspects to that for sure. You know I think a big part of our initial thought was that if it can be successful on Kickstarter just in terms of you know people being interested that's gonna help validate it for us a lot. The thing that we didn't, we weren't really in tune with because we're just not part of the educational market was how much are kids going to like this. You know I have an eight year old daughter or I'm sorry an eight month old daughter and clearly she's not part of the test market at this point. So I didn't really have that background but as you know we've got this out there.
Speaker 3:We've got so much outpour from teachers really from all over the world saying hey we're using platforms right now but we can't get everybody to get engaged because it's still too code focused. Know we want something that's less code focused and more creative focused. So you know that combined with what we're seeing with games like Minecraft where a lot of the reasons that it's still so successful is because it's got sharing built into it. People want to share things that they spend a lot of time working on And get those YouTube videos out and all that. And it's fun of course you know but you know people like to share those things because they spend so much time on them and they're proud of them.
Speaker 3:So those are some of the things we wanted to key in on. As far as the monetization side of it, you know we are learning that monetizing through education markets is very challenging. People aren't necessarily looking to spend a lot of money and you know some of the challenges we're having with our Kickstarter are kind of related to that. But at the same time, it's very clear that you know people are very interested in this platform and you know obviously app stores are a viable business model if you can kinda find that magic bullet in terms of how to kinda connect with people and keep them engaged. So we're very hopeful that you know that we're very confident that we're creating a product that people want and it's just a matter of executing on it and making sure that some of those small things are set up correctly.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And so what what how is the pricing going to work for for Pixel Press?
Speaker 3:Yeah. You know, we've been we've been careful about, you know, publicly saying anything on that those lines because we're just not sure yet ourselves. One thing that we want to be very sensitive to is you know not overdoing in app purchasing because you know a lot of parents and a lot of consumers in general you know feel like they've been burnt a little bit on the way that some of these apps are pricing like the free and then you know pay a bunch of money for coins and all that type of stuff. But the way we wanna price it possibly you know two different versions. One version allows you to just play levels.
Speaker 3:So you know if you don't have an interest in actually building levels because it is a time consuming process, there's still an opportunity to just play. We want to make that affordable. We don't wanna like, you know, pull a dollar out of people every single time they download a new level. We want people to be able to enjoy that experience so that they can enjoy the levels that their friends created. On the building sides, the level creator in that process, I mean what we're building is a pretty complex pretty complex beast because you know with this optical character recognition tool we can't assume that everyone can draw a straight line and we have to deal with those challenges and the QA and the customization that goes into that.
Speaker 3:So you know we are building a platform and the way we're kind of thinking about it is if went to Walmart and you bought one of those little kits that allow you to build you know some little game thing or some little electronic thing and you pay you know anywhere from like 10 to $15 for it. That's kind of how we're thinking about this product. So maybe in that like 7 to $10 price range where people are saying, okay I'm willing to spend a little more money because I'm actually getting long term value out of it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. And what kind of, you mentioned technology, What kind of that was my biggest question when I saw this was, how are you guys going to pull off the tech behind this? Because the actual the product itself is simple, like the idea of getting kids to draw levels on paper. That part makes sense to me but it was the OCR stuff that scared me a little bit.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah. I mean as a product manager we all know that creating things that are simple is the hardest thing to do. And there is a lot of work that's going go into making this as simple as possible and reducing frustration. You know if people are frustrated by this, if they're not actually able to you know recreate that drawing as a kid experience, then it's going to be a challenging battle. You know on the technology side we've already started on a prototype.
Speaker 3:We've actually crossed a lot of hurdles on the optical character recognition side. One of the bigger challenges as I alluded to earlier was you know not being able to depend on everyone having the same drawing skills. But then also it's you know it's going be used with pencil because people needed to be able to erase and change things and that's a lighter mark than even a pen would be. But with that said, we're working with two individuals that have world class experience with optical character recognition and they appreciate the product and they're putting you know their full effort into this. And we're really focused right now on getting that piece right because we want to make sure we're not making any promises that we can't deliver on and over the last month and a half we're feeling really confident in what we've built so far.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Tell me how are you balancing all of this? Because in my head I'm thinking, like on one hand you've got this Kickstarter campaign where you're kind of marketing and trying to get people to contribute buy and into And the on the other hand, you're trying to do product development, like you're working on OCR and the actual tech behind it. And then on the other hand, you have a full time job and a family and everything else. Talk to me about how are you balancing all this stuff?
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's been a challenge. Know the hardest part that I've learned with Kickstarter and everyone will tell you that Kickstarter is time consuming has been the number of communication channels to work with. Know it ultimately comes down to about three different email accounts, three different social media accounts. Kickstarter has a commenting system and a messaging system. You're managing incoming press.
Speaker 3:Even with help from people like Luis and Brian, my developer, their communication channels in and of themselves that you've got to manage and keep going. But ultimately I think what I've been afforded is not only press and fans out there that really love the idea but coworkers that really love the idea and them frankly busting their ass to make sure everything stays in motion too. So kickstarter is a big piece of it and it's kind of a distraction for the product management piece but obviously it's very important for us. On the product development side we're constantly getting feedback from our kickstarter backers and we're integrating that in real time into what we're doing. We're integrating their marketing feedback real time into what we're doing.
Speaker 3:For example, we recently added a new higher level teacher package that includes 25 downloads of the game and free downloads for life and that was driven really by a lot of feedback we were getting from teachers that were saying hey you know we don't have a lot of money to spend but if you can make the package look this way you know it's something that we might be able to do. So it's a ton to manage but you know it's something that you can never do enough of any one aspect. You've just got to try to keep each moving forward.
Speaker 2:Yeah and right now it looks like you're about $34,000 in to a goal of $100,000 and so you're about seventeen days in and about twenty days to go, is that right?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so we started the campaign at thirty seven, so yeah, we're right at seventeen. We're feeling really good about where we are. I mean we've got a long way to go and it's been successful so far. The number of backers we've had is amazing. Know we're almost at 1,500 backers so that really excites us.
Speaker 3:We've also got a number of things coming down the pipeline that we hope to get out to people to kind of continue to get the word out there. We're working on a prototype that we'll distribute on a limited basis to our users. We've got things going on like drawing contests. We're continuing to have great press coming in. So all those things together are continuing to drive our efforts.
Speaker 3:And I think the biggest thing for us right now is to hopefully connect with some people that are more on the donation side that are willing to back us with a little bit more money to help us get there. And we're working on some of those things too. You know, we've got a lot of people that are really excited about it and just don't know exactly how to get involved. So this Kickstarter project is a constantly moving beast and there's a lot of good things going on with it right now.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And in some ways it's kind of amazing if you think about it because again like a lot of the interviews that we've done on the show are business to business apps which are actually normally not that complicated to build. The tech behind them is a database and putting stuff in the database, retrieving stuff from the database. But this has some actual real tech behind it and you know it's probably something that you could have gone out and you know maybe approached some angel investors or something. But I'm looking at you know $34,000 already.
Speaker 2:That's kind of like a small angel round right there. Is there a reason you decided to go Kickstarter versus look for other funding?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean I think one way that I've looked at it is if someone's willing to give you a $100,000, what if it's just one person. Know, what is how does that help you really validate the fact that you have a great product idea? But if you can get a thousand people, you know to help you get up to that that $100,000, then then you know the valuation of the company is different. You know the the marketability of the company is different. The confidence that the team's gonna have it is indifferent.
Speaker 3:So that was the true value that I felt like we would get out of Kickstarter. And I feel like we've already got that validation. Before, you know, we felt like we needed a $100,000 to make this happen. But you know, now we're in a mindset now where maybe that if we don't get the $100,000 it slows us down a little bit. But we've got the validation that we were looking for from this for sure.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I'm going to ask you a little bit about in a second about that prototype and demo you made because it's pretty impressive. But maybe just to round off this Kickstarter part, what do they because I've never done one, do they give you the actual contact information for all the folks that have backed? Like will you own the mailing list when you're done or is that something that stays with Kickstarter?
Speaker 3:Yeah. So there's an export button. I did click it and it said something along the lines of you either have to be backed or your campaign has to be ended over before you can export it. Even though but I will say even if your if your Kickstarter is unsuccessful, you still have access to all those people through the Kickstarter messaging system. For For example, I've backed projects that have been unsuccessful and I've got thank yous post campaign you know and those types of things.
Speaker 3:And I've even been asked to you know transfer my donation to PayPal if I was interested in doing that. So yeah, I mean it's pretty cool to have like this community within the Kickstarter campaign. It feels weird to send out an email update to my Kickstarter backers. I'm like hey, know 1,400 people that are super enthusiastic about this project are going get this email. That's kind of a cool feeling.
Speaker 3:It's like a social network for Pixel Press that Kickstarter has allowed us to build.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. Now, so the other thing you've done really well is you've created this demo video and related materials like screenshots that give you a really good picture of what this is. And I think unless people could see it, wouldn't be able to understand it. How did you do this? How much is this like did you code up a bunch of stuff and actually record you know using a real prototype or what is that that we're seeing in the video there?
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah definitely. I mean a couple of things there. Know one benefit that I've had to this point is that you know my work within product development and specifically as a UI and UX designer over the last you know twelve or thirteen years kind of put me in a position to be able to create a majority of what you see myself without writing any code at all. Mhmm. All of it was built you know in Photoshop and Fireworks and then imported into Motion and Final Cut and put together essentially, you know, pieced together without writing any code.
Speaker 3:And and we've created that video not to not to deceive anybody but to to sell the vision on what it could be. And I have really only recently started writing codes. I think it's to the lean startup model, know, I think one thing to note about this project is it's been very cost effective. There hasn't been a lot of money spent. And the result of that was a lot of press and a lot of interest and a you know, a successful Kickstarter campaign at this point without investing a lot of money.
Speaker 3:So I think a message out there for individuals trying to do ideas and also corporations trying to do ideas is it doesn't always take a big budget. I think the thing that probably is one reason, probably the number one reason for the success of it though has been that it's been something that I'm super passionate about. Done other projects like this in the past where like you'll get a month in and if you don't get positive feedback, if you're not really that into it, It's hard to spend every night till 2AM working on it but if it's something that you really love and you're just continuing to get good feedback because it's a great product, then it's gonna continue to drive you know that development. So I think those are some key things that have kind of made us at least been able to reach this point so far.
Speaker 2:Yeah and can you give us an idea of like how much you've spent in terms of money and time just getting what you have off the ground?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean prior to the Kickstarter, I spent probably $2,000 Now granted, built the website, I got a little bit of help from some friends, I built all the graphics. So there's a lot of things that I think not everyone would be able to do themselves. But spent a minimal amount of money there. And then since the Kickstarter campaign is gone, you know, we have spent money on things like some Facebook ads and you know, press releases and some of those things. So you know, the money is adding up a little bit here and there throughout the Kickstarter campaign.
Speaker 3:And then I've and then I've kind of floated some money to my development team to kind of just bolster what they're doing and and started to work through that. But a lot of that is gonna ultimately be, you know, like partnerships and those types of things. So so yeah, it's it's been been cost effective at that point. As far as the amount of time spent on it, I mean, it's probably in the range of personally, I don't know, maybe three or four hundred hours. You know, a lot of late nights spent on it.
Speaker 3:Mhmm. And and and and as of recently, I've been working on it full time. I've I've worked with the company that I work for and I've kinda taken a sabbatical away from from that while managing this Kickstarter because it's 100% a full time job. So the time is adding up a little bit pretty quickly there but yeah that's kind of a summary.
Speaker 2:So you're actually, you're saying I'm going to put my full time job on hold for a bit while I focus my energy on this because I guess you only have so much time.
Speaker 3:Yeah, you know, as someone who likes to do as much as possible, I struggle with personally that the next connection that I'm gonna make with a reporter or a backer is just one email away, know. So there's never gonna be enough time to send enough emails. It's just a matter of keep going and and put as much time as possible. So I I sat down with my wife and and talked about it and and we think it made a lot of sense to continue and invest our own personal time and money into this to to help see it through.
Speaker 2:Well let's talk a bit about that, maybe just to close. What was that conversation with your wife like? How did that go? Why was she willing to come on side with something like this?
Speaker 3:You know a lot of it is the fans and what they've had to say. Know she believed in it from the start. She loved the idea. You know she didn't necessarily get it because she didn't draw video games when she was a kid but she knew I was passionate about it. And then just I mean, the amount of support from the press and the fans makes it clear that this is an endeavor worth pursuing, whether it's financially or on the education side.
Speaker 3:I mean, that's been a big focus for us is we feel like there's real, tangible values that kids can learn by learning how to build video games. Whether it's computer graphics, patience, logical thinking, teamwork, whatever it is. You know those are things that you know ultimately have a lot of value. If you can tie that to something that's fun you know that's where you know the real skill starts to develop because the passion that I have will just be extended to them.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well Robin I think it's a great project. Where can people find out more?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so our URL is pixelpressgame.com. You can find us on Google pretty quick with Pixel Press. You can also find us on Kickstarter. Like you said, we've got about twenty days left. We're 33% of the way there and going strong.
Speaker 3:So you know still getting a lot of excitement. We've got a lot of fun things going on. Yeah, pixelpressgame.com and that'll take you wherever you need to go.
Speaker 2:Perfect. Where can people find you personally? Are you on Twitter or anything else like that?
Speaker 3:I am on Twitter, yeah. It's RobinRath, so RobinRath with an I. We're at PixelPressGame on Twitter too.
Speaker 2:Perfect. Well, I'm going to back the project. I'm going to start by putting $10 in. And any Product People listeners out there that are going to back the project as well, I want you to reply productpeople.tv and reply robinrath if you match my pledge. We'll see if we can get this thing all the way to 100 ks.
Speaker 3:Awesome. Thanks, Justin. Thanks, guys, for listening. Hope to connect with you guys sometime soon.
Speaker 2:Perfect. Thanks, Robin.
Speaker 3:All right. Take care.
Speaker 1:And that's another episode of Product People. You can find us on the web, www.productpeople.tv. I'm Justin Jackson. That's mijustin on Twitter. And if you haven't already, if you could go into iTunes, search for Product People, and give us a five star review, that really helps the show get noticed.
Speaker 1:Next week we are back with Dan Martell from clarity.fm. We'll see you then.