One of my favorite cartoons is Pinky and the Brain, which begins every episode with the question,
What are we going to do, today, Brain?
answered by,
“The same thing we do every day, Pinky, take over the world.”
So, that is what Maria (also known on twitter as @burnsortiz ) and I are doing at Boom Startup in Salt Lake City this week, the same as we do every day. Hopefully we will work out better than Pinky and the Brain who never made it out of the lab. Brain had my sympathy. Hey, evil genius is better than no genius at all, right?
What are we learning about taking over the world?
One thing we knew when we came here is that although we have great technology we need two things:
- More people to know about (and hence, buy and use) our games.
- More money to enable us to make the games we have on the market better and make new games.
What I’m hoping to learn this week is how to get out of the circle of never having enough time to put all of the improvements and ideas we have into the games because I am constantly raising money and trying to get people to know about our games. We are meeting with experts in sales, business development, design and more. Stay tuned for all the insights.
Two I have heard over and over are :
- You NEED to get your games into the schools. Yes, sales to large, bureaucratic organizations is a harder sell than getting Bob to buy your game to play while he watches the Big Bang Theory, but that is where you need to be. (If you’re Bob, though, please DO buy our games!)
- Don’t worry about the bells and whistles for now. Who cares about a perfectly designed product for teaching students to create graphs if teachers don’t think that is an important skill?
A really interesting session this morning was on finding a mentor and working with a mentor.The answers to participant questions were somewhat different than I expected.
The afternoon session is starting now, but stay tuned over the next few weeks if you are curious about what happens in a business accelerator.
