I'm doing a survey

[ch00beh]

Hello everyone.

Some of you know me a bit, but I'm pretty sure most of you don't. So a little about myself. I'm a college student at Georgia Tech, and I'm currently taking a class on how to start a company. We're being taught in a pretty hands on way; the ideal goal of the class is to have our little start ups go public. Apparently we get an automatic A if we do. =3

Anyways, I'm doing work for the potential start up called Shiny Egg. We cater to fan people, keeping them connected to the the world and each other. Of course, thinking of fankids made me think of my childhood days playing Pokemon at every hour. And by childhood days, I mean last semester.

That's why i came here. I know that this is a great, active Pokemon community, and it's people like you that we want to hear from.

Right now, we're figuring out a direction for the company to go towards, but we haven't really surveyed our target audience much to find out what they really want. After all, we can have all these lofty ideas and crazy cool products, but if the fans don't care, then we flop. We've got three possible products that we'd like you all to comment on.

(these are all working titles because I'm sure they violate copyright)

1) Fred's List
This site is a dedicated trading place for memorabilia, tickets, action figures, games, and all kinds of cool stuff. The site wouldn't rely on actual currency but would instead have its own credit system. That way people can avoid the hassle of having to sell something, then use that money to buy other things. Instead, people can barter directly with other people. Alternatively, they could just go with the standard trade-stuff-in-for-credits and buy-stuff-using-credits and buy-credits-with-real-money.

2) Treehouse
Got a bunch of news sites, fan forums, and gossip sites to watch? Want to find out some information on your favorite game, but think Google is boring? Well then use Treehouse! (my partners will all kill me for using this name instead of our other working title of 'Tree of Knowledge'). Basically you enter in your areas of interest and plant these seeds. Very soon, they grow into a tree that you can shape to your liking. Fruit will grow on the tree, representing links to articles, stories, and various other sites pertaining to your interests. After clicking on one, you can either throw it out or keep it in your basket, thereby customizing your tree even more.

3) Totally Trivia
Impress everyone with your in-depth knowledge of celebrities, pop culture, movies, music, games and everything with this fun little game. Simply answer questions correctly and get points. From there, points can be redeemed for real life prizes. Get enough points, and/or be the best of the best, and you get the grand prize: a chance to meet and get a signature from whatever celebrity pertains to the trivia you've been doing. People stand in line for hours after concerts to get an autograph. People spend bajillions to get backstage. You can play a game and cut everyone in line.

I kinda mentioned this earlier, but these are more for direction than for what we're actually making, so any and all criticism, comments, and questions are welcome.

Thanks for reading!

Much less-than-three,
ch00beh

 

[Teapot]

Well, here's my thoughts:

1) With eBay and Craig's List and similar stuff, I think this would probably fall flat on it's face if it wasn't executed perfectly... but it could work well if you gave it premise. It would, perhaps, work better for children or younger people, especially with the credits system - saves them from playing with Mummy's credit card You'd need to have a large stock of interesting things first to sell, however - you couldn't just chuck it up and leave it for other people to populate.

2) This been done hundreds of times before... but not quite in the way you suggest here. Again, the idea sounds like it would appeal more to kids, and again, you'd need a splash or real originality - or just really, REALLY good usability and design - to make it work and be effective. Every man and his dog has a portal - yours would need to be special to make people use that rather than the likes of MSN Home, My Yahoo!, or iGoogle - just to name a few.

3) The trivia idea certainly sounds fun. It would probably benefit most from a community/friends focus - perhaps making it a Facebook app, or similar, would help. However, I'm not too sure about the real life prizes bit - I think it'd probably work best without prizes and with more rewards like leaderboards or online prizes - medals and such to hang in a profile. Also attach a forum to it so people can discuss their favourite artist. One problem you may come across, though, is people posting the answers to the trivia... and another is the fact that you'd need to post new trivia very frequently, which is time consuming, and thus expensive.

 

[ch00beh]

Thanks for the great response, Database. I'm kinda bummed I didn't get more, but I posted this on several sites, so we've now got a definitive product direction. We'll be using the trivia idea.

I'm not sure if anyone is even interested, but in the off chance that someone is, I'd like to shift this survey to a discussion. We've moved to the product design phase, and we'd like to hear what fan people want, and dare I say need, from a trivia experience. Is it the smug sense of superiority from being more knowledgeable than everyone? Is it relief of boredom? The prize at the end?

Again, thanks for the input.