Lessons learned from a failed poker software business
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Re: Lessons learned from a failed poker software business
#2Thanks for sharing the insight. A few months of work in exchange for some valuable lessons learned - well done.
Re: Lessons learned from a failed poker software business
#3Does "estimating your opponent's hands" have any value? If you could do that with any certainty you probably don't need a calculator.
EDIT: I realize that estimating your opponent's hands is important. Basic poker there. I'm talking about "estimating your opponent's hands" which is featured in one of the calculator's screens. That seems like an iffy thing to feed into a computer. It's a garbage-in-garbage-out situation.
Re: Lessons learned from a failed poker software business
#4I don't think you had a failed poker software business. You wrote, released, and announced some software. That's simply step one, and the very minimum. Next, you need to iterate, which may include adding features found in other software, creating a web version, and more. I see very few lessons here, and they are on how to fail.
Re: Lessons learned from a failed poker software business
#5It sounds as if you didn't try any advertising at all, except for a small announcement in a poker group? I think you should have put a lot more thought into how to get users to find your product. Like, sometimes (often, maybe), people don't even know they could use something and that something they could use exists. You have to educate them.
Re: Lessons learned from a failed poker software business
#6Does "estimating your opponent's hands" have any value? If you could do that with any certainty you probably don't need a calculator. EDIT: I realize that estimating your opponent's hands is important. Basic poker there. I'm talking about "estimating your opponent's hands" which is featured in one of the calculator's screens. That seems like an iffy thing to feed into a computer. It's a garbage-in-garbage-out situati…
Being able to figure out what kind of hand your opponent has is the difference between winning and losing poker. You usually make a guess based on previous behavior, how much aggression your opponent has shown so far, the position your opponent is in (acting first is a huge disadvantage) and so on.
If you make no estimate what kind of hand your opponent has you can only reason in three ways:
a) you assume he always has the best hand. So you throw away your hand.
b) you assume he always has the worst hand. So you put your chips in.
c) you bet big if you have good cards, and you throw your cards away when your cards are lousy.
Clearly (a) and (b) are bad strategies.
The last strategy is not as bad as the other two, but still terrible. More often than not your cards are bad. So your opponent will figure out you're not willing to make large bets with lousy cards, so every time you don't bet, he will, and every time you bet, he won't. You're going to lose your chips that way. Basic game theory.
So you need to figure out what cards he could have been dealt so that his actions make sense. Then, from that range of plausible cards, figure out how often he has a better hand than you do. If you like your odds, you put your chips in. Otherwise, you throw your cards away.
It's a lot more complex than this, of course. But the point is that "estimating your opponent's hands", as difficult as it may be, is absolutely crucial if you want to win.
Re: Lessons learned from a failed poker software business
#7It sounds as if you didn't try any advertising at all, except for a small announcement in a poker group? I think you should have put a lot more thought into how to get users to find your product. Like, sometimes (often, maybe), people don't even know they could use something and that something they could use exists. You have to educate them.
Good point. I added a bit of clarification to the article since it did read like the one post was the only thing I did.
After it launched I decided that the best way to demonstrate its utility was to search poker forums for problems and then post the ALL IN Expert results. I wound up adding a feature to the software that let people export the results in a forum-friendly format which also linked back to the site. This helped bring some people to the site and if I had continued it for some time it may have brought in a few more registrations. In hindsight maybe I should have done this more. It's hard to say... No matter how much you prod a dead duck it's not gonna move much.
Re: Lessons learned from a failed poker software business
#8It sounds as if you didn't try any advertising at all, except for a small announcement in a poker group? I think you should have put a lot more thought into how to get users to find your product. Like, sometimes (often, maybe), people don't even know they could use something and that something they could use exists. You have to educate them.
Good point. I added a bit of clarification to the article since it did read like the one post was the only thing I did. After it launched I decided that the best way to demonstrate its utility was to search poker forums for problems and then post the ALL IN Expert results. I wound up adding a feature to the software that let people export the results in a forum-friendly format which also linked back to the site. This…
Were you aware of the existing (and immensely popular) free tools when you started programming?
If so, what was going to be your edge?
Re: Lessons learned from a failed poker software business
#9I don't think you had a failed poker software business. You wrote, released, and announced some software. That's simply step one, and the very minimum. Next, you need to iterate, which may include adding features found in other software, creating a web version, and more. I see very few lessons here, and they are on how to fail.
Yep, you're right. As I mentioned in the post, I use the word "business" liberally for lack of a better term. If there had been a future for the product I would have iterated, created a web app, etc, but I decided it wasn't worth the effort. As far as the lessons, figuring out how something fails is strongly tied to figuring out why it succeeds.
Re: Lessons learned from a failed poker software business
#10It sounds as if you didn't try any advertising at all, except for a small announcement in a poker group? I think you should have put a lot more thought into how to get users to find your product. Like, sometimes (often, maybe), people don't even know they could use something and that something they could use exists. You have to educate them.
Good point. I added a bit of clarification to the article since it did read like the one post was the only thing I did. After it launched I decided that the best way to demonstrate its utility was to search poker forums for problems and then post the ALL IN Expert results. I wound up adding a feature to the software that let people export the results in a forum-friendly format which also linked back to the site. This…
Not saying that it would have been successful, hard to say.
But reading "Advertising is a tax for being unremarkable” seems a bit harsh. In some businesses, there simply is no other way. For example recently I heard from some online dating services that they really boil down to the hard calculation of "how expensive is it to convert a user we bought with advertising". Like if they raise their conversion rates, they can afford more advertising, and so on. Sure, maybe sometimes there will be a "hit dating service" that spreads through word of mouth, but the others seem to do OK, too.
Especially in Poker it seems advertising is huge?