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Lessons learned from a failed poker software business

mattmazur.com

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Re: Lessons learned from a failed poker software business

#31

Post by arockwell »

Tichy wrote: post #28
arockwell wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they're spending that much money on advertising doesn't that imply that they are unremarkable? Advertising isn't a bad thing, but if your only differentiator is advertising you're probably screwed.

Unremarkable or not, they do make a lot of money.

Right, but remarkable and unremarkable have nothing to do with making money, but I don't really want to turn this into an argument about semantics. A similar quote that I prefer on this subject is "Be so good they can't ignore you".

I think the message is simply you're better off focusing on making a great product than making a really great ad campaign for a product.

Re: Lessons learned from a failed poker software business

#32

Post by Tichy »

arockwell wrote: post #31
Tichy wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unremarkable or not, they do make a lot of money.

Right, but remarkable and unremarkable have nothing to do with making money, but I don't really want to turn this into an argument about semantics. A similar quote that I prefer on this subject is "Be so good they can't ignore you". I think the message is simply you're better off focusing on making a great product than making a really great ad campaign for a product.

The only reason I argue against this is that I think it would be a shame if a great product fails because of a wanting advertising strategy. I think not even Apple would be where it is now without advertising.

Sure, it would be nice to be "so great they can't ignore you", but how likely is it to be like that? Is it more effective to keep trying to create that super product, or maybe invest more to make your normal, really good product sell?

Re: Lessons learned from a failed poker software business

#33

Post by lazyant »

matt1 wrote: post #26
lazyant wrote: post #20

Perhaps you can make an online free version and put some ads?

Given the small target audience, I don't think it would be worth it to convert it into a free web app. Anyone that wants to toy with it is welcomed to download the desktop app now anyway.

I was mentioning it because there may be people interested in a web version of the poker calculators. As far as I know the known names (pokerstove etc) are all Windows-based and only Ed Miller has an online equity calculator in his page.

There may be more poker players like me who doesn't use Windows at home and I could see the value of having a re-sized small web window while playing with just three boxes (pot, my stack, opponent's stack) plus a small pre-selection of opponents ranges (ex: top 10%, top 40%, any two) so it can be used in real time.

Re: Lessons learned from a failed poker software business

#34

Post by Retric »

jd wrote: post #6
mynameishere wrote: post #3

Does "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 h…

I suspect that the best long term stable strategie is to randomly assign a personal value for this hand. Something like .75 to 2x the actual value of your hand before the bet to reduce the amount of signal your sending out. If your both doing this and playing perfect poker then nobody wins.

Finding what the best random function might be would be an interesting test of machine learning. But in the real world few players are going to do something like this so finding out what their approach is is going to be a better approach.

Re: Lessons learned from a failed poker software business

#35

Post by time_management »

I wouldn't consider this a failure. Guessing that you don't want to run into legally shady territory (assuming you're in the US) and start an online gambling site, it's hard as hell to make money in anything related to games, especially public-domain card games. For example, I'd doubt that the designers of card games like FreeCell and Ambition ever made a cent off their inventions.

I'll point this out, though: games do well when the economy tanks, so I wouldn't give it up just yet. (Monopoly was invented, in its modern form, during the Great Depression.)

Re: Lessons learned from a failed poker software business

#36

Post by [deleted] »

vlad wrote: post #4

I 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.

[deleted]

Re: Lessons learned from a failed poker software business

#37

Post by alexhu »

I'm guessing your problem is a miscalculation in target market.

People will be either

1: Very good at poker. In which case they can go through this mental, odds-calculating process in their head without the need for software. or

2: Not very good at poker. In which case your software is immensely confusing. They need to be able to put opponents on a range of hands (how does a novice guess what an opponent most likely has? half-likely has?) in less than 20 seconds (the time online poker software gives to each player per turn).

I play poker pretty often, and can tell you that odds calculation is never a fixed thing (so it's hard to replicate with software), and even considering my poker background, the screenshots of your program still confused me.

Re: Lessons learned from a failed poker software business

#38

Post by papersports »

cabalamat wrote: post #17
Tichy wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

> In some businesses, there simply is no other way. For example recently I heard from some online dating services I don't think advertising is necessary for an online dating service. For example, quite a few of my friends are on OK Cupid, and as far as I know they don't do much advertising. "Advertising is a tax for being unremarkable" is a really succinct way of putting it.

OK Cupid is free and freemium, isn't it?

I think a free product or service is in trouble if it has to advertise.

Perhaps the quote should read: "Advertising is a tax for being unremarkable, and/or not free."

Re: Lessons learned from a failed poker software business

#39

Post by [deleted] »

Tichy wrote: post #32
arockwell wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, but remarkable and unremarkable have nothing to do with making money, but I don't really want to turn this into an argument about semantics. A similar quote that I prefer on this subject is "Be so good they can't ignore you". I think the message is simply you're better off focusing on making a great product than making a really great ad campaign for a product.

The only reason I argue against this is that I think it would be a shame if a great product fails because of a wanting advertising strategy. I think not even Apple would be where it is now without advertising. Sure, it would be nice to be "so great they can't ignore you", but how likely is it to be like that? Is it more effective to keep trying to create that super product, or maybe invest more to make your normal, r…

[deleted]

Re: Lessons learned from a failed poker software business

#40

Post by sokoloff »

Tichy wrote: post #21
cabalamat wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In some businesses, there simply is no other way. For example recently I heard from some online dating services I don't think advertising is necessary for an online dating service. For example, quite a few of my friends are on OK Cupid, and as far as I know they don't do much advertising. "Advertising is a tax for being unremarkable" is a really succinct way of putting it.

Even if you can be successful without advertising, it seems a bit silly to be against it. If you know that by investing 100000$ in advertising, you can earn another 1000000$ in revenue, why would you not do it? Just because it loses you points in the indie scene? I used to be all negative about advertising, but I changed my attitude since I realized that nature itself relies heavily on advertising. A beautiful flower…

One example answer is that if your gross margin is anything under 10%, you shouldn't spend $100m in advertising for $1mm in marginal revenue.

Doesn't happen often in software, of course.

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