"My startup has grown and now has gatekeepers, how do I use them effectively?"
You mention that this is a playbook on making enterprise sales. I think that's slightly different, ie:
"My startup is selling to an enterprise that has gatekeepers, how do I work with them?"
Within your own organisation you have a relationship with the gatekeepers, but as an external startup / salesperson you don't. Do you have any extra tips or thoughts on that?
Does it mean you must simultaneously sell to both the gatekeepers and non-gatekeepers?
Or sell to the non-gatekeepers and show them how to cross-sell to the gatekeepers? Can they do that bottom-up or across their business, or does that need to come top-down within their business?
Teaching non-gatekeepers how to approach them is often a critical component - especially in highly-regulated markets like education, healthcare, finance.
While Eric's lense is on a startup, the strategies he recommends are great suggestions for customer executives.
For example, if you hear "we've got a budget cap or we have to put out a bid." A fairly standard policy for most organizations with some government funding.
What you might not know is that all of these policies have a "sole-sourcing" exception. If your champion will submit a statement on why you are the only vendor capable of fulfilling their specific requirements, the bid clause is waived.
I learned that by taking the initiative to contact the CFOs of organizations I was pursuing and letting them know I wanted to better understand the requirements/regulations their business units needed to follow.
I was also able to help a few internal champions summon the courage to ask their contacts within procurement by sharing "this is what we've seen at other orgs we've worked with, perhaps your policy is similar?"
In the end, helping champions reduce their fear of an internal regulatory smack down is often the key to creating permission for innovation. To some degree, most "back office" functions see themselves as a service unit, even if their business units don't.
We're making enterprise sales to mining companies, and while we see interest from the front-line users, they can sometimes struggle to get wider support within their company. In particular finance to get the budget to run a small experimental project without clear ROI, and IT to get access to internal data sources on a trial basis. And these non-gatekeepers are getting that response for their own internal initiatives as well, not just what we are trying to sell.
So sounds like we should make a two-pronged approach:
1) Do some customer dev type work with the gatekeepers, to find out what they want to see
2) Share what we learn from 1) with the non-gatekeepers, to help them get support internally
It's an interesting strategy that I've wondered about before - make lots of games until you make a hit, or at least have lots of things bringing in a small amount each. Even internally, it's worth prototyping lots of ideas to find the best one to develop into a full game.
However, with over 700,000 apps on the app store, it's incredibly hard to get noticed at all. Therefore I think there's some value in working on something over a longer time frame, trying to build up a community around it.
Back around September of last year Jay and I were at a bit of a crossroads - keep going with ZOS/C3O, or switch to something else. In the end we decided to part ways, Jay left Binary Space in December and I decided to keep making updates for ZOS and C3O. I'm buying out Jay's share of Binary Space by giving him a share of revenue for the next several years.
Back in 2010-2012 we were trying to build Binary Space into a legitimate business - ie something that could support us full-time. I agree that indie game dev is incredibly hard to make a living from. I've now scaled my ambitions back to it just being a hobby. It's a fun hobby though, and it makes enough money to pay for itself :)
We spent about $1600 on ads, resulting in about 3,000,000 impressions and about 2,000 clicks through to the app's promo page (http://www.class3outbreak.com/iphone-ipad-ipod-touch/games/z...). From there it's impossible to tell how many of those people bought the game, but I assume it's much less than 100%.
Those clicks cost us 80c each. This is not effective for a $1 app which gives a 70c profit after Apple's 30% cut. Even for a $2 app, it would only be effective if about 60% of people who clicked the ad bought the app - it seems unlikely that it would be anywhere near that high.
Most advertising seems to cost about $1 per click. Based on the cost per click and the potential return from a sale I don't think advertising is cost-effective for promoting apps. The only way it might work is if you spend tens of thousands of dollars, so you're on "all" the websites and so "everyone" becomes aware of your app. Therefore it gets talked about, and each click results in potentially more than one sale, by spreading through word of mouth. This also only works if the game is good enough :)
I mentioned briefly in the blog post that we got a few reviews written up. Jay contacted dozens of review sites and sent out about 20-30 review codes. We had a poor response.
In the end I think the only marketing that was really effective was that we had an existing community around the web versions of our games - at the time of ZOS's release we had about 30,000 visitors a month to our website, and about 8,000 fans on Facebook. I think this is the main reason that we did as well as we did :)
The bombs ended up being about 45% of revenue, so I think that financially that's a "success". Of course the total revenue is still not great, but I think that has more to do with the overall appeal and/or visibility of the game than saying that bombs failed.
But yes, the bombs still bother me from an ethical point of view.
I think freemium / consumable IAPs can work, in a way that leaves players feeling like it was worth their money. However I don't think they really suit the 'gameplay' of ZOS (it's not even really a game - more of a toy).
In the next update for ZOS I'm planning to make the bombs free. I think they were an interesting experiment - they earned a bit of money and were an interesting learning experience. However ultimately I've learned that IAPs don't make sense for the type of game that ZOS is.
"My startup has grown and now has gatekeepers, how do I use them effectively?"
You mention that this is a playbook on making enterprise sales. I think that's slightly different, ie:
"My startup is selling to an enterprise that has gatekeepers, how do I work with them?"
Within your own organisation you have a relationship with the gatekeepers, but as an external startup / salesperson you don't. Do you have any extra tips or thoughts on that?
Does it mean you must simultaneously sell to both the gatekeepers and non-gatekeepers?
Or sell to the non-gatekeepers and show them how to cross-sell to the gatekeepers? Can they do that bottom-up or across their business, or does that need to come top-down within their business?
Thanks.