The power of contests

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Diary of a failed startup

Diary of a Failed Startup

So, here's the collection of lessons learned. I'm going to frame these as advice, but everyone should remember Buchheit's Law: "Advice = Limited Life Experience + Overgeneralization". This is one startup, and not even a successful one at that. There are many ways to succeed, and even more ways to fail, and so there will likely be exceptions to every single one of these rules.

Using games to attract visitors

Become One With the Game

From the article:

So what do original games get you?

If you're Burger King, you get year-over-year double-digit sales growth, as well as a marketing program that has generated significant revenue. After launching three original Xbox games during the 2006 holiday season, the brand reportedly sold more than 3.5 million units in just eight weeks, at a price of $3.99 each with the purchase of a value meal -- making them among the best-selling games that year.

For Orbitz, playable banner-games routinely get the online travel site higher click-through, registration and conversion rates than any other ad unit -- making games a leading driver of traffic to the site, and an efficient source of customer acquisition. And in a commoditized category, in which consumers have only limited, need-driven interactions with brands, it helps give Orbitz a personality.

An example

An example of a simple site idea that gets a fair amount of traffic:

'Tank on Empty' is a gas, gas... gasp: Tales from beyond E

"Google Analytics says I've had about 600,000 page views and over 110,000 visits since it started," he says. "My server, on the other hand, would disagree -- it's transferred closer to 3 million page views."

Totspot

"It’s a bit of a cross between an online scrapbook and a MySpace page."

Totspot Teaches My Children About DataPortability

Prototyping user interfaces

Gives you an easy way to sketch out a UI or a screen shot for a web site:

Download a Stencil Kit

More importantly it points out how easy it is to do sketching like this. You can simply cut and past from web sites that you like to create a sketch of wat your UI might look like.