Spaceteam has to be one of my favorite multiplayer/in person mobile games but one of the things that makes it fun is the app itself creates the chaos and time crunch. Do you see the card game being able to maintain that same level of excitement and chaos?
For sure! That was our biggest design challenge with converting it over. We have a sand timer that helps, but that time crunch feeling is something that's generated by the players oddly enough.
In the card game, you're frantically trying to work through malfunctions that are repaired by different tools that your teammates have around the table. When, and only when, you get through a chunk of your pile, you were begin to reveal the System Go cards that restart your Spaceship. We also bring in physical activities such as people needing to change seats or tools switching hands to keep the chaos alive throughout the 5 minutes.
We're currently working to boil all that down and bring it right out in front to fix this problem. Basically what happened here was this version of the home page was somewhere between a teaser and functional homepage. We've been working on so many other parts of the business, we let one of the most important pages slip. We're hoping to fix this with our new design coming out soon.
"Get funding for your software project from early adopters who care. Ramen lets you raise money from users who help test and develop your product."
Your homepage lacks clear instructions for either startup projects or investor/users. Have a clear look at the frontpage of ramen.is from the perspective of a user, then look at sites like YouTube, Soundcloud, BBC iPlayer, Kickstater and so on. These are all trying to seduce people in to look at things that are new and fresh.
Then look at it from the perspective of the startup entrepreneur. Business users want to see both clear instructions on how to use the site and what they'll get out of it, as well as seeing activity of existing projects, case studies of companies that have used it before.
You aren't doing that good at providing either.
Just some constructive criticism, I hope. Interesting project.
Yup, your landing page is very confusing. (mine once was too!) My best suggestion is to grab a few people who would be your typical audience, physically sit them next to them and watch/listen as you ask them things like:
UserTesting (the folks behind Peek) shot us over a promo code to get the first 100 of you to the front of the line if you want to give it a whirl: ramenreader
For anyone who's not familiar with the term: A wantrepreneur is an individual that desires to be, but is not quite yet, an entrepreneur. It sometimes has a negative tone that suggests they'll never be an entrepreneur.
I disagree with Urban Dictionary[1] on that definition. An entrepreneur who is trying to succeed, but has not, is just an unsuccessful entrepreneur. The negative context is what embodies the "wannabe" in "wantrepreneur", like "gangsta" and "wanksta". It is an insult. The person using the term thinks you have the desire to be seen as an entrepreneur, but neither the skills, nor the inclination, to actually build anything.
The author seems to have a decent amount of experience using many services. He does breakdown each by price, memory, and any cons about them which is helfpul.
Thanks, the article was indeed interesting, even though reliability is what interests me the most. The "99.99% uptime SLA" mentioned on digitalocean's website means up to 3.5 days of downtime per year unless I'm mistaken.
99% uptime is 3.65 days (3 days 15hrs) of downtime.
99.9% uptime is 0.365 days (8 hrs 45 min) of downtime.
99.99% uptime is 0.0365 days (52 min 33 sec) of downtime.
It's also hard for the average person to catch unless they have users that are going to complain or a secondary service to constantly test the connection. And if they fail to deliver 99.99%, you just get a proportional credit. The benefits of advertising 99.99% usually outweigh the consequences of failing to deliver.
Edit: It also always depends on what uptime really means. I have one hoster who regularly does "network maintenance" where their entire network goes down for several hours. This can happen several times per year. So there's no easy failover.
It's so incredibly annoying. A few years back even their corporate site went down during such outages. They have that fixed now but I can't move all sites due to political reasons...
