Being first doesn't win if nobody understands what you're selling. The speaker introduced gamification in 2006 to blank stares, but when FarmVille and Foursquare launched in 2009, the market suddenly got it. Timing your product to when people are ready beats racing ahead.
Spanish. What you need to be able to do is read the market timing and time the launch of your product accordingly. A common misconception about startups is that they're most successful if they come out ahead of the market. But that's in fact entirely wrong. You categorically do not want to be a startup that nobody understands at all. Okay? Let me tell you my story. In 2006, I gave my first talk on gamification. And I got up and I was like, wouldn't it be awesome if we could use games to help the world and change the way people behave and get into product design and that would be kind of awesome? And the people in the room were just like, what the fuck are you talking about? It took until 2009 and the advent of two big breakout products, FarmVille by Zynga, which some of you might remember, and Foursquare. And it wasn't until these two products came into the market and became successful that people finally understood what I was talking about because they were like, "Oh, right. Games can get people to do shit that makes no sense."
