[jon914]

As a founder of a startup doing #3 (Stencyl), I can attest to that idea being an enormous time sink and risk. I can name at least 10 startups or larger companies that went after that idea and either died or pivoted.

What we have is working, and it's working well, but as we press forward, we find that our strongest value proposition is no longer the code-free aspect, which turns out to be just one small part of a larger puzzle. Once you remove that roadblock, other pain points come to light that are far more difficult to solve.

[dwiel]

any chance we might be able to read about what some of those points are?

[jon914]

Sure, I'll list out some of the pain points we're aware of and have tried to address.

- Not able to think logically. There's only so much you can accomplish if you take logical thinking out of the equation, and when you do, the creations are underwhelming. Many startups set out to make creation easy, and that works to some extent, but the real solution to the problem may be to try to educate users and bring them up to a minimum bar (learn how to fish), rather than trying to lower the bar to the floor (give them the fish). This would be suicide for most startups, but the users of creative apps are more patient and more willing to learn and grow with the app. Sure, we'll shut out some people this way, but we want to lift up the right, motivated people, rather than trying to lift the entire world up.

- Can't draw/other artistic skill. Shockingly, this ends up being a big problem, and people absolutely hate using placeholder art if they can't draw. We've addressed this by integrating a marketplace for pulling in all kinds of resources.

- Can't work with other people. Many game projects fail due to bad communication (if you're not working solo). They start out strong when brainstorming and then die somewhere in the middle, usually when the members fall out of regular contact or don't know what's going on. We've integrated some features into our app to directly address this after observing how our users interacted with each other on several group projects.

- Set their sights too high. No, you're not going to create an MMORPG or RTS as your first project. ;) This one isn't directly addressed by our app right now and falls more under the umbrella of general user education and progression. One idea we have is to incorporate game elements (turning game creation into a game?) to nudge the user towards making baby steps towards completing something through a quest structure, rather than trying to let them go free from day 1.

The take home point is that like any startup, what you set out to do ends up evolving as you move along and that the problem you're solving turns out to be different and sometimes larger than what you originally expected.