The Most Ingenious Game of the Last 5 Years & Juggling Monkeys
Clawee is the most ingenious game/app/experience I’ve played in the last five years. Players control a real claw machine, with the app streaming the video as players make claw moves in real-time. Everything outside of that execution is dogshit, and you know what? That’s actually okay. Not only is it okay, it’s exactly how it should be.
When Offer Yehudai was trouting the development method of FIRST putting up $500 paywalls last year, I couldn’t endorse it loud enough. In the explore-exploit framework of modern development, way, way too many devs spend too much time digging, when they don’t even know if they’re sitting on an oil well.
One of the earliest and strongest signals is demand, despite polish, not because of it.
Everything about Clawee’s UX and monetization is utterly a mess: I honestly thought it might be adware on first open. The menus respond poorly to touch, and the UI art appears to have fallen straight out of an early 2010s iPod Touch App Store featuring. However, the company’s ability to raise funds is now significantly easier. They’re operating downhill because they have real KPIs that validate their market insight. Downhill momentum is a powerful result of the dancing pedestal monkey, too!
If you’re teaching a monkey to juggle on a pedestal, the first problem to solve isn’t getting the monkey on the pedestal; it’s teaching the monkey to juggle. If you can’t solve the hard problems first, solving the easier problems is worthless. Counterintuitively, game founders should start by asking: what is the hardest part of my thesis that I need to validate first to make this whole thing worthwhile?
Many times at The Experimentation Group, we force brutal organization of ideas. The Experimentation Framework, even if not literally applied, is extremely useful: what is the thing or feature that, if I removed from your app, would cause KPIs to collapse? That’s where your real value is. That’s the thing you need to double down on or validate.