Ok, I've been keeping quiet, but...

It's time for a bit of a reality check here.

Imagine, for a moment, that you've been invited to invest in a new business. You attend the investor meeting, and the sales pitch is as follows:

We're going to project an online presence that does everything you've ever wanted, and if you pay us enough money, we'll do anything you specifically want.

We don't have a working prototype.
We don't have a locked in domain.
We don't have a business plan.

We don't have a funding goal. It was only announced recently that they want to reach 4kUSD in order to consider themselves funded for development.
We don't have a solid plan for what system of maths we're going to be coding around.

We do have:
A long list of ambitious features
A web site about what we want to accomplish, and to show off how much money that has been contributed.
A resignation letter before we're fully funded.

Much as I'd like to be supportive,

There aren't any profitable, money making go servers outside of asia. KGS, I have heard, and I believe, does not make money with its adverts and KGS+ subscribers, it makes enough to keep the server running and maintained.
So, what's your business plan? How do you plan, assuming you do manage to program this server, how do you plan to make it profitable, given that it is a heavily niche market, even in Asia, and a well saturated market in the west? You've quit your jobs for this, great, but how do you plan to keep this going past asking people to invest without chance of return?

What is your development schedule? If 4k gets you a couple months of development, what is that 2 months buying us? A demo? A beta? Nothing finished? What of your features list are you going to prioritize on that initial investment in order to have a working product by the end?

I'm, honestly, amazed that people have given you this much money, given that all I've seen is blind enthusiasm, and a complete lack of business planning.

People talk about it wanting it to be 'bigger than tygem'. How do you plan to get there? Given that tygem's base demographic is much broader and more exposed to go than the western world, how do you plan to attract that sort of demographic?

I wish the server developers all the luck in the world.
But seriously, if you're going to start a business, you may wish to plan a little more before doing an investor call.

Sure, I wouldn't invest large somes of money hoping for a profitable return either. But one can make small donations for a dream, even if that dream is somewhat unlikely to become reality.

As I have been involved a lot with matters of web development and especially user interface design, I am getting a good idea of where this is going from the responses by Gabriel and Patricio, and that is good enough to me.

The go market may be comparatively small, but it's really not "small small". Especially if you succeed at also tapping into the asian markets, there is plenty of potential. KGS has a huge user base, there are plenty of projects who are quite profitable with less than that. It's not just about the numbers, it is also about quality and how you monetize the user base (as well as cutting down costs of course). None of the existing go servers presents a truly modern experience, or take advantage of modern technologies. There is no telling what will happen if somebody does it right from the start. Perhaps it won't be enough, but we won't know before we try. And nobody can (seriously) try without some kind of funding.

It is also worth considering that it is quite possible to make some kind of living from teaching go. If that is possible, why should it not be possible to make a living from providing a go service that is cherished by a majority of go players? That's inconceivable. Imagine for example, this go service would provide the best interface for people to provide lessons or teaching games online, and in turn would take a small cut from the fees that are being paid. This is just one possibility and we don't know what they will actually end up doing, but if there is one thing I learned about web projects, then it is that creating a user base is always the first step, and once you got it, finding a way to create revenue from it is usually not that hard. This is why investors tend to be head-over-heels whenever a project is gathering a critical mass of users, whatever their business plan may be (or not be).

The bottom line is, if we don't take a small leap of faith, then we will never know. As a go fan I'd rather know, so I happily take that leap. And even if it ends up being a failure, we will have learned from it and hopefully gained a new appreciation for quality in go related services. Because that is something we are severely lacking at the moment. It's like we are all still living about 10 to 20 years in the past, with nobody even attempting to make serious strides forward.

Someone dropped 1k for this. It's their money, and yours, you're free to do as you like. But really, really, I feel like people need to be aware that there's a significant chance that even if the greatest server ever gets coded, there's a chance that the business will not succede.



This is true. But I'd be more inclined to believe that they had a plan for monetizing the user base, cutting costs, etc etc, if they had a plan for doing that. Thus far, there has been no compelling presentation of a business model that shows that they have thought at all about how they're going to make money, only a desire to leverage new technologies to do everything everyone ever wanted. That's super keen and all. And it may be the best server of all time. But a business without a monetary plan is not a business.





Teaching go is only workable as a business with either A) high fees, or B) a high user base. Go Juan, for instance, goes with the high user base. Also, it is generally suplemental income, not primary income, for pros. For amatuers teaching, it is rarely a decent monthly income.

I don't know of many teachers eager to go pay someone else a cut to play teaching games. I'm not sure what more you need besides a /board/ and audio/text capabilities. I don't really need to see my teacher's smiling face in order to hear when he's joking with me about my latest terrible move. KGS is A) free, and B) provides an adequate teaching service, for free. Maybe not 'the best ever', but.. Free.. Free is worth a LOT of inconvenience in the business world.

So, this server is competing with a FREE and ADEQUATE and ESTABLISHED server. This is an uphill battle. And while I've read that it's going to be the coolest high tech awesomest server of all time...

I've yet to read a compelling reason that it's better than Free, Adequate, and Established.



Actually, the bottom line is, this is a high risk venture being undertaken without adequate planning or forethought.

If the service is the iPod/Phone/Pad of go servers and causes some sort of grand paradigm shift, awesome, I'll gladly eat my words, and congratulate the programmers and all.

But, I feel it necessary to point out,

The Emperor.
He has no clothes.

I don't think this is particularly meaningful on its own without knowing how much the mystery person earns. There are thresholds of money where I'd happily put thousands into vague new go server projects, but I wouldn't personally right now.

CSamurai, your negativity is grating.

You simply cannot say that there is a lack of planning and forethought. You can say that there is a lack of information about plans. They have stated before that for instance they have some plans for monetization, which they are not disclosing at this point.

They have no obligation whatsoever to disclose anything to us. Everything they disclose they do so with the intent of gathering support. If you are not convinced to provide that support, then you simply don't. Others are more willing to give G&P the benefit of the doubt and see where they are going with it.

It is possible to support people who take significant risks for the hobby we love, without being convinced of gaining a personal advantage out of it.

For me, the issue is more than simple: If they wouldn't be doing it, I would be doing it. And frankly, I feel more comfortable with them taking that risk at this point. Everything I have seen and heard so far fills me with confidence that this has a chance, which is a plus.

My calculation: If the project is a failure, almost nothing is lost (for me, that is). If the project is a success, the implications will be tremendous. Some people buy lottery tickets for an almost non-existent chance of success. I rate the chance of this project being a success considerably higher....

As for the emperor, you are not qualified to judge whether he is wearing clothes or not, because you haven't actually seen him yet. At this point in time, the status of the emperor's clothes is undefined.

And of course it has to be free, at least in the beginning. Pay-to-play is not likely to work, but there are many other ways to monetize a large user base, which also tend to be more effective.

So it will be free, adequate and established, vs. free, more than adequate but not established. It was exactly the same situation for KGS when they arrived on the scene, so this is not an impossible obstacle to overcome. It all hinges on how much more than adequate it will be.

Would you say...



More seriously, I'm not trying to be negative. Again, people are free to spend their money how they see fit, and I hope the best go server ever does come out of this.

But realistically, I haven't seen any evidence that there is a plan, any evidence of a development schedule or plan, or any evidence of a solid business plan. They were/are still debating which ratings system to use, which is a fairly large portion of the maths of server construction.

I like kickstarter projects. I've contributed to a few that got funding.

All the projects I've invested in have had clear goals, clear products, and clear timelines.

The knowledge that the coders tendered their resignations before getting a month of funding together does not fill me with warm fuzzies about the level headed, forethought and planning nature of these individuals. In fact, it screams, to me, of impulsiveness. Passion, and belief, yes, but I have lived off passion and belief before, and I got really, really, really hungry.

I'm glad you have faith in them.

I hope they do manage to produce a good product.

But they're asking for money, I don't think it's out of place to ask:

What is the plan, exactly? What is my money going to actually accomplish?

There are now 50 contributors. As I said earlier, I offer a free teaching game to every mutiple of 7 until we reach 126.

So, who was 49 ?

We have made a small geek section summary to the site. Being short, we are using a Ruby framework and heavily Javascript client code. Javascript will be the main language regarding what will be open in the server eventually, as whatever happens in the client side is very unlikely to produce security concerns or usability issues. (if a widget doesnt work , it wont affect the others).

There are many developers out there that would love to contribute with small features or widgets and we plan to allow that. However you can imagine that it requires source control, and a procedure, and a stable server version before we open it up. So if you want to put in developer hours you will be able to, at a later point.

So today we are more in need of supporters. The more people and moeny we raise this way, the easier it will be to convince an investor to put big money behind it.



Hey CSamurai, let me address some of your concerns.

First of all, a call for community support is not a call for investors. Supporters are not getting a % of a company and are not liable in any way for what happens in the server. Investors have a much different relationship with a venture.

Community support is about helping an initiative that wants to make the very same community richer and more active. We offer in return recognition, and other treats to know they are special for putting their faith in us. But we also have supporters that have made pledges and desired to keep their identity secret(like the Kisei) or that have supported a featured and said that "whatever we think is fine, i just wanted to help you".

We dont have a show-able prototype, but we do have working software. That is a common request, and its only natural. You want to know more, so does pel and other people that are intrigued, but want more confirmation. So do investors, since a prototype greatly reduces the perceived risk.
We are working on that, and we have made clear from the start of this support-call that we didnt have a demo. This matter was addressed many times in this very thread, you can look back and check it out.

I dont get what you mean about the locked domain. We have it locked, or so says GoDaddy. What am i missing?

About the business plan. We do have one, a well written one, with statistics, estimates, development schedule, pronostications, details of the team, techonologies, market, reference businesses, competitors, etc etc.
Its just not public. We ARE talking to investors. We have moved our business plan in angel rings and VC's, contests and gaming companies. That's actually how we found our will-be iPad publisher.

The story with the funding goal is the following. We started this whole crowd-sourcing ordeal with idea.me, a site very much like kickstarter, but were we could actually show up. (not being american, we couldnt be in the latter). There, we had the 4k dollar goal, which is what we estimate will give us enough time to build a working beta or a decent demo. We estimate that based on the fact that our dev server already works, open/closes games, chats, channels, and starts games.

But idea.me did not support paypal, and the payment portal was pretty bad. So bad, foreigners couldnt make a transaction. So we dropped idea.me and started our own website. We thought of putting the 4k dollar goal to match, but we are thinking that we will soon surpass it and we would like to keep it open. At least 4k is not the criteria we have to stop the community support call.
So instead we want to make some fancy graph showing different milestones, but we haven't gotten around on it.

All that said, you can imagine and so do the people that support us, that 4k or 8k is not enough to build a server, its a long road. This funding is not going to give us infinite time, just a head start. If we can develop for 2 months without thinking about money, we can have a good beta/demo,which gives us bigger leverage with investors.

About the system of maths, im not sure what you are talking about. Are you thinking of the rating system? or are you talking about the computational complexity and performance requirements of the application? We have chosen tools specifically designed to this very purpose, from the DB to the connection-handler. If your concern was the rating, not matter what we choose, a rating system can be implemented plug&play.

About the "resignation letter" comment. Again and again i will repeat, if we dont get the crowd-funding goals we want, we are doing this ANYWAY. Having already resigned is only to show you guys our commitment.
But happening anyway doesnt mean that the support is point-less. Quite the contrary, as looking for investors in 2, 3, 4 months is going to be much more fruitful than doing it today. Its going to be more solid and a lot more clear.
Looking for money takes time and energy. it took us 3 days of part-time work to make a single contest presentation of our project( guys cross your fingers for september).

And if we dont find any investor, becuase they are all stupid and think we suck, then we have our own funds for a long period of time, which we have been saving up to this very goal since we started this journey in end March/start April.

And if after a year of developing, we dont find a business model or can't make it profitable in time, then the most likely scenario is that we open-source the whole server. So as we see it, even the worst case scenario is a gain for the community.

So if you worry about what happens if we dont get the 4k goal or any other: don't worry. We are in this 100% already.




I have been telling all those that asked for dates the same that it was published in Go Sensations. I want to have a solid demo or beta by October 20~, so i can show it in KPMC and also to a group of pros i know there.
We dont want to advertise launch dates or make promises we might not want to keep. The server will be live when its good and usable , and not because we are approaching a deadline. We are believers of the Agile methodology of software development, that makes you see our application as a value product that gets richer each week, instead of thinking of a finite application that after reaching a set date or group of features its finished.
When it has enough value, it will be live.

We have a few strategies in the planning regarding the Asian community, but there is no rush to them. The Bar to compare to Asian clients is higher than to compare to KGS. In the line of production, we believe we will provide more than KGS sooner that providing more than those servers.
That said we have a few ideas (impossible to reproduce by Asian Servers) that have the potential to attract professional players. We think that if we get them, the asian community will follow. This very OCtober i want to stay there for a couple of weeks to make some quick-dirty demos to show some high level pros and get some feedback, and use as research.

As you can get by now, we are now working from our very own community, the western one.

This was a long one I hope your concerns are addressed CSamurai, and that if your doubts are cleared you might want to consider helping us out. Even if you dont want to support, you can help us out in many other ways, like the feedback section of the site, or telling your friends about Kaya.gs.


Edit: CSamurai, if you want to know more aobut our business model, pm me. I am willing to say some of what we plan, but i dont want to say anything in public that could get mis-interpreted. As with many web-ventures, what we think is good now can change drastically when the server is up with users in 5 months. Plus talking about finantials publicly feels a little out of place to me. The server will be of course free to play.

_________________
Founder of Kaya.gs

The question of monetizing was raised earlier in this thread and while it is encouraging to hear there are plans I am not particularly convinced they will work, especially as playing itself will be free. (And there are ample opportunities to play online free of cost, so you won't convince people to join if you start a server with a fee to play.)

If the whole traffic is on a website advertisements may work, but I am not sure how much money this is supposed to earn. You may imagine "plus-accounts" (or another way to monetize possibly unique bonus features) as is practice elsewhere, but again they are not creating a particular impressive revenue stream judging from KGS. You may try to monetize on side bets on ongoing games, but you are heading for trouble as betting business is highly regulated / taxed etc. You may want to take a fee on all those teachers utilising the superior teaching facilities offered there. You may want to sell rank certificates when you finally settled for the best rating system in town - but I doubt online players are eager to pay for a paper (however nicely it looks). You can sell the player data to the highest bidder (no don't do that.) And here I am out of "monetizing" ideas, to me it looks the main idea is make Koreans, Chinese, Japanese play on the server in high numbers, then it may work out.

However, making presentations in Korea isn't enough - even if you find some people who like the idea and like to support you, even if you have a unique product. I am told e.g. that when the Western community had study software w/ game databases to offer sth. at that time not available in CJK (I don't know about now) there was about zero enthusiasm for the whole thing and no market in CJK and evidently the study cum database software had a no sizeable return on investment. Surely not MasterGo, surely not GoGoD (just imagine the time TMark spent in going over all those games again), maybe SmartGo is earning a little now with iPhone apps but it is like a big software package w/ reasonably strong computer opponent, study opportunities, database all incl., maybe MoyoGo did earn a little when new on the market, but surely they didn't earn much. Surely not GoBase or BiGo either.

You are in luck. He put a facebook link: http://www.facebook.com/norman.richards

Funny, the guy will get two games, he donated for the baptism games. We have e only 1 game left.

_________________
Founder of Kaya.gs

Well this is a reason why we dont go out in public with the business model. We have plans, but they can change.
The presentation in korea is to set a milestone to future users, and to talk to pros to gather information. What all western ventures probably didn't do was talk to the asians and find out what they want. Thats what my prolonged stay in korea is about: what do pros want on a server.

That said i do not fancy a business model discussion like this, less in a forum. I could present you with the business/finantial model of twitter, facebook, wikipedia, kickstarter, groupon and many other's more and they probably wouldnt survive scrutiny neither here nor there. And we have a definite successful business with a name we are modeling ourselves after to.
Giving anyone satisfaction and confidence about whatever we model we pick is too high a standard, and it requires personal meetings , hours of talk and demonstrations to do so. That amount of energy and effort is obviously reserved for investors.

_________________
Founder of Kaya.gs

I hope you don't regret this joke.

Why would he ? Notice the word ''if''... I'm pretty sure it applies to the rest of the sentence .

It's still unprofessional to imply, even jokingly, that anyone who refuses to invest is a moron. Ironically, many people, when they are insulted, or even criticized constructively, stupidly make the irrational decision to refuse to listen anymore, a.k.a. not invest. Does kaya.gs seriously think investors with human biases are going to miss this page?

We have uploaded a quick-dirt geek section at last.

We just touch on the particular architectural details of the application and the main tools.

We will be improving that information over the course of the following weeks.

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Founder of Kaya.gs

A terrible question.... have you any plans to monetize through gambling on outcomes or performance?

Although gambling in the future might be a possibility we explore, definitely not something we are relying or planning to.

So the answer is no, definitely not right now.

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Founder of Kaya.gs

Excellent! Thanks . Good stuff right there .

The geek section is great! When can we expect the backstage section?

The backstage footage & documentary are being filmed. The whole idea is to make a neat video once the server goes live ,showing all the progress and big events since we launched the call for support.

Right now we have over an hour of footage, but of course it is only the beginning of the Documentary. So when will it be finished? probably a few weeks after the server goes live.

You guys will have to wait to see it . There is no way around it, the grand finale is the server going live.

_________________
Founder of Kaya.gs