So I can’t sleep….. i’ve been reading about game design for the past two weeks and want to build my application already and am waiting on my designer to get back to me.  We’ve been going back and forth about what our application should look like and do and finally what Eric Reis and Steve Blank talk about finally clicked in my brain.

I don’t know shit.  It’s not that I literally don’t know shit.  It’s just that all I have are assumptions.  I assume that my users will want to do this.  i assume that my users will want to do that.  I really don’t know what they will do in a real world situation.  In the game design book ‘Rules of Play’, they talk about getting your game out to game testers as early as possible because you need to figure out what works.  If it’s all in your head, then it’s impossible to see whether or not it works.  It also doesn’t make sense to just build a game then test it after it’s all built.  You need to test the game constantly to test whether or not it’s playable and if people understand what you’re trying to do.

Another way to think about it is this way.  If you had to bet your life on whether or not a feature worked, would you?  Would you risk your first born on a feature?  Probably not.  BUT, if I told you that you had the option of testing that feature out compare to the current model to see if it would work, wouldn’t you want to test it first?  No one really knows wtf they’re talking about,  even entrepreneurs who’ve done it before.  They may have some insight, but that insight still needs to be tested and validated.

This is the whole concept of customer development. Don’t wait till the end to get it in front of some customers.  Create an assumption, ask people about it, test out the theory.  If it sticks, move on and build a prototype to get out in front of ppl.  Just keep iterating and testing it front of people as you go.  Eventually you’ll get something that makes sense and has a market fit.