Zynga is a social gaming giant. Farmville,their largest game, has more than 69 million monthly active users, making it larger than Twitter. Unlike many companies, Zynga also monetizes these users effectively with virtual goods and advertising. Zynga makes a huge amount of real money – while the company is private, 2009 revenues are projected to be around $100 million.
Today I listened to a podcast of a talk from Mark Pincus, CEO/Founder of Zynga and Bing Gordon of KPCB. In this podcast, Mark shared some of Zynga’s methods of creating phenomenally successful social games. As with almost all successful start-ups, Mark uses an appropriate version of customer development and rapid iteration.
Mark talked about how they assess demand for new products and features without taking up engineering hours. All of his methods are pure customer development/agile start-up.
How Zynga Assesses Market Demand
– Create a 5-word pitch for a new product or feature
– Put it up on a high traffic webpage
– If it gets clicks, collect the emails of interested customers
– Build a ‘ghetto’ version of the feature
– Test everything
– Iterate constantly
This post is about the process that the creators of Farmville go through during product development, and how it is so closely tied to their customers. If you are interested, click through the original link to the whole pod cast that is in the intro.
