Chris Boos: Passion Drives Business - Two Exemplary HackFwd Company Profiles

The following was originally posted by Chris Boos, HackFwd Referrer and legendary geek, at his blog Chris Boos on Automation. We have the pleasure of cross-posting it here.

Now let me talk about the HackBoxes – the term for HackFwd companies.

Let me start out with a company I put into the dead pool only 9 months ago. Delta Strike a company producing a universe as a platform for many games and writing their own game in this universe. Well 9 months ago I saw the first prototype and asked the 4 founders – in no uncertain terms – why they thought that someone should play their homemade stuff when other gaming companies invest 100 people into the same kind of game and you could see that. Since then they have completely turned around. I have rarely met a team that can handle criticism so well and actually take the content and base a decision on feedback and their own vision of what they want to do. The team has grown, mainly with passionate partners and other contributors and their game is one of the show off applications for the new Adobe 3D environment. I am not a hardcore gamer, but I think their new idea has potential and the way they dealt with really harsh feedback gives me every confidence in this team.

Also Delta Strike is an impressive example how being on the edge of technical development can push a business ahead of the competition and of how the combination of creativity/art and technical skills allow for a flexibility single talented teams cannot show easily and an enterprise IT could never achieve.

Then I want to talk about Fantasy Shopper (quoted on Twitter as the next Facebook by someone from the British government). Well everyone at HackFwd loves the idea of Fantasy Shopping in real world shops without having to spend any real money but still getting the real benefits such as discovery, bargain hunting and feedback.

Originally this game – actually it should be called platform – was intended for teenage girls, but the first tests showed us there is a potential market for this kind of application to a much broader audience. But I am getting ahead of myself. Fantasy Shopper is an virtual shopping environment modelled around real locations – i.e. if you go Fantasy Shopping in Exeter, UK (where the team is located) – you will find shops that actually exist in the real world Exeter replicated in the Fantasy universe. You can shop with Fantasy Money (the virtual currency denoted as £*), stock your wardrobe and combine your acquisitions into outfits. You can then share your newest trends and fashion ideas with your friends and get into a lot of conversation, feedback loops, trend setting experiences and so on. To make the shopping experience more goal oriented Fantasy Shopper has contests, where you have to create an outfit for a special events within a certain budget. Obviously this sounds like great fun for every shopoholic, everyone interested in fashion and everyone who wants to get the feedback from their friends and peer group before actually spending real money. There are so many possible business models for Fantasy Shopper that build an amazing case – on the assumption that they can first achieve a sustainable user base. The potential in popularity and the business interest from stores, fashion magazines and the ad industry is obvious and their early beta has shown that user interaction is even better than expected. Now the only question is when this brave new world will be online and live for the public. This is what everyone at HackFwd has been urging the team to do: PUT IT ONLINE. And I think we have succeeded in convincing the founding team there is no point in making something 200% before giving it to the market. I hope we will soon all be Fantasy Shopping.

To me Fantasy Shopper is also a great entrepreneurial story. The CEO actually posted an ad in the newspaper to find his CTO and together they applied (and were obviously accepted by) HackFwd. But that is not all. The entrepreneurs behind Fantasy Shopper also live on the bare minimum in order to use their budget exclusively for developing the company. This is the spirit we are looking for and this is the spirit where big successes are made. Connected to the passion is the ego and stubbornness to create a perfect solution and we all had a hard time to convince the team to get it out into the open, but as I said Fantasy Shopper will be available soon.

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