IMVU: Real Money from Virtual Goods, Media X at Stanford

0

Real Money from Virtual Goods

Brett G. Durrett (@bdurrett)

VP, Engineering & Operations

IMVU, Inc.

Media X, Stanford University, August 19, 2010

1

About Brett

• IMVU

– 2005 – present

– VP Engineering & Operations

• There.com

– Virtual world, RIP 2010

– Various executive roles, 1999-2004

• CEO Asylum Entertainment

– Video game developer

– 1992-1999, before gray hair

2

What is IMVU?

• Not a virtual world

• Not part of the healthcare industry

3

What is IMVU?

• Not a virtual world

• Not part of the healthcare industry

So why am I speaking about “Cashing In on

Virtual Worlds: Entrepreneurial Insights for

the Healthcare Industry”?

4

Why I’m Here

• IMVU is a leader in virtual goods

– Over 4 million items, worlds largest catalog

• IMVU is leveraging this to get real revenue

– Over $40 million run rate

• We have some entrepreneurial insights!

5

About the Product

• Social Entertainment

– Play games

– Create, build and share clothing and items

– Chat

• Virtual Goods

• Social networking

– Friends, groups, networks

16

About the Business

• “Freemium” model

• Website and Windows client download

• Majority revenue on credit sales

– Advertising revenue very small

• Profitable

17

Customers

• 10 million unique visitors per month

• 50 million registered users

• 2 million active users in the last 30 days

• 1.3 million fans on Facebook

– But no Facebook application

18

Who uses IMVU?

• 65% Female

• 60% United States

• 60% 18 years and older

19

What Lead to Success?

Some keys to success

• “Lean” principles

– Rapid iteration

– Build, measure, learn

• User Generated Content

20

Lean Principles

Thanks to Eric Ries, http://StartupLessonsLearned.com

21

Build

• Variation of scrum

• 2-3 week development cycles

• Continuous Deployment

– All code live to production in 20 minutes

– 20-50 changes live per day

22

Measure

• Split-test experiment system

• Real-time business metrics

– Monitoring

– Alerting

– Trending

• User tests

23

Learn

• Frequent postmortems

• ROI analysis on projects

• Transparency!

– Data shared with all employees

24

Why is Rapid Iteration Important?

Your business plan is wrong

25

Why is Rapid Iteration Important?

Your business plan is wrong

(until you are monetizing customers)

26

Why is Rapid Iteration Important?

Your business plan is wrong

(until you are monetizing customers)

As you decrease to time to learn why it is wrong

you increase your chance of success

27

Why is Rapid Iteration Important?

• No blueprint for success with virtual goods

• Probably less so in health care

28

Why User Generated Content?

• Scalable business

• Breadth of appeal

• Hit-driven business is tough

29

Virtual Goods and UGC

• Over 4 million items, 99% user-generated

• 5000 new items every 24 hours

• 30,000 creators sold items in past 30 days

30

Conclusion

• Great business opportunity

• Move fast to find it

• Leverage your customers for content

31

Thank You

Brett G. Durrett

Twitter: @bdurrett

bdurrett@imvu.com

…and many thanks to Eric Ries of the Lean Startup

Great info for entrepreneurs at http://StartupLessonsLearned.com

32

Oh Yeah…

Interested in getting more experience?

We’re hiring!

http://www.imvu.com/jobs/

An online community where members use 3D avatars

to meet new people, chat, create

and have fun with their friends