Disqus - Latest Comments for mattmaroon

Re: Troubleshooting - Whipping Siphons Class - ChefSteps

mattmaroon — Fri, 27 Dec 2013 13:45:56 -0000

Carbonated Fruit:
If I were to use this in a bar setting (for instance, say I want to garnish a drink with a carbonated orange slice) is there a way to keep them carbonated after opening? Or do I just have to use lots of small ISIs?

Re: - Recipe - ChefSteps

mattmaroon — Mon, 16 Dec 2013 17:27:27 -0000

Thanks! I'll try messing around with it.

Re: - Recipe - ChefSteps

mattmaroon — Fri, 13 Dec 2013 00:58:06 -0000

Might I ask how you came up with that exact mix of hydrocolloids? I'm fairly rookie-ish at using them. I'd kill for you guys to do a series of classes on that topic.

Anyway, why lambda carrageenan and guar?

Re: Creative Feature: Seriously Dope Artwork from ‘Darkfire Galaxies’

mattmaroon — Thu, 23 May 2013 13:05:08 -0000

Thanks for the love! We're very proud of the art in the game. Just wait until next week, the whole game is getting an overhaul.

Re: The depressing math behind consumer-facing apps

mattmaroon — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 10:06:50 -0000

Conversion rates are higher in gaming. 10% would be poor.

Re: The Easy Trade

mattmaroon — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 11:52:31 -0000

From what I understand, providing enough electricity to power a laptop in every seat is more than a large plane's electric systems are able to handle.

An efficient compromise would be to make plugs part of seat selection. Add a $5 fee to seats with plugs and you'll quickly get to where everyone who needs one has one. (Of course business class should have it in all seats, that's just ludicrous).

Re: Regulation Strangulation

mattmaroon — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 10:24:43 -0000

Why don't VCs have lobbyists? Is there no VC equivalent of the RIAA? Venture firms cooperate much more than record labels on a daily basis, you'd think it would be even easier for you guys to come together and fight for what is mutually beneficial.

If there is one thing I learned from the online poker industry, it's that where lobbying is concerned, and ounce of prevention is worth 1,000 pounds of cure.

Re: CleRB - The Cleveland Ruby Brigade - Home

mattmaroon — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 14:01:02 -0000

My company, Blue Frog Gaming, would be happy to host this. We've got an auditorium and a conference room at our office in Montrose, right off of 77, so we're not too far from Cleveland.

Re: How To Get Me To Hang Up On You

mattmaroon — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 12:07:22 -0000

Re: Protecting Business

mattmaroon — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 10:06:01 -0000

Strangely in public discourse, people have forgotten what a business really is. It's just something owned by a group of people. So when you say you want to "protect business", what you're really saying is you want to prioritize the interests of one group of people (entrepreneurs) over another (consumers).

As an entrepreneur myself, I don't want to be protected from the consumer. My job is to make the world a little better, one product at a time. I just want as little resistance between me and the consumer as possible.

If we want to serve the general public, we don't want to prioritize some of them over the others. We want to enable competition and let the consumer do that themselves. Deregulation of the Telecoms (forcing them to share their cables the way gas companies share pipes in many states) might be a good start, but for as long as we have natural monopolies or duopolies, as in most places, I just can't see any argument against net neutrality.

Re: Is Zynga’s Farmville.com A Sign of Things to Come or a Clever Hedge?

mattmaroon — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 10:37:35 -0000

We're definitely looking into moving our games onto the web. There still are some pretty big questions we'll need to answer before it becomes our sole focus though.

1. Do web-based viral channels work well? Can you do invites via email/IM succesfully? Clearly you can allow people to send and unlimited amount of them, but what's the response rate? If you reward people for invites, how much work do you have to do to prevent multi-accounting from deflating your virtual economy?

2. What does it cost to buy traffic from Google/Yahoo/etc. and how much reach is there?

3. As you mentioned, how do RPUs compare? Can you keep people coming back as easily?

I hope to find out these things in the near future.

Re: On Auto-Tweets, Facebook Games, and Other Potential Pollution

mattmaroon — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 16:21:26 -0000

Response rates are surprisingly hard to quantify, at least on Facebook, because they don't tell you specifically which requests (some of which were invites, some of which were gifts, etc) were accepted and which were not. They do tell you when someone installs, and you can build some tracking into them, so you can determine acceptance rates accurately. But you have no idea on ignores vs. blocks, and blocks in particular are extremely important to your platform allocations, seemingly more so than even acceptances.

The median request acceptance rate on Facebook has been hovering between 55-60% lately. That's largely due to gifting. I'd be surprised if anyone gets over 20-30% on normal invites, but with some good multivariate testing and an app that has broad appeal (such as Mafia Wars) that range is achievable.

If I had to wager it wouldn't be that you'd fail, it's that your perspective would shift a bit. The best thing about Facebook, rather than console or mobile platforms, is that you have the ability to continuously improve over time. It's not hit driven, it's more like web development. It took us a year and a handful of apps (some of which made decent money along the way) to get to where we feel we really got it right. We couldn't do that on the iPhone or Xbox platforms.

So you'd figure it out over time I'm sure, and your perspective would change. Mine certainly has. Stuff seems a lot less spammy when you realize that people are clicking accept 60% of the time.

Auto-tweeting is probably wrong, and was a mistake when we did it. We stopped that really fast once we realized that on Twitter, people don't expect it nearly so much as they do on FB. It's probably the right thing to do if you only care about growth, but we are more focused on engagement and keeping the customer happy over a long time, so in the end we felt that even ignoring the moral aspect it was the wrong thing to do.

I can't really give you much data on Twitter yet. We only started that game as an experiment and we haven't really put as much time into it as we should. Our game on Facebook was growing like gangbusters and we had to scramble to keep up. We're probably going to put some more work into it soon, so I might be able to give you some more insights, though unlike Facebook I'll never get to see how we stack up against the median.

Re: On Auto-Tweets, Facebook Games, and Other Potential Pollution

mattmaroon — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 12:14:48 -0000

If only the world were so black and white. There are a few problems.

1. One man's spam is another man's ham. The line isn't as clearly-drawn as you indicate. I hate the Farm Town gift requests as much as anyone, but my wife loves them, and they've driven the median request acceptance rate up from ~20% to ~60% on the platform. The fact that these tactics work (and it's way higher than 1% response rate) indicates that a sizable number of people like them.

2. The platforms (especially Facebook) are designed in such a way that if you don't spam, you get choked off and die. Seriously. You cannot make a popular game on FB without gifts anymore. The platform is fundamentally broken in that respect. I'm not sure if you can make a popular social game on Twitter at all, but if you can, you probably have to cross that line.

3. Most of the popular web services we know and love were built through such spamminess. Facebook got big by asking you for your email login and password and then inviting everyone. Is that not spam? Sure you agreed to send those (just as you agreed to send the pigs on farm town) but the receiver never asked to get that stuff.

"I think I’d just focus on making really fun games, making it MORE fun if people invited friends, and giving them the tools to tell the world should they want to."

You'll still be accused of spamming. The person annoyed at receiving 20 Farm Town gift requests per day doesn't really care how much the sender liked the game.

The problem is not that game developers want to spam, it's that the system is designed in such a way that we have to do it (in which case we can make a fortune) or we fail (in which case we lose one). If you want to fix the problem, fix the platform, which would be easier if any of the platforms had any real developer outreach. Unless you're Zynga it's nearly impossible to just get anyone with any clout to respond to an email.

If you insist on "taking the high road" then I'm glad you're in time management.

Re: Whenever ad networks talk about their “targeting” remember the Netflix prize

mattmaroon — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 22:05:36 -0000

This is a touch disingenuous. BellKor didn't get a 10.5% increase over random recommendations, or ones made by me (especially since my recommendation to anyone who liked Michael Bay movies would be to off themselves as painfully as possible). They got a 10.5% increase over a recommendation engine built by highly-paid and probably highly-talented Netflix engineers. I'm guessing that Netflix's Cinematch was so state-of-the-art that a 10.5% improvement over it is quite impressive. I'd be surprised if any ad-networks, which generally aren't as engineering-focused as NFLX, are starting from such a baseline.

Re: Failure

mattmaroon — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 10:17:29 -0000

Our bankruptcy laws are possibly the best in the world and are what makes this possible. If you read about some of the other OECD nations' bankruptcy laws you'll wonder how they manage to get any entrepreneurs at all. German law, for instance, forbids anyone who has gone bankrupt in a previous company from being CEO.

Re: Some Birthday Wishes

mattmaroon — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 14:44:26 -0000

My bets:
#1: Yes, though it'll be hard to tell even in hindsight.
#2: No, but maybe something a little closer
#3: No
#4: Seems inevitable eventually.
#5: WebOS is already there. Check out the homebrew app community on PreCentral. #2 might happen too if Android gets it together.
#6: Depends how you define TV.
#7: I don't know how die-hard you are, but you might get LeBron in 2010. Other than that, good luck.

Re: Why Adwords Won’t Work For Social Networks

mattmaroon — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 21:01:10 -0000

I don’t think it's fair to compare to the early days of Google because CPC was more or less a new paradigm then, now it isn't. Your second point is very interesting. CTRs are so low that a significant portion may be plain old misclicks. Pretty funny really.

Re: Hockey Is A Grind

mattmaroon — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 16:31:14 -0000

Ha. I don't know if anything is worse than curling. At least I can understand how someone might come to play soccer. The only explanation for curling is lots of weed.

Re: Hockey Is A Grind

mattmaroon — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 10:28:13 -0000

Yeah, Pittsburgh would be nowhere. I wouldn't bet too much on that 2-2 though. It's last year all over again.

Re: Hockey Is A Grind

mattmaroon — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 21:49:11 -0000

Might also be the lack of good soccer in the US. We've got sort of a half-assed league, that's about it.

Re: We got a new sign at the office today.

mattmaroon — Sat, 30 May 2009 10:32:08 -0000

It's way too early to predict what's going to happen in that race. I'm going to buy the Pre next Saturday, so I'll at least be able to tell you how I like that.

Re: Heyzap

mattmaroon — Fri, 29 May 2009 10:21:35 -0000

Awww. Group hug.

Re: Heyzap

mattmaroon — Wed, 27 May 2009 18:58:54 -0000

Congrats on another great choice. Immad is one of my favorite people from the YC experience. He's smart and driven and I know he'll succeed.

Re: Heyzap

mattmaroon — Wed, 27 May 2009 18:55:09 -0000

Congrats on another great choice. Immad is one of my favorite people from the YC experience. He's smart and driven and I know he'll succeed.

Re: Why Isn't Paypal More Successful?

mattmaroon — Tue, 26 May 2009 10:23:40 -0000

Customers definitely use it when it's available as an option. On our Facebook apps, we offer people the ability to give us credit cards directly, or use PayPal, and about 55% of people opt for PayPal. Given the immense amount of work it takes to establish and fund a PayPal account, that's pretty high.

My feeling is more merchants don't accept them due to transactions costs. They take a much bigger cut of each transaction, which is highly relevant for the big online stores and services like Amazon.