First community topic! Well, the game is well done and i couldn't find any bugs.. but i can't make a profit: my churn rate is huge and i can't ever make profit. Do guys have some guide or similar?

Thanks! Congratz for the game.

YAY!!

Thanks for trying the Beta. Besides some balancing issues, I definitely need to bubble up information about "what affects what". Tutorials would be one way but I think I also want to improve the UI.

Long answer your question, here are the core stats in the game and what affects them:

• Visitors: Visitors to your site/product is mainly determined by your marketing spending. Spend more money on activities that are well suited to your product, and you get more visitors. Some other things like your branding logo will also give you a boost.
• Signups: This is primarily based on the number of your features, so the more features you build the more visitors will sign up to your product. Note that over time people's expectation of the number of features increases so you need to keep building more and more. There are some other factors, for example building "requested" features will give you a boost.
• Churn: This is the most complex and interesting part. Churn is mainly based on your combined "Feature Rating". The rating for each feature depends on:
  • The number of components in the feature. This is the base and really important so you need to build bigger and bigger features.
  • Getting the ratio of design vs tech components right, based on market reports and experimentation.
  • Whether or not it's a "requested" feature.
  • Adding feature upgrades (their effects stack).
  • Average performance of the components.
  • Keeping the feature bug free.

You can see most of this information by right clicking features and selecting "Details", and also by checking the "Metrics" checkbox at the top of the Product Backlog view.

I hope that's helpful.

I should also mention that at the moment it's really really hard (maybe impossible) to make a profit without a couple of rounds of investment. It takes a while before you get cash-flow positive. Still working on balancing :)

Thanks! I'll try it again with those informations.. i get some investment ($250.000) and try it but my scenario was: Spending a lot in marketing (20k) and only have a few users (100, giving me a 3k profit).

Well, we'll see. Thanks, keep the good work and i would love to contribute with some ideas.

Thanks heaps for the encouraging words! Feedback is always welcome. Send it to me whichever way is easiest for you. You can use steam community forums (http://steamcommunity.com/app/722660/discussions/). It's a bit dead at the moment but once the game is on Steam, that will probably become the main channel of communication. You can also use the feedback Trello board or join Discord and message me directly (links over at https://startupfreakgame.com/contact/).

Nice, just another question: how much does the price affects the gameplay? I mean, if i set the price too low it's good for customers so in theory they should buy it.

Yes, the lower you set the price, the more customers will sign up. However that doesn't get you the most revenue. There is an optimum point you are trying to look for and the market reports help you with that.

Also generally it's better to have more plans than fewer, but that also makes it harder to find the optimal price point for each plan.

EDIT: nevermind... found it xD