Ask HN: How to monetize a play for fun poker site?

[joelreymont]

I'm launching a poker site this week or next. It will be based on my OpenPoker server and a Flash client. There are plenty of real-money poker sites out there but mine will be the one and only "social network" where you can actually play poker.

I plan to make it as convenient as possible for friends to hang out together and play poker, the kind of game that goes on in pubs and college dorm rooms right now.

Does this sound like a good idea and if so how can I make money?

I'm thinking of charging $10/mo for subscriptions and perhaps a bit more for people wanting to run poker bots. I can also hook into MochiAds to run ads in the Flash client. Then there's customizing of your poker table, avatars, etc.

Any other suggestions?

    Thanks, Joel

[dazzawazza]

Before I comment let me qualify this with the fact that I worked on one of the big poker websites as lead engineer.

There is a big difference between free and raked poker. The betting patterns in free poker are erratic and make the game MUCH less fun. Because no one buys in to the hand (literally and figuratively) no one cares if they win or loose. So there is always some idiot who just goes all in on every hand clicking the 'more free chips' button when it goes wrong. They ruin ALL the free tables on all the poker sites.

To make games more fun you could consider:

private tables: people pay for the right to create private tables that they invite friends/family to play on (eliminating the free play whores). Maybe with a subscription you can create a private table for 10, without it's limited to 6.

limited chips: people can only get new chips once a day (or what ever period suits your traffic). You can get very clever with this allowing bad beat loosers to get more chips buy reckless players get penalized.

I wish you luck but it's an industry flush with cash and corruption so you'll need to be very canny. There are sections of the community (such as students) who are looking for a good time on the cheap. They are also prime candidates for beer advertisers so there is an angle there. You might want to consider splitting your site in to students.domain.com and family.domain.com so you can target the respective audiences more accurately.

[joelreymont]

Great advice, thanks!

And Hacker News is THE site to read.

[apsurd]

I don't like the idea. There is god awfully too much competition. Nearly every single for-money poker site is actually masked/marketed as a play for free site. There is already poker apps on the major SNS like facebook (and probably myspace).

You are outmarketed, outreached, and out muscled in almost every conceivable way.

Also, as much as people DON'T admit it - people play poker to win money. If you think your niche is those "friendly college games" well why in gods name would your "college friends" play poker online when they can kick back some beers, invite friends over and have a REAL game?

Lastly, if your angle is "social networking around poker" well thats called "every other poker site out there". I can not see anyone who is legitimately interested in poker, signing up for a social networking site about poker, that does not let you play poker "seriously" (read for money). I just can not see any possible legitimate angle to go forward with this.

Please someone show me the light.

[joelreymont]

There's no light. When life throws you lemons you gotta make lemonade, right? I have no other product at the moment and, questions of why I developed it in the first place notwithstanding, I gotta do with what I have.

I'm not going to mask as a play for free site, I'm gonna be one. It's clear that I have to be the best play for free site out there but it's not clear what I have to be best at.

I'll put the site up, try to make the experience as good as possible and experiment relentlessly. I have no other options.

[mindaugas]

I'd like to point to real free "play for fun" site: http://gpokr.com

And it seems quite popular I think :)

P.S. written in GWT .

[icey]

This might be a good fit for the guys at Plura: http://www.pluraprocessing.com/

Poker apps would be a perfect situation since it takes much more time than most games.

[bhandras]

Joel I think you should think about your idea a lot first. I follow you on your blog and you happen to jump from project to project and your mind just can't settle with one on the long run. How about planning the business first with all the legal things (which everybody hates and leaves the last). After that you may see if it will be a success or not. Read back your ideas and look at why they change every day :) If you have one for more than 5 days than that will be the winner!

But that's just my 2 cents.

[joelreymont]

I have been thinking about this for a couple of months now, ever since I commissioned the Flash client. It's obvious to me that I cannot plan this business, there's just no way to predict the way the cookie crumbles.

I have another daughter coming up this month and a certain limited amount of savings. I'm throwing my weight behind this project.

Do you have any specific legal concerns in mind? I'm not going to run a gambling business and Wager Labs, SA has been in business since 2002.

[Russelldb]

Hi Joel, Don't want to sound like a stalker or sound too fulsome so don't get the wrong idea but I follow you in twitter and read your posts on the erlang list and find you inspirational.

My opinion on this is:-

1. Forget the subs. Let people play for fun for free and if they want to bet take a cut of the ante or pot or something (IE you only make money when people spend money and even then only make a little). Make it very, very easy to bet (Paypal, google checkout easy). But let people play for Kudos too.

2. Also let people play on Facebook. Do Facebook Connect (or other social networks) so peeps joining your site can bring all their friends (their whole social graph). Make it so people can play away from your site basically (iPhone etc)

3. Bring in non-players IE have tutorials, novice tables, private game rooms stuff like that. There is a huge untapped market of women who love to gamble (witness the power of Bingo in the UK) if it is fun and social.

Personally I'd back you whatever as your drive and commitment are evident. Whether you follow my advice or not I expect you to succeed with this or another idea and if I had a few 10s of thousands of pounds I'd be in like Flynn. Sorry if that embarrasses you.

[joelreymont]

Russell,

I can't take a cut of the pot or ante as that will convert me into a gambling site, of the type that are illegal in the US.

I'm all for letting people play for free but I would like to make at least enough money to support the site and cover development cost.

I have an idea for a Mac/Win/iPhone client built with Unity [1] but I need to launch something first and let people kick the tires. This is where the Flash client comes in.

What about letting people replenish their balances, for a fee, e.g. pay $5, get $1000 in play money?

[1] http://unity3d.com

[charlesju]

Did you really write your whole server code in Erlang? Your intelligence scares me a little bit.

First off, can you elaborate on what these "social network" features are? There is a really popular poker FB application already, that seems to me to have "social network" features.

I think that there are a number of questions you should answer before you embark on this journey.

1. Why will your poker program be unique?

2. How will you achieve critical mass (what's your distribution channel/marketing)?

3. How will you stop your competitors from stealing your idea and implementing them with their existing user base?

------------------------------------

As for how I think you can make money? I think that you are a very intelligent person, much more than me, and you should leverage that to your advantage.

Here are two ways I think you can make a lot more money than just simply running a consumer product:

1. There are plenty of people trying to solve the multiplayer problem (my company for example) and we would love to buy some sort of license to custom code written to handle generic server requests. Then you can package your Poker software on top of that as a "demo". But if you go this route, you really need to redo your server in a more traditional language, Erlang is fun for show and tell, but not very practical for the masses.

2. If you are adamant on doing a poker related site with your stuff. I would recommend making a Ning for Poker Sites. There are so many poker sites out there right now that it doesn't make sense to try and compete with all of them. It does make sense to setup the backbone to run poker sites, take a cut of the money processing, and then let everyone else figure out how to market and distribute your stuff. There is currently no free poker software that is easy to skin and market, you can be the first, you can undercut everyone and be a millionaire by this time next year.

[joelreymont]

> Did you really write your whole server code in Erlang?

Yes. I started with Lisp but realized I didn't know how to scale it. Then I tried Erlang, thought it scales automatically and finally realized that it's still a lot of work and careful analysis of your architecture.

I wrote another version of my poker server in Lisp in the past few weeks and it's almost complete. I know how to scale it now but see no point in pursuing it. I wrote it as a way of relieving my frustration with Erlang, a way of moving forward, even by taking a step back.

> Your intelligence scares me a little bit.

Thanks! If was as smart as you think, I would have been rich by the age of 30 and I'm not.

> First off, can you elaborate on what these "social network" features are?

I don't know, actually, I haven't given it much thought. I did google for poker social network and found that existing sites are forums without any ability to play poker.

I see my site as a friendly place to play poker, one you can customize and tailor to your needs and wants.

> 1. Why will your poker program be unique?

Beats me. It's not unique at all. It didn't have a poker client for a couple of years, I'm just finishing up tournaments and there's only Texas Hold'em at the moment.

Once upon a time, a sportsbook and casino in the Caribbean commissioned poker software. I was running an offshore development shop from my apartment at the time (NYC and then Atlanta). I outsourced development to Russia. The sportsbook fired their top management because their software could not handle the load during football season.

The sportsbook then dropped custom developed software entirely and went with off-the-shelf solutions. That's how I ended up with buggy PC-based poker software written in Delphi. I'm still kicking myself not not forcing development in C++. Devs said it would cost much more (Delphi specialists them) and I capitulated.

I thought I could do better myself and wrote OpenPoker.

> 2. How will you achieve critical mass (what's your distribution channel/marketing)?

Word of mouth and slow growth.

> 3. How will you stop your competitors from stealing your idea and implementing them with their existing user base?

There aren't that many scalable poker servers to go around. Also, most of the competitors are huge real money poker servers. I looked at gPokr but I think I can do better.

> 1. There are plenty of people trying to solve the multiplayer problem (my company for example)

I'm available for consulting.

> and we would love to buy some sort of license to custom code written to handle generic server requests.

What are generic server requests? Are they binary? JSON? UDP? TCP?

> Then you can package your Poker software on top of that as a "demo". But if you go this route, you really need to redo your server in a more traditional language, Erlang is fun for show and tell, but not very practical for the masses.

What is a more traditional language? Python? Java? C? C++?

> I would recommend making a Ning for Poker Sites. There are so many poker sites out there right now that it doesn't make sense to try and compete with all of them.

Great idea, thanks! Hosted white-label poker.

[socksandsandals]

Joel, this will be an attempt to prove out your OpenPoker infrastructure to either a) sell licences to OpenPoker, or b) sell the rights to it outright, correct? Given that, the site does not need to be super-popular in and of itself. You will probably only need about 100,000 active players to prove how much more efficient and scalable your software is. My thoughts on making money are MochiAds and private tables; they seem about as good as any. But if the goal is to sell OpenPoker, then you just need a proofpoint, not a successful site in and of itself (in fact, a popular site would make it harder to sell off the rights to OpenPoker altogether, as it would raise the cost to a potential acquirer).

[ashleyw]

I think you've got it spot on — ads for free members; and no ads, the option to customize things, use extra features, and some extra virtual cash every month for the "Pro" members.

Plus you could sell exta virtual currency, with Pro members getting a discount.

Whats your URL? :)

[joelreymont]

Thanks! I'll announce the URL as soon as the site is up and running. Watch http://twitter.com/wagerlabs for announcements.

[Tichy]

There is a lot of competition, but I haven't found a place where I could just play poker for fun, no download or payment necessary. If you want to charge a monthly fee, unfortunately your site won't qualify, either. Otherwise, your position would not even be so bad, I think.

Wouldn't ads be sufficient? I think there is a lot of money in ads for Online Poker. Of course that would be ads for other poker sites, so I am not sure if it would be good for you to have them on your site.

[joelreymont]

I feel your pain but don't know if ads will be sufficient. There's a huge downturn in ads at the moment.

Plus, if I position myself as a family-friendly site then I definitely can't show ads from other poker sites.

Perhaps there's good money in ads here but I definitely don't have a budget for running this site without external funding.

[cjenkins]

Hi Joel,

One thought I had might be to use some of your ad revenue as a prize pool each week/month/etc. That way people could play with the potential to earn some real money. Hopefully it snowballs so that you can offer bigger prize pools attracting more traffic in a happy money making circle.

I think this could be a really nice niche to be in as you could end up as the "default" free poker site to play at. Why play somewhere else when you could potentially earn real money playing free poker?

[joelreymont]

I doubt this would be legal. My assumption is that any payout at my poker site would label its activities as gambling.

[jasonwatkinspdx]

I'm unaware of the legality, but there might be an opportunity to combine a web of trust with online poker. Track play money bankrolls but provide some feedback mechanisms players could use to settle outside the site. Pay for the site via ads. Being purely ad supported would be a nice feather for your software licensing business demonstrating hosting cost advantages.

[mpc]

How about digital goods/gifts? Similar to what facebook and other gaming sites have done...virtual trophies, awards, etc. that users can display in a 'giftbox' within their profiles.

If your site has enough traffic and is socially 'interactive' you could monetize the interactions with virtual gift micropayments instead of trying to monetize the users themselves.

[icey]

Can I recommend labeling the bots? I think you'll have trust issues if people think that there is some super-genius robot playing next to them. Poker players know that it's not that huge a deal, but I think amateur players may be turned off by that.

Either that, or have bot-friendly tables and human-only tables.

[trevelyan]

wagerlabs - you should look at dominategame.com

A subscription based Risk-style game with free play options. I've subscribed in the past and considered it worth it.A serious and well-designed points system can provide social standing and other sorts of incentives to help compensate for the lack of betting.