Recently, I made a submission for the Blue Ocean Competition for a strategizing/communication app for gamers. Today, I would like to walk through my experience of creating the pitch along with what the Blue Ocean Competition is.
What is the Blue Ocean Competition?
According to its website, “The Blue Ocean High School Entrepreneurship Competition is the most prestigious pitch competition for high school students in the world.” The pitches submitted for this competition were in the form of 3-5 minute videos which were required to utilize elements of the Blue Ocean Strategy in the presentation. These pitches are then sent off to judges who will be evaluating the pitches based on the competition criteria shown below: There will be multiple rounds of judging cutting the pitches down to the top 25, then the top 10, and then the top 3.
What did I submit?
My Blue Ocean Pitch was an application mainly for gamers called Winnable. This application was created to address the various difficulties gamers face in communication, teamwork, strategy, and planning.
To be successful in these types of games, a team must excel in four areas:
Communication
Strategization
Planning
Teamwork
Communication – a team with good communication will be able to share important information quickly and efficiently.
Strategization – a team with good strategization will be able to come up with smart plans to help combat the specific challenge at hand.
Planning – a team with good planning ability will be able to think in advance about the possible hurdles they would have to overcome.
And teamwork – a team with good teamwork will be able to do all of the steps mentioned before with a high amount of efficiency.
Despite competitive multiplayer games being so popular, there is not one single application which helps gamers with these aspects of their gameplay.
Although there are applications such as Discord and Teamspeak which enable gamers to communicate, most of the time communication amongst untrainted, casual teammates is either very disorganized or does not happen at all.
To solve this issue, I created the concept of Winnable. Winnable is an all-in-one communication, planning, and strategy application which bolsters overall teamwork as a result. Winnable automatically opens in the background when a game is detected and the GUI can be manually opened with a keybind.
Winnable offers users real time communication through two main features – connecting to friended users directly or joining a public/private server with multiple other Winnable users.
When friended users join the same game on the same team, Winnable will automatically connect the two players with each other. This setting can be toggled off, but it is on by default to provide ease of use.
Once Winnable users are connected with each other, they will be able to share information through the various features offered.
Firstly, Winnable offers a quick fix to combat the aforementioned public text channel anxiety. Winnable has its own private text channel with the connected users which can be opened and closed at the press of a keybind for maximum efficiency.
In addition to this, Winnable offers a keybind-triggered callout feature which will display a small card to all of the users in the same team. These cards will have defaults based on the game being played at the moment. Users do not have to use these cards – they are simply suggestions. Users can add up to 10 custom cards.
Finally, Winnable helps gamers strategize by offering a planning feature in which users can quickly open up a whiteboard to explain something to the rest of the team, or be able to markup uploadable video game maps with icons, drawings, and notes. The icons offered can be either left blank, or be changed with game-specific presets.
Teammates would be able to see the map update with icons, drawing, and notes in real time similar to a Google Document. The owner of the strategization plan would be able to give editing permissions to the other team members.
In the server, only one teammate would have to make the map/whiteboard to share with the rest of the team. This teammate would also be able to give editing permissions to other members.
To monetize this application, there will be a premium subscription for $10/mo which gives the user various cosmetic and practical additions.
Premium users will be able to change the color of their name. Additionally, users will be able to add up to 25 cards and add custom animations to them as well. For the map-planning feature, premium users will be able to upload custom icons and/or gifs to use on the maps.
Our tier 1 customers would be multiplayer strategy gamers who would directly benefit the most from this application.
Our tier 2 customers would be single player gamers who could benefit from the strategization feature but would not necessarily need everything else.
Our third tier customers would be non-gamers who would not have any use for this application.
Link to the video: