Minecraft Playdates
Group play for your kids with parental controls
Slow and steady growth is the name of this update. My customer acquisition channel has remained the same: Scan Facebook groups related to our product area occasionally, and helpfully respond to questions. Never directly advertise, but let folks know that I run a Minecraft hosting service designed for parents. Pretty high touch so far, but it's netted a stable and growing customer base that has started promoting us recently!
Also, I've been busy adding features — in part to attract and in part to maintain the customers. Biggest new features are ability for Java and Bedrock players to play together, and support for "plugins" and "mods".
Biggest support burden is handling game updates from Mojang and Microsoft. Clients running newer versions aren't compatible with older servers, and most clients auto-update in the bedrock world...
At Minecraft Playdates — Safe online play for your kids. Control playtimes, durations, and who they play with — we got our first zero-touch paying customer! This is Customer #3. Customers #1 (growth hacking on Facebook) and #2 (growth hacking on IndieHackers!) were incentivized to sign up, but I have no idea where #3 came from. Super psyched. Is it my Google Ad? Is it my novice attempts at SEO Who knows. And you know what, I'm OK with that!
P.S. We're running a special deal for Indie Hackers: 50% off any subscription for 1 year. Redeem with promo code INDIEHACKERS1Y at Minecraft Playdates Signup. Not enough? Get a free server for 1 week then spend 30 minutes on a video chat telling me what's good, what's missing, etc, and get 75% off for the lifetime of the subscription. Signup here.
Oh boy, I have a story to tell. So, I refactored the signup / subscribe flow for Minecraft Playdates right after I launched because I realized that if you selected a plan before you had created an account, that by the time you finished with account creation, I had lost the state of which plan you wanted to subscribe to. (The analytics showed huge dropoff on the signup -> subscribe flow).
So... Lesson <foreshadowing>: Test everything. I smoke tested, and everything seemed to be working, so I pushed the new site live... A few days later after letting it soak, turns out that this fix had the opposite impact, it increased the dropoff rate rather than decreasing it. Hmmm...
Well, purely by chance, through non-scalable growth hacking techniques (reading Minecraft for Parents groups on Facebook, posting helpful comments for parents having trouble getting playdates setup for their kids, etc), I figured, why not try attracting early adopters via a compensated user study? (details here if you're interested), and quickly got a bite from a parent in one of those groups.
So, getting her setup, she writes to me "Hey, I hit the subscribe button but nothing happens". <queue the dread...>
So we find a good time for a video chat / screenshare (remember our value prop: parents that don't need to know anything about tech to get their kids setup with playdates!), she screenshares with me and shows me the problem, she pops up the javascript console, and there's the dreaded error: "billing.js:437 Uncaught TypeError: Cannot read property 'id' of null"
Gahhhhhhhhhhh
So after our chat, I'm thinking WTF .. as I start debugging. Yeah, you know software dev 101... test your changes... well... yeah. So now I try to go subscribe again for myself, and sure enough, I get the same error!
OMG. I broke the site with my last round of changes.
OMG. I didn't actually retest subscribing after that set of changes. <facepalm>
OK, well, the fix was actually really simple. While refactoring the flow, I had renamed the entity id of the subscribing modal that pops up while the subscription is processing, but didn't update the corresponding Javascript that pops it open.
So I tested in the sandbox, it seems to work. I cautiously push to production, and... Yay, it's working now <wiping sweat off brow>!
You'd think that after writing software for 25+ years, that I would have learned this lesson... Well, turns out you'd be wrong. But truly, I get it now, it'll never happen again <knocks on wood>...
Anyway, this story ends on a positive note. That user, this didn't turn them off! Their kid is having fun playing Minecraft now, and I have my first customer, and in a week or so we'll do a UX feedback session. Yeah!
Hey Indies!
TL;DR: Seeking ≈20 parents of Minecrafters to provide feedback on Minecraft Playdates — Includes free server for 1 week & compensation at the completion of the study.
I just launched the MVP of Minecraft Playdates, for parents to plan and manage multiplayer Minecraft playdates for their kids and their friends without knowing anything about Minecraft server hosting.
What better place to get great feedback than other indie hackers who are also parents of kids that love Minecraft!
User Study Details
30 mins gets you a $25 Amazon gift card or a lifetime subscription for 75% off
We're seeking people interested in Minecraft server hosting, especially parents of young kids (4-12), to participate.
If you are selected for the UX study, you get a free server for up to 1 week to play on with your kids and their friends, and after completion of the study (which is just a 30 minute conversation about what you liked, didn't like, and what's missing), you get either a $25 Amazon gift card or a permanently low cost subscription (75% off for the lifetime of the subscription) as a thank you for your time.
—Tad Hunt
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I love this idea! Hours saved trying to get servers set up (or get people to join the right server) and around the same price as the X-Box server subscription.
I just signed up for the UX study and look forward to taking this for a spin!
Thanks Tad-
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Thanks Andrew! I just sent you an email with details about how to get started!
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Just a quick update today, after about 6 months of nights and weekends working on minecraft-playdates.com, My wife, son, and I just launched our side project!
Our story:
It All Started When Our Son Discovered Minecraft
Then Coronavirus struck, and suddenly opportunities for social interaction plummeted. Video chats with his friends just didn't hold his attention, but he loved playing Minecraft.
One day we found him playing multiplayer Minecraft on some random server on the Internet. While we believe that playing the game for a moderate amount of time each week is acceptable, especially cooperative play and adventuring with friends for the social interaction, playing with random strangers was not. Thus the idea for Minecraft Playdates was born.
As parents, a key challenge many of us have have is we are busy, (mostly) not technology experts, and yet, we want to be in control of who our kids are playing with, when they can play, and how long they can play for. None of the server hosting companies we found offered this combination of capabilities, and most of them are designed for advanced players or really large multiplayer worlds.
Thus, https://minecraft-playdates.com was born
Stay tuned for updates as we navigate the next phase of growth, and LMK in the comments if you'd like to hear details about the journey, technology, or growth challenges!
—Tad
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