Fantasy Politics: A Political Game for Fun, Education and Data
Fantasy Politics (@Fantasypols) CEO Aaron Michel’s vision started with an idea to make a game out of politics, and a few discoveries evolved it into something that’s transforming civic education and political data. He’s had many Eureka! moments – see three here.
1. The MVP was not easy on the eyes, but it got the job done - We created a true MVP (Minimum Viable Product) in 2010. I was working on other projects at the time and just threw $1,500 into creating a political game to see if we could get people to have some more fun with politics. I hired a bright young guy right out of college to run things, but frankly, the game wasn’t good. Even so (and to our shock), we got covered by some major news outlets at launch.
Our number of users skyrocketed and then quickly plummeted. This was expected, as all of the people who had read about us and tried our game soon realized what we already knew – it just wasn’t that fun. So we surveyed those former users, running some new product roadmap ideas by them to see what might lure them back. Most of our product ideas didn’t get them excited – at all. Then we mentioned the concept of a fantasy football for politics and they were jumping out of their chairs. The same was true for potential partners – most of our ideas didn’t strike a chord, but we sensed a hit with fantasy football for politics.
2. Kids can learn to love politics - The second Eureka moment came when we realized the potential for Fantasy Politics to transform civic education in America. It happened organically. Just weeks after launch, a teacher approached us and told us that her classes were using our game and that every other student in the school wanted to be in her class because her students were having so much fun.
She had been teaching out of textbooks her entire career and many of the students just didn’t relate to the (often boring) material. Fantasy Politics gave her a new and powerful way to teach, and her students a fun way to learn.
It turned out we didn’t just have a game on our hands, but a new way to teach politics (Eureka!).
3. Political junkies are data junkies - We’re building out an ability to track how well each political figure is faring in real time against a broad variety of metrics, and we display it in a very compelling way. We showed mockups of our visualized data to our advisors, who include a number of very high-level political operatives, and their jaws dropped – at first, we didn’t really understand why.
They told us we had to give this data to political professionals and to the media – no one else is aggregating this type of data. We hadn’t realized that this type of information would be valuable to so many different audiences!
Our initial goal was just to give our players a great gaming experience and we ended up stumbling into creating really valuable content for the broader political universe.
Check out Fantasy Politics at http://fantasypolitics.co, see their Startup Profile on MassChallenge.org and be sure to check back here for more insights and stories from other 2012 MassChallenge Finalists every Monday/Wednesday/Friday!
