What do you do when you have hundreds of beta hungry bloggers and early adopters banging on your virtual walls with sledgehammers of tweets and emails for access to your not-quite-ready product?
Why, you challenge them to a game and hand over beta invites to the top ten players everyday. Along the way, you bag cool points, garner some press attention (we are suckers for stuff like this) and pique the curiosity of early adopters worldwide.
This is exactly what RAVN, a new startup that lets people find, schedule and book ‘activities’ online, has done with its game, RAVN hunt.
Head over to the RAVN.com homepage and you will be greeted with a fairly unremarkable splash page (save for the moving background). Click on the ‘Play for an Invitation’ button, however, and the scene quickly changes into a shooting game where you have to hunt ravens to collect points. Be among the top ten players on any day and you’ll win a beta invitation to the site.
But wait. Start off the game and you’ll be confronted with a very familiar sight: a dog. Specifically, a particularly annoying dog that catches all your kills and guffaws like a maniac each time you fail to score. Even more specifically, this dog:
Yes, the RAVN beta-game channels Duck Hunt, the iconic Nintendo game that delighted and annoyed and entire generation. The pesky pooch is still the same, but chasing ravens instead of dead ducks. You can’t kill him (though God knows I tried), and he’ll still mock all your shooting efforts. It’s annoying. It’s brilliant. And it makes me very nostalgic.
The play-for-beta invites was innovative enough, but RAVN has earned a warm and fuzzy place in my heart by channeling Duck Hunt.
Startup founders: more of this please!
