Hatchlings Blog

Dear Hatchlings Hunters,

It’s been a busy year at Hatchlings and we’ve been working our bunny tails off! Since last Easter we’ve released over six hundred new eggs, held nine special events, answered five thousand customer support tickets, and served over five billion eggs to players from around the globe.

We’ve also expanded the Hatchlings brand to new games and platforms. In August, we released our first spin-off game, Hatchlings Match. It quickly grew to be our most popular game ever, amassing over five million new users in its first six months!

November marked our first foray into mobile games when we released our new word game, Alphabrawl, for beta testing. It is now available publicly in the Apple App Store.

At the end of December 2013, we also launched Hatchlings Match for iPhone and iPad.

This year we released our third Hatchlings branded game, the Worldwide Easter Egg Hunt. It’s a throwback to our very first game from 2008, Hatchlings 1. Many of you have been delighted with the nostalgia as you’ve raced to collect all 100 eggs before Easter.

We have also continued to release new worlds for Hatchlings Match, new eggs for Hatchlings, and we have a whole slew of fun up our sleeves as part of our Easter Eggcitement event.

We hope you’ve enjoyed the past year as much as we have! But we’re just getting started. We have big ideas scheduled for the rest of the year and hope you’ll join us for the ride.

We need your help making these plans a reality. While our games are free, creating them isn’t. We’re currently running our Easter shell sale. The revenue from your in-game purchases goes towards paying for salaries, egg artwork, code, servers, office space, and more. Please support Hatchlings by stocking up on shells today.

As always, thank you for your generous support. It gives me great pleasure to see how many people from around the world enjoy the games we craft each day.

It's been a little over a month since our last update and a lot has been going on.

Status Report

Our newest game, Hatchlings Match, has now passed 2 million users. This puts us in the top 200 Facebook Apps globally -- for some reference, we passed Zynga's hit game Draw Something in Monthly Active Users late last week.

This also means that Hatchlings Match is now officially larger than Hatchlings 2. And, at 2 months after launch, it's growing much more rapidly than the original Hatchlings ever did.

Going Global

Much of this growth has been driven by Europe and South America. Of particular note are Brazil, Argentina, and Italy. Those three countries seem to have a particular affinity for Hatchlings Match.

As a result, today we're announcing that the game is now available in Portuguese, Spanish, and Italian.

For good measure, we've also translated it into French and Dutch. More languages are on the way soon!

We're Moving

On a completely different note, the Hatchlings office has moved!

After calling the Liberty Building our home for nearly 2 years, we're happy to announce that our office is now located a few blocks down the road at StartupCity Des Moines.

Last Monday our new game, Hatchlings Match, hit 100,000 users. Now, a week later and one month after launch we welcome our 500,000th user!

I’m also happy to announce that Hatchlings Match has officially passed Hatchlings 2 in terms of number of users. Yesterday it had about 15x as many players sign on as Hatchlings 2.

With these milestones in mind, I wanted to take the opportunity to reflect on where we are as a company, where we’ve been, and where we’re going. (Hatchlings users: please be sure to read the final section.)

Context

For the first few years of its existence, Hatchlings was a very profitable endeavor. I was pretty successful at building up a solid userbase and decently successful at keeping costs extremely low.

Hatchlings was a startup that, while growing rapidly, was being treated by its founder like a small business. I should have been hiring like crazy with focus on building something for the long-term.

But, because I had it in my mind that Hatchlings was just a fad that was going to implode at any minute, I played it safe and didn’t hire anyone at all.

The Epiphany

Throughout the adolescence of Hatchlings I watched our major competitors raise hundreds of millions in venture capital. I remember decrying them for taking so much investment with -- seemingly -- no need for it.

At the same time, I was watching my own business being crippled by a lack of investment in the future. The constraint to growth was completely self-inflicted. At the time I didn’t see the contradiction.

The tipping point for me was when I saw one of our direct competitors go public at a multi-billion dollar valuation. It was at this time that, while still unsure of its future, I decided to give Hatchlings a shot at being successful. I hired our first employee a few weeks later and we were on our way.

The Grind

By this time Hatchlings was on a downward trajectory. The original game was built on old technology and an old platform that was slated for deprecation. The game had been designed for a Facebook that no longer existed.

Through a long series of evolutionary changes, the game had become stale and confusing.

We were (and still are) very lucky to have a traunch of highly devoted and engaged users who stuck with the game through thick and thin who were supporting the game financially.

Our first step, we decided, was to build a new game to solve the problems of our most vocal users. We wanted to incorporate the gameplay strategies they were making into the core gameplay and make it much less of a hassle to be a hardcore user.

That’s what Hatchlings 2 is: a reimagining of what Hatchlings 1 would have been for our power users in an ideal world.

The Dip

We succeeded in building just that. The Hatchlings 1 power user experience is now at the heart of Hatchlings 2. And many of our Hatchlings 1 players love it!

Unfortunately what we found as time went on was that, without the context of Hatchlings 1, it was hard for new users to understand why many of these features were useful. Furthermore, the new game that we had created had a relatively long period of grind before you discovered why it was fun.

The fun parts of Hatchlings revolve around the community. It’s the gifting, trading, helping, competing, chatting, and friendships that make the game compelling. But what we found was that the vast majority of new users were giving up before they started to understand what makes Hatchlings fun and different.

We spent the year or so after Hatchlings 2’s launch trying to balance our efforts between making the game more engaging and easier to understand for new users and keeping the game fresh for existing users.

Unfortunately, all the while, our core metrics kept drifting on a downward trajectory. In hiring people I had made a conscious decision to invest in the future knowing that we would have to go through a period of unprofitability before we would start to see the investments pay off.

When your expenses go up and, no matter what you do, you can’t seem to move the needle on any of your key metrics, it’s a very scary feeling. We knew we were doing something right because we still had a lot of people paying for their premium memberships each month, but we still couldn’t crack the growth code.

Every business has a user lifecycle. Your customers are never going to be with you forever. If you don’t have a stream of new customers to replace them, your business will die too.

For us, what it all boiled down to is that we were churning long-term users faster than we were able to convert new users into paying customers. That’s the recipe for the long walk into obscurity.

The First Step Is...

It’s oftentimes hard to admit to yourself when there is something wrong. Deep down in your gut you know it, but it’s easier to just ignore that feeling and keep plodding along than to confront it.

The day to day job of the company as a whole is to execute on the plan. At Hatchlings, we were doing an awesome job of that. Everything I asked of the team they delivered on flawlessly. Unfortunately, even perfect execution on a bad plan leads to failure.

As the CEO, my job is to decide what the plan should be. And the first step towards changing the plan is to admit to yourself that your current plan isn’t working.

With that in mind, we had a team meeting this summer where we enumerated all of the things that were wrong with Hatchlings 2. Sometimes honesty is brutal. We ended up with a full page front and back of all the problems, major and minor, that we had identified.

There were several commonalities, but we kept coming back to one thing: most people don’t find the actual collection of eggs in Hatchlings fun. The best parts are in the community and social interactions between players.

With our kimono opened we could finally have a frank discussion about what we should be focusing on. What we decided was that we needed to start from scratch and make a few simple games to test our theories on what would make Hatchlings more fun.

The first of those games is Hatchlings Match.

The Future

The recent success of Hatchlings Match doesn’t mean Hatchlings 2 is over. Quite the contrary, actually. We want to eventually bring what we’ve learned from our spin-off games back into the core game.

We have some innovative ideas about how to do this but that revelation will have to wait for another day.

We launched our new game, Hatchlings Match on Monday of this week. It's now three days later and we've hit 10,000 users so I thought it might be useful to do a bit of reflection for the benefit of the community at large.

Takeaways:

Thinking we could do a soft launch was naive. Originally our plan was to take the game out of "Sandbox Mode" and send it to some close friends and family for some initial testing. Given our existing userbase it quickly became apparent that this wouldn't be possible. Within a couple of hours one of our users had discovered the game via a mutual friend and shared it with their friends and it snowballed from there.

Our fears were unjustified. We discussed a lot of hypothetical situations as a team before the launch. We ended up wasting time making contingency plans for situations that ended up not happening (for example: "What if our users accuse us of abandoning Hatchlings?"). Some planning is good but a lot of these things could have just been dealt with if they arose.

Yes, Facebook integration really is a necessity. Many of our friends and users know how much we complain about Facebook. It's frustrating when they go down, it's frustrating when they change things, it's frustrating when they introduce bugs, and it's frustrating when they change the rules. People often ask us "Why do you keep putting up with it? Why can't you just cut the cord?" Well, one of those frustrating situations happened with the launch of Hatchlings Match and it forced us into an involuntary A/B test. On our launch day, we grew from 5 users (our team) to 5,000 users over the course of about 12 hours. This sudden spike in growth apparently tripped a false positive in an automatic abuse-detection algorithm at Facebook and our app was summarily banned. The ban only lasted for a couple of hours (we appealed it and the app was quickly re-enabled). A side-effect of the ban was that we had to re-submit our open graph actions for approval by Facebook. So for about 48 hours we were without our main Facebook integration. This put us in the interesting position of having data showing exactly what the affects of Open Graph integration really are. Here is our new users by hour graph:

It's pretty obvious where the ban happened and also where open graph was re-approved. The difference between the peaks and the valley? 800-900 new users per hour when Facebook was enabled vs 10-20 new users per hour without Facebook integration. So that is why we put up with the platform instability, unreliability, and uncertainty. It's certainly a tradeoff but it's hard to argue with the numbers.

By now, some of you have probably heard: we’ve been working on a new game! For the past several weeks we’ve been busting our bunny tails at Hatchlings working on a spin-off game we’re calling Hatchlings Match!

We’ve taken the beautiful eggs you’ve come to know and love and built a matching game around them. The goal is to find all the eggs in a series by matching their tops and bottoms before your timer runs out.

This is the first companion game we’ve ever made so try it out and let us know what you think!

We’ve teamed up with Aunt Sonie’s Shop on Goodsmiths to bring you our first-ever Hatchlings Auction! Up for grabs are five beautifully woven, limited edition “Handmade Hatchlings." Made with yarn, buttons, sugar and spice, one of these fantastic five could be your very own touchable, huggable, lovable Hatchlings pet.

The auction is now officially open! It will close on Friday, March 29th. Place your bids quickly--you'll want to beat the clock (and the other bidders, for that matter)!

Click to enter the Hatchlings Auction!

To bid, simply enter the highest amount (in shells) you’d be willing to pay for your favorite snuggly snowman and press submit max bid. If your maximum bid is higher than the current Highest Bidder, we’ll automatically pull the shells from your account and you’ll become the newest High Bidder. If someone outbids you, your shells will be returned. If you win, we’ll credit back into your account the difference between the highest “Current Bid” and your maximum bid.

Let the Easter Hunt begin! All month long, we’ll be featuring bonus collections, special releases and a few surprises for all our Hatchlings players across the globe. We’re excited to share with you some of the goodies you’ll find inside this month’s Easter basket! TONIGHT! TONIGHT! (the world is full of light!) Name that tune! Also, we’re releasing TWO collections TONIGHT at 12am GMT: the next Premium-Only collection and a Super Rare collection! Double releases, all month long! THIS MONTH ONLY, we’ll be releasing two collections per week! That’s double-releases, all month long! One series will come out every Saturday (as usual), but the other during different days of the week--so keep your ears perked and your hunting mouse at-the-ready.

Welcome to the Hatchlings blog! Hatchlings is fast-paced Facebook game, known commonly as the World’s Largest Easter Egg Hunt, that allows users to find eggs, build them into collections, and level up to earn shells and points.   My name is Kaylee and I work as the Copy Editor/Contact Support Aid for Hatchlings. If you’d like to keep updated with our blog (and I’ll give you a couple of good reasons why you should in just a moment) you can follow me (@kayleecat) or Hatchlings (@hatchlings) on Twitter. In this blog, we hope to provide relevant articles, gaming tips, updates and a community forum for our users. Most importantly, this blog is interactive. We encourage comments, thoughts or opinions below--just click “Leave a Reply” to join the conversation!

Facebook announced today that they're changing their developer terms of service to prevent games from operating on outside sites (like Hatchlings.com, Zynga.com or Farmville.com).

1.13a. Desktop web games off of Facebook.com may only use Facebook Login (Authentication, excluding user connections such as friend list), Social Plugins and publishing (e.g., Feed Dialog, Stream Publish, or Open Graph). When authenticating, these games may not request additional permissions other than age, email, and our Publishing Permissions (effective December 5, 2012).

1.13b. Games on Facebook.com and mobile must not share the same app ID with desktop web games off of Facebook.com. You must not use Canvas apps to promote or link to game sites off of Facebook, and must not use emails obtained from us to promote or link to desktop web games off of Facebook.com (effective December 5, 2012).

If this rule stands games operating outside of Facebook.com will no longer be able to use information such as a user's list of friends, their gender, or their age.

This effectively means that no Facebook integrated game can exist on the Facebook Connect platform. This is an about-face on nearly a half decade of Facebook Platform policy.

For us, this means our users will not be able to take advantage of their full screen real estate and will be stuck with an ugly and distracting Facebook frame around their playing area. The only way to create an immersive experience will be by utilizing a plugin such as Flash.

They claim the policy change is to "focus engineering resources" but I suspect this is meant to be an attack on Zynga who has increasingly tried to distance themselves from Facebook but it is going to have huge unintended consequences on other developers.

Oddly enough, "mobile web" games are exempt from this new rule. Which is odd because technologically speaking there is no difference between a "mobile" website and a "desktop" website. It's all just semantics.

If revenue is the issue there are better solutions... make Facebook Credits available to Connect websites (the tech is already there.. in fact they *require* it already if you're on a mobile device) or if ads are the issue then start an Adsense-like program and allow developers to place Facebook-branded ads on their sites. Don't legislate 3rd party games out of existence.

Over the last couple of weeks it seems everyone I talk to asks me about the status of our last blog post. There hasn't yet been an amicable resolution but I thought I'd share a quick update.

First of all, I'd like to thank everyone for the support and interest. This story struck a chord with people worldwide and we are humbled by the thousands of tweets and shares.

After seeing the post on Hacker News, a Google employee reached out to us. We had a half hour conversation on the morning of Saturday, April 7th and then another half hour followup call with the same Google rep and an engineer from their Ads team on Friday the 20th.

Speaking to a real person was highly beneficial in terms of understanding the challenges Google faces in dealing with these sorts of situations; it's just a shame this issue had to become a public spectacle in order to get anyone's attention.

What struck me the most from this whole ordeal was the number of people who have voiced similar "me too" stories (I counted over a dozen in the Hacker News story comments alone). From speaking with the Google reps, one tidbit I gleaned was that even if only a minority of traffic is considered "invalid" their recourse is to permanently ban the publisher. This seems wrong.

As Paul Graham commented, I think there is room for disruption in this industry.

One company that I think would be in a strong position to cause this disruption is Facebook. Every single one of our users hitting an ad was logged in on Facebook (which is why I find baffling that our traffic could be considered "invalid"). Google has no way of knowing or tracking this but Facebook does. Not only is their identity database a great source of targeting information but it is also an amazing anti-fraud mechanism.

As for us, as I told Google, I can't promise there was no invalid activity on our account (our analytics and server logs don't show anything obviously different between the 2010 traffic that Google considered "valid" and the 2011 traffic that was considered "invalid" -- but again, I haven't seen the data that led them to make this determination). All I can promise is that if there was invalid activity we were not the perpetrators. We have always tried to be a good member of the network and we absolutely understand that "invalid activity" decreases the value of the entire system. But there are far too many good publishers getting caught in the crossfire.

We have long-since moved on from this event. And while I still hope for an amicable resolution with Google, it's not make or break for us.

And as I mentioned in the first post, we are very grateful for our customers. We strongly believe our users are our customers, not our product for sale.  Our interests are best aligned in focusing our efforts completely on making a great user experience that our customers are willing to pay for. And a brand that our users are happy to support.

With that in mind we have decided to completely forego traditional banner advertising within Hatchlings 2 in favor of premium subscriptions and virtual good sales.

We will also be working directly with partner brands to create an immersive experience customized to our unique format.

We will have more to announce on this front later on this year but as a bit of foreshadowing, in 2009 we partnered with the Make-A-Wish Foundation to sell a limited edition branded egg for $10 each. We managed to raise over $90,000 in 25 days. There is real value here and I'm excited for the future of Hatchlings.

After trying to go through the "proper channels" for almost a year now it's time to share this story of how Google screwed over our startup with the world.

Hatchlings is the world's largest Easter Egg hunt. We have over 3.5 million users spanning all 50 states and almost every country on Earth. We have been in operation for over 4 years and are launching our new version, Hatchlings 2, this spring.

In a nutshell: Google bid on, displayed, and then failed to pay for over $40,000 of advertising space on Hatchlings. They have since stonewalled us for almost a year, locking us out of our accounts, screening our phone calls, ignoring our emails, and making it a living hell to figure out what exactly went wrong.

What you can do to help: please share, tweet, and reblog this post. Help us get the word out so that others don't fall into this same trap.

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Since early 2008 we have been running the world's largest Easter Egg Hunt on Facebook and hatchlings.com. We have amassed a loyal following of users from all over the globe who have spent untold hours collecting over 1,300 unique eggs and pets.

We are a bootstrapped startup located in Des Moines, Iowa and now have a full-time team of 5 and are currently looking to hire 2 more. We owe many thanks to our paying users for supporting us by purchasing premium memberships and eggs over the years. Without you we would be out of business right now.

Because of Google.

Our relationship with Google started out great, continued on great for several years, and in an instant they banned us, confiscated two months of our earnings, and have never contacted us again despite our repeated efforts.

Let's go through a brief timeline of our relationship with Google. (Links will open supporting documentation or referenced email correspondence)

February 2006: I sign up for a Google Adsense account.

2006-2008: I use Adsense on some personal websites with minimal traffic.

February 2008: Hatchlings is launched out of my dorm room at Iowa State. I include Google Ads as a revenue model from the start.

Spring 2008: Hatchlings takes off. The Google ads start making money.

October 2008: Worried that our rapid growth might trip some sort of trigger at Google I reach out to Matt Cutts who sets us up with our first account manager at Google, Debby Chang.

October 2008: Debby and I had our first optimization call and she made suggestions about our ad placements, etc. They first mention selling Hatchlings branded eggs to advertisers.

February 12, 2009: Google raises concerns about one of my personal websites. I immediately take down the ads on the site since Hatchlings is much more important. Debby assures us on February 12 that "your AdSense account remains in good standing and any actions taken on this domain do not affect the performance of your other AdSense ads." This is the only issue that has ever been raised by Google in regard to our account.

February 24, 2009, Debby contacts me with an urgent proposal to release a Marley & Me branded egg to coincide with their DVD release along with a full ad-buyout of Hatchlings' ad inventory.

The rest of 2009: More optimization calls, good working relationship.

Also in 2009: Google is still working on finding an opportunity for them to sell deeply integrated ads.

Throughout 2010: more of the same. Good working relationship. No concerns raised about Hatchlings' compliance, etc. We launch hatchlings.com to distance ourselves a bit from the Facebook platform.

January 2011: We get an email from our new account manager at Google, Laura Sergio.

February 25, 2011: Our last correspondence with Laura was February 25, 2011.

April 18, 2011: So you can imagine my surprise when less than two months later we received an automated email that said "After reviewing our records, we've determined that your AdSense account poses a risk of generating invalid activity... we've found it necessary to disable your AdSense account. Your outstanding balance and Google's share of the revenue will both be fully refunded back to the affected advertisers." [emphasis mine] As we were locked out of our account we don't know the exact amount of credited money that was taken back but based on historical data it is in the range of $40,000. This is for ads that were already shown on our site from February 1 to April 18.

April 18, 2011: thinking this was obviously a mistake and that some algorithm had flagged us with a false positive of some kind I followed an appeal and reached out to our account manager, Laura.

May 4, 2011: the appeal was summarily denied. Our account manager never returned my calls or emails.

May 2011: at this point we started exploring what our options were. We found out that some people had success filing a super-detailed second appeal form itemizing the Adsense terms of service and explaining how they were not in violation. Although, if you'll note, Google never even claimed we were in violation of their terms.

July 21, 2011: after an extensive review of our records, the Google terms, our historical correspondence with Google, etc. We filed a very detailed second appeal. We also included some extra sources such as traffic stats and email records (not linking to them here as they contain some confidential info).

September 2011-Present: Google never replied to our second appeal so we started trying to explore other channels to get this issue resolved. Contacting someone through their lobbying arm via a personal connection yielded nothing. Getting in touch via the Startup America Partnership was unsuccessful. The closest we can get to an answer is "oh yeah we'll look into it and see what we can find"... then silence. We still don't even know what it is that we supposedly did wrong.

We even sent them the full text (including the links to the supporting emails!) of this blog post last week before publishing with no reply.

We have been advised that to sue Google (even though we are completely in the right and would probably win) would cost more money than we'd get out of it. We are just spreading the word about what happened to us to help other startups.

The moral of the story is to be careful when planning your business that one "partner" company can't pull the rug out from under you. While this is a story about Google it could very well have been another large "partner." Who does your business hinge on? A lot of startups accept the implied risks of building on "platforms" or having big, faceless "partners" form an integral part of their business foundation without a second thought.

We were very fortunate to have a diversified revenue stream with paying users to support us and help us remain a viable business even after losing a large chunk of advertising revenue (and we thank our users from the bottom of our heart for that) but others wouldn't have been so lucky.

Personal Note to Google: I realize that this probably wasn't done maliciously and that we were probably caught up in some algorithm gone awry. And I also realize that for the amount of money we're talking about you probably don't even consider this to be an issue worth your time. But for a startup like us this is a huge deal. Feel free to reach out.. you have my cell number and email address. But after almost a year of being ignored I'm not holding my breath.

What you can do to help: please share, tweet, and reblog this post. Help us get the word out so that others don't fall into this same trap.