CouchTycoon - almost Review

by Jose E.

Today popped on my Inbox an email from Mr. Idle with my invitation to CouchTycoon. Let´s see what Mr. Idle is cooking there.

What´s is all about

Since their “About” page is not so clear I get some ideas from the logo competition request: “CouchTycoon enables you, in a playful way, to take a stake in objects, projects or companies you could not afford on your own. in a range from startups to a nyc skyscraper. So you can build up your personal holding-empire while sitting on your couch and watching TV.”

With a quick search I found The Company or “Firma” (as we say here) behind CouchyTycoon is PIPELINE ventures GmbH based on Hamburg, Germany.

The name, the logo and the domain

“CouchyTycoon” is a compound name from “Couch” and “Tycoon”, I guess making reference to the “Friends n Family” part of their tag line.

The logo was made by Matthew Coates on a competition at LogoSauce. Representing as requested: “… playful, real game, couch, profit, pocket money investment, tycoon, rags-to-riches” a Tycoon sitting on a Couch.

Easy to remember name, but not so easy to type Uri “couchytycoon.net”. They have the “.com” also but .net resemble the “Venture NETwork” of the tag line.

Approaching to the Couch

The website is on “private chicken-test (beta)” as Mr. Idle wrote on the invitation email. So I click the link and registered on the site with my invitation code.

The first thing you can notice when you enter the site is a big-loockatme-pizzazz flash banner that says thing like “Monopoly 2.0 - but real”, “invest $4 in startups before Sequoia does”, etc., etc., etc., (I am still lost here). The copy paragraphs under the flash banner is a little bit more explanatory “…community… investments… global… submit… ideas… discuss… vote… invest… jointly”, ok let´s get in.

The UI/UX of the couch

A Couch is designed to be comfortable and that you are willing to spend most of your time sitting there and watching TV (or Joost or YouTube or …).

The UI is a remix of the iTheme from N.Design Studio. The loock and feel is not right “Mac” cause the blue background is missing.

On the home page (after logged in) you get again the big-flash-pizzazz-thing and below something more about a “Beef Island”… after carefully reading that you learn that “going to the Island” is actually Posting your idea to be voted and/or discuss (this is not clear to me at this moment).

On the right hand you have the classical sidebar with some stuff like News, Mini Board Game, Last Assets Slip Quotes, Top users, You possible actions to do (finally!), a shout box, and a Poll. Nothing interesting so far.

Sitting on the couch with the monopoly game

When I click on the Mini Game thing on the right I get to a page with a Monopoly Board.

OK, the first that call my attention is the “Exchange button”, the page is completely useless for me cause at this far I don´t know we are using “CouchChips” as virtual currency so, go back.

So, the next to visit is the “Bank”, on the bank page you can do 2 things: Cash out CouchChips and Buy CouchChips, and see your history on these actions. So far I have no “fine” idea of how much cost a CouchChips, so I click on buy CouchChips… Read the User Agreement (now?, I have singed already? wtf?) and click agree… and go back to the Board game cause so far nobody tell me, in a clear way how much cost a CouchChip and there was a “Please consider, the minimum amount of CouchChips you can get is 120 CC”.

Buried on the FAQs I found that 1 USD = 12 CouchChips, but is too late I don´t want buy nothing at this very moment.

I Lock around and found that there are the new “ideas/startups/projects” on the board game, and the minimum assets price is 50 CC, so far i don´t care about that anymore.

The UI/UX sucks and take down the idea behind the site, a pretty good idea but like many online startups from Germany (I have to say it) the lack of Usability and good Design is just unforgivable.

I know they are in Chicken-Beta but a great UI could make so much on their favor.

Behind the surface

Taking a look at the XHTML code we learn that they are using Drupal (what?) well… as you can read here CouchyTycoon rely on many external applications.

For instance the idea/project/startups stuff are posted on a blog (on blogger.com) and linked back from CouchyTycoon.

This solve one problem to the Couchy Team: they don´t have many things to develop or take care, but what about security, confidentiality, etc., etc., I let that to you as homework.

Final Verdict

Mixing the venture investments in a game-like environment is a great idea, but Mr. Idle and team have to work hard to take things on the next level. Improve usability and make a decent back-end.

But is nice to see how good ideas are flowering now days.