#473 The Banana Phone Game

This week we soft-launched and iterated on a free web-based casual game we’re calling “Banana Phone.”

Try banana phone here: https://banana-phone-prototype.parabol.fun/

As CEO, the holiday break is often a creative time. Over the course of doing my job I spend a lot of time speaking to customers, investors, and employees. The relative quiet of the holidays gives me the space to explore ideas that have come up throughout the year.

Just before the break our full team played an internal game we developed we call, “AI Banana Phone“. Think of it like the classic game of telephone where players whisper messages to each other around a circle, except this time the message is being mediated through AI-generated pictures.

We used to play “AI Banana Phone” on a digital whiteboard. When we played during the holidays we used Parabol Pages. It worked fine but still required loads of manual facilitation and I couldn’t get it out of my mind how nice it would be to have a fully-automated version. So, I started making one.

Over the course of the year we’re planning on launching a suite of free, collaborative tools to allow teammates to run powerful activities together. Our theory is, will the rise of generative AI the value of content marketing is approaching zero. Making apps (for now) may have a slight advantage. So, we’re going to concentrate on that to grow our top of funnel. This also has the secondary benefit of allowing us to de-risk features we are considering bringing into our core product.

And we’re back! The global usage drop off during the holidays is always remarkable. Amazing that there are still folks who hold retrospectives during the winter break.

This weeks metrics may be amended further. Keen eyes will spot that the “Weekly New Signups” metrics is showing 0. Our CRM provided, HubSpot, ended up dropping support for one of their APIs, which caused a ripple effect in our data infrastructure (a story for next week) and we’re still getting everything re-synchronized.

…kicked off ShapeUp development Cycle 12. Development goals include search for Parabol Pages, shipping a new free Prioritization app, and SCIM provisioning.

…further investigate and resolve problems with syncing our data infrastructure. Maintaining our data infrastructure has been a challenge. Over the holiday break, our data warehouse loading processes failed. We’ll need to dig in and figure out what was going wrong, and how to improve things. Having accurate data on usage is the lifeblood of our company!