Our trademark application of the DealStreet board has just been approved in less than 1 year as compared to the normal practice of 2-3 years. So phase - 1 of our IPR protection is done, the next big step will be getting our US patent approved.
A big thanks to Abhishek Malhotra & Karan Lahiri (our lawyers) for helping us get this trademark in record time.
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The DealStreet board game Yesterday, Mumbai mirror ran a story on the how DealStreet is an interactive board game which helps people understand financial jargon. The story can be found here. A big thanks for this article to Divashri Sinha. After lots of negotiations, we signed a 5 year deal with Toysbox Inc to manufacture and distribute DealStreet in India. After lots of uncertainty and last minute negotiations, its a big step forward for us. More details on this in a few days...
To go to the article on 'Boosting Kid's Financial IQ', Please click on the "Financial Literacy Article - 1". We will provide links to interesting surveys and articles on Financial Literacy. Stay updated. Financial Literacy equals Financial freedom. f I listen I have the advantage. If I speak, others have it ~ Confucius ~ 450 B.C.
This post starts a series which reflects our struggles and lessons of the important aspect of negotiation. After rounds and rounds of testing of DealStreet, we took the next step in April 2010. Like designing a board game from scratch, this too was new for us. After googling around, we found our first lead Mr X1. Overall, we were confident about our game. Having tested the game 'n' times, we knew that it was something that people jump, laugh and fight while playing. Having simplified the game to the extent that it could be played by school schildren. So we were optimistic about hitting the home run. We called MR X1, told him about DealStreet. Conversation: Me: am xyz calling from intuitive learning, we have come up with this ... tested at ... can be used .. we found your contact ... we would want to understand how to launch and about manufacturing.. and maybe distribution.. Them: ok.. It is difficult to say now, why dont you bring it over. Whether his ok was sincere, not sincere, we were excited and thought that we had got an easy entry. We then had Karan, ‘our man in black’ prepare an NDA (Non Disclosure Agreement) which simply stated that Dealstreet is the property of Intuitive Learning and any information divulged, cant be used without out permission. We found people to be extremely sceptical before signing this, more on this in another post though. D-Day came: We took our prototype to the meeting. We were excited that if we cracked this meeting, we would be ready to hit the market. But I guess that we forgot about what Confucius' age old proverb was telling us. We sold our game completely: Demoing the game for an our, talking about the design,game concepts, useful features of the game, etc. We saw the look of "Wow" on their face and thought that we had made the breaktrhough. We talked about the nuances of the game. What got us to design such a game financial literacy, etc. By this time out of an hour we had talked for about 45 mins and he had hardly said anything useful. When we started asking questions, how to manufacture, what is the cost, how to distribute, how to market, etc - he just said "I AM NOT INTERESTED". Your game is great but board game market in India is small and scattered. Games get killed day-in & day-out. It's very tough out there. A lot of investment is required in manufacturing. We suggest you partner or sell off rights. However, if you place a big enough order, then you can come to us. Why don’t we discuss more when your game is near ready to launch?? So overall, we had revealed lots of information in chatting, presenting and cajoling them, and they had revealed nothing. He managed to kill our bubble, reflected on our dependency on them and didn’t reveal a thing about real estimates on cost, margin, and distributors. Ofcourse he never signed an NDA and told us he could not care less and still kept a foot in the door. Lessons: we spoke, we divulged, he never had to question us, we shot 20 questions in anxious shape in 45 minutes and he dodged them all and now we were unsure of whether we can even launch without losing rights and is 3000 man hours worth it !!! The negotiation series will continue in the future... Meanwhile, some DealStreet trivia: it took us 5000 man hours to build it (including testing, designing, legal, etc). After 4 months of drafting and redrafting with our lawyers (who have been very helpful), we have finally submitted our patent application. Now at least we can update our website to contain all the information about DealStreet. Once we publish our new website, our blog will go live as well.
Although HT wanted to cover Intuitive Learning and DealStreet in a full article - I guess that has to wait for until the patent is filed. So instead they covered us as a part of a wider article on games, with us promising them a full story once the patent is filed. They got the spelling of my name wrong though .... Arrgh!!!
The weblink to the story is http://epaper.hindustantimes.com/PUBLICATIONS/HT/HM/2010/07/17/ArticleHtmls/über-cool-GET-ON-BOARD-17072010017002.shtml?Mode=1 In Mumbai, there is a new community of board game enthusiasts, which you can join here. After Arjun & me went last week to play board games, we decided to test out DealStreet, by placing it alongside some of the best board ggames in the world: including, Settlers of Catan, Dominion, Diplomacy, etc. For us, this was an iron test - if DealStreet was lying beside some of these games, how would people react.
Today was the D-Day & I must say that things went very well. The moment we opened our boards, the interest level simply took off as people were stunned by the quality of design (More kudos to Priyanka, I guess). Even better was to follow, when Arjun & myself talked about some of the features of the game, there were 25 people out of a total of 40 who wanted to platy DealStreet immediately. After 2 hours of playing the game, where most people loved the game, especially the deal-making, the bankruptcy proceedings and the volatile stock market. At the end, there were another 8-9 people waiting to play, but I guess that can wait till next week. On the downside - we still need to do more work on the rule document. Its still requires too much of mine and Arjun's intervention to explain the game. Thats all for today - a very good day overall The schedule for the event is posted here http://www.iitk.ac.in/ime/MBA_IITK/finatics/Finatics2010Schedule.pdf
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About the BlogFinsight is a set of jointly written by all the 3 co-founders. While some posts relate to helping a layman to gain some Insight into the World of Finance, others are just the bits and bytes of a startup. Archives
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