[quote style=”boxed”]Dream it, build an amazing team and culture of people with different skill sets to build the best product and inspire others to believe in the vision. Momentum is key.[/quote]
Nathan Lands is the Co-Founder of Gamigy. He began his journey as an entrepreneur at the age of 15 in Alabama when he began making money from playing games and has been creating companies ever since. Nathan is crazy passionate about having an impact on the world and has always believed life should be more fun, like a game. That idea started as a child when he wondered why you couldn’t level up in real life and that dream led to the inception of Gamify.
Nathan Lands is a gamer and has been fortunate to become friends with most of the top game designers and executives in gaming, and he also had a major booth at E3 with his last company, GameStreamer. During his early 20’s he traveled to Asia and studied Mandarin Chinese in Taiwan.
What are you working on right now?
Gamify. We’re working on building a community to collaboratively explore how you can apply game thinking and game mechanics to non-games to make things more fun and engaging using our Gamify Platform. Our platform contains an “App Store” that will continually grow and gives our partners(websites, applications, etc.) new ways to reward and engage their users with “game like” experiences. The basics are adding things like points, achievements, leaderboards, status titles, quests etc., but the hard part really is nailing the experience and making it fun and relevant to the users and the brand. We believe this can be applied to so many things, like websites, education, charity, marketing, daily life.. you name it.
3 trends that excite you?
Gamification. A new era for the web and beyond with great user experiences that are fun for things that used to not be fun. Gamification in our opinion is the biggest thing after social networks and it has the potential to touch so many parts of our lives, it’s really exciting.
Real-Time Interactions & Data are exciting. Companies like Twitter really are just early examples of how Real-Time is going to impact the world, it also is a big enabler of what we’re doing with Gamification.
Personalization of Experiences, more and more things will begin to be personalized based on your tastes and your friends tastes.
How do you bring ideas to life?
Dream it, build an amazing team and culture of people with different skill sets to build the best product and inspire others to believe in the vision. Momentum is key.
What inspires you?
Life. With Gamify it’s pretty simple to look at a lot of things in the world and imagine how they could be more fun and pleasurable which constantly keeps my mind thinking of new possibilities.
What is one mistake you’ve made, and what did you learn from it?
We made a critical mistake at my last startup by taking a huge sum of money too early and giving away control to an individual investor who didn’t understand our industry. I learned that money isn’t everything. Chose your partners very carefully (that includes business partners, investors, and clients). This is so important because if you pick the wrong partners you will fail regardless of how great your idea’s potential is.
What is one business idea that you’re willing to give away to our readers?
This is a shameless plug, but become a Gamify Expert. Engineers, Artists, Game Designers, Marketers etc. will have the opportunity to potentially make money using our platform to apply it to different industries. Before they can do that though, they need to be part of the community, learn, share and prove their knowledge and expertise! We think the skills you’ll learn from doing this are going to be critical in the future, regardless if its with or without our platform. We think that making things more fun and engaging is the future, and hope that our community will help lead the way, to the benefit of all involved.
Who would you love to see interviewed on IdeaMensch?
Jude Gomila of Heyzap. Awesome guy, awesome company.
How to get started with Gamification?
We recommend you first take a look at our Gamification Encyclopedia and check out the gamification books. Then if you’re interested in joining a community to learn and join discussions around Gamification, you should apply to become a Gamify Expert. If you’re interested in how you can gamify your website, application etc. you should apply to be one of our beta partners at http://gamify.com/partners. The Beta is coming soon!
Tell me something about yourself most people don’t know?
In addition to being an entrepreneur, I’m also a gamer. In the Starcraft 2 Beta a friend and me were #1 2vs2 in North America, though I never have time to play anymore.
Connect:
Gamify –
Gamification.org –
Gamify on Facebook –
Gamify on Twitter –
Mario Schulzke is the Founder of ideamensch, which he started a decade ago to learn from entrepreneurs and give them a platform for their ideas.