2016

Case Study Analysis

Andres Patricio Croucher

EMG 460 Feasibility Study and Evaluation
of New Business
4/10/2016

The Case
The setting
Andres was 23 years old on August 2009, when he decided to leave the company he was working for
and dedicate himself entirely to finishing his studies. He had at least 2 more years of hard work
ahead of him but he decided to make up for some of the time that he had spent both working and
studying. He was very lucky to be able to ask for some financial help from his parents and, since he
wasnt going to generate any income, he had to move back home and be a good son. Prior to
quitting his job, he had started working on an online project which he expected to leave him a little
bit of disposable income so he would not necessarily be begging for his parents money. Andres had
been working his whole adult life and he didnt want to stop being financially independent while he
was back at his parents home so he figured that, with this project, he was going to at least cover
part of his expenses.

The idea
At that time, there were a lot of video game industry websites from all over the world mainly in
English and focused on the customer side of things by providing news, previews and reviews of the
latest videogames. However, there were very few international sites focusing on the news from the
developers point of view, for example, what they were working on, if there were any events with
guest speakers that might be of interest to the developer community, providing information of job
opportunities. Andres realized that there were some websites that did this in English and focused on
the US, UK and Europe markets, but none were focusing on Latin America. At that time, there were
many new young development studios blooming from the region and there was nobody covering
their feats or communications. Hence, GamerBiz was created.
GamerBizs main objective was to promote, communicate and help small studios that did not have a
significant marketing budget but wanted to share their creations to the world. Small studios include
from people who are just one developer to a team of ten to fifteen people. The website also had a
job board and they would also be covering relevant industry announcements such as important
events and releases. This was all going to be in Spanish focused for Latin America. Basically, the
editorial guideline was to create original content. Each contributor could have their own personal
style in writing as long as the post was an original piece and it was encouraged to produce video
contents to provide a new and fresh experience to the sites visitors.

Getting started
Andres had some savings remaining for this new stage of his life and he decided to invest it on his
idea. This investment was used to pay for website design, hosting and server maintenance. On the
other hand, this was a huge endeavour and if he wanted to go ahead with it, he wouldnt be able to
make it alone. He created some job postings asking for people to write a short review of their
favourite board game. This would help him decide whether if the style of the candidates writing had
the entertainment value that he was looking for and if they could write something exciting out of
something that many would consider boring. After going through 50 applications, the candidates
were narrowed down to a team of 6 contributors. It is very important to highlight that during the
application process, the contributors were told that since this was a start-up, Andres was not

expecting to see any income on the first days, months, years and that only if the team was able to
make some profit, then Andres would gladly pay the contributors for their work. Andres was just
providing the platform in which they could take part in. All of the 6 contributors (including some
close friends), agreed to this and they got down to work.

The disrupted honeymoon

During the first month, everything was going just fine. The site started promoting itself through
social media, industry boards and basically spamming everywhere the team was able to do so.
Andres was also able to get in touch with a local server provider who allowed the team to use some
of their game servers for people to join in for free in exchange for some ads in the website. He had
also managed to implement Google Ads on the website since this was expected to be the main
source of revenue.
Everything seemed to be working fine, visit numbers were increasing by the day and the forum were
gaining traction as well, so even the visitors were generating content which increased the sites
retention rate and gave people the excuse to come back. Andres felt great, things were going just
fine until one day he received a call on a Sunday morning. Andres had gone out the previous night
so he wasnt quite awake yet and he was a bit annoyed that someone called him on a Sunday
morning while he was in bed. It was one of the contributors telling him that he tried to generate a
new post but the website went down. He instantly finished waking up and opened up the laptop.
Indeed, the website was down with an unusual error. His first thought was We got hacked so, he
went ahead and checked the files on the servers but everything was still there and nobody seemed
to have modified anything. He checked in with his server provider and apparently one of the servers
was under heavy load and required maintenance. A few hours later, this was resolved, but the same
issue appeared the following day, and then, the next, and so on. It was possible that the servers
werent handling the amount of traffic that the site was having or maybe the server was not the best
one.
When Andres hired the hosting service, he did it for free and the annual payments were very cheap.
Since they were having increasing traffic, he decided to move on to a more serious hosting service.
The whole moving lasted for about 2 weeks and by then, the people who used to get on the website,
were partly gone. The new server was working fine and it took as a while to get back in their feet.
The website outage also affected the teams moral and they were all a little bit demotivated,
particularly the contributors.

Moving on
A couple of months later, if the team wanted to maintain the number of visits, they would require to
have new content daily. This was a lot to ask from the contributors who were not getting paid.
Some of them decided to leave the project and move onto other things. Andres couldnt blame them
for wanting to leave, they knew what they were getting into and maybe just good intentions were
not enough for their time. The question was: How come was website not getting any income at all
from advertising even though the visits were high. Andres later found out that some of the
contributors tried to cheat Google Ads by clicking on the ads displayed on the website. Google
identified that these clicks were not unique and came from the same source. Since this was done
almost daily, Google had banned the AdSense account and all of the small income ceased to exist.
Andres believed that the intentions of these contributors were good but it completely backfired.

After this, the team couldve maintained the website but it required time and the teams mood had
drastically changed after this. In the end, the site was online for about a year until this event
occurred which was the breaking point for the team to part ways. This became Andress first
entrepreneurial and a huge learning experience that he wouldnt change for anything in the world.

Issues
Below are the issues identified by peers after analysing the case study:
1.
2.
3.
4.

Trust of contributors
Revenues Planning
Team Management
Team Motivation

Relevant Papers
The Other F Word: How Smart Leaders, Teams, and Entrepreneurs Put Failure to Work
Kathleen Ross, ISSN: 112590910, DB: business source complete, Permalink:
http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=ip,cookie,athens&db=bth&AN=112
590910&site=eds-live
Summary: When managed well, failure is a resource for learning, resilience, and agility. Indeed,
seasoned entrepreneurs embrace the notion of failing fast and early. The author defines 7 stages of
the Failure Value Cycle and how to take a proactive approach on failures.
Case relationship: This paper is related to the issue of how to make the best out of failures by using
a simple 7 stage situation analysis. Having gone through this process when the issues appeared
could have helped into looking at the issues differently.
Questions:

Is it possible to identify the failures in the case?

Are they suitable for the model proposed by Ross?
If the model was applied, how would it change the outcome of the issues?
How can the Failure Value Cycle be applied under future situations?

Effectively Managing Expectations

Richards, Douglas, ISSN: 1537-1816, DB: Business Source Complete, Permalink:
http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=ip,cookie,athens&db=bth&AN=103
070177&site=eds-live
Summary: The authors examine the importance of effectively managing expectationsour own,
those of our prospects and clients, and those of our associates. We explore ways of identifying them
so that we eliminate mental and emotional roadblocks and move more productively toward their

fulfilment. As all of us have expectations that affect our professional relationships, it is important
that we increase our awareness of what they are and how they affect us.
Case relationship: This paper appeals to the issue of team management and team motivation. The
team had high expectations on their contributions and the result of them. Managing team
expectations correctly could have helped reduce the contributor anxiety by communicating
effectively what were the goals in the short run and the way of exactly knowing on how to achieve
them.
Questions:

According to the author, what is a good way to manage the expectations that the
collaborators had?
How could this have helped the protagonist to ensure he communicated more down to
earth expectations?
What could the protagonist have done in order to understand the team expectations?
How is this framework useful to deal with possible future issues such as this one?

Communication and trust are key: Unlocking the relationship between leadership and
team performance and creativity
Kathleen, Boies, ISSN: 1048-9843, DB: Science Direct, Permalink:
http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=ip,cookie,athens&db=edselp&AN=S
1048984315000934&site=eds-live
Summary: Considerable theoretical and empirical work has identified a relationship between
transformational leadership and team performance and creativity. The mechanisms underlying this
link, however, are not well understood. To identify the intervening processes inherent in this
relationship; we experimentally manipulated the leadership style assigned to 44 teams taking part in
a resource-maximization task. Teams were exposed either to a leader using inspirational motivation,
intellectual stimulation, or a control condition. Our findings reveal important differences between
leadership styles in communication and team outcomes (objective task performance and creativity).
These results suggest that different dimensions of transformational leadership should be
emphasized depending on the outcome sought. In addition, our results provide evidence for a
sequential mediation model where leadership influences team outcomes through overall team
communication and trust in teammates. This study suggests mechanisms by which transformational
leaders may impact team outcomes, which has implications for team building and leadership
training.
Case relationship: This paper deals with the issue of trust amongst the team members due to issues
in communication. By understanding the research done in this paper with multiple teams
manipulating different leadership styles, one can utilize and optimal leadership style to enhance the
teams creativity and performance. Also, the paper provides an insight on how communication plays
a key role when developing team trust.
Questions:

What is the optimal leadership style that the protagonist should have used with his team?

How has communication affected the idea of trust in the case?

What steps could the protagonist take in order to influence the teams outcomes through
communication and trust?
How can the mechanisms proposed by the author be utilized for future issues that the
protagonist might face?

How does trust affect the performance of ongoing teams? The mediating role of
reflexivity, monitoring and effort.
De Jong, Bart; Elfring, Tom, ISSN: 0001-4273, DB: Business Source Complete, permalink:
http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=ip,cookie,athens&db=bth&AN=514
68649&site=eds-live
Summary: In this study, the authors investigate how trust affects the performance of
ongoing teams. They propose a multiple mediator model in which different team processes act as
mediating mechanisms that transmit the positive effects of trust to team performance. Drawing on a
data set of ongoing tax consulting teams, we found support for the mediated effects
of trust via team monitoring and team effort. The results did not support the mediating role of
"team reflexivity." These findings contribute to understanding how trust operates within
ongoing teams in a way that is distinct from what is known from studies of short-term teams.
Case relationship: Similar to the previous paper, this paper deals with trust and how it affects team
performance. Contributor trust had a lot of weight on how the teams performed given to the nature
of it being a job with no salary but based on trust that this would be achievable if things were
working correctly. Understanding how trust affects the performance of different kinds of teams can
provide a different lens to which to look through the case when the work methodology was
explained through the selection process of the contributors.
Questions:

Using the framework provided, how does trust affected the teams relationship
What mediating mechanism wouldve been the optimal to use for the protagonist?
How could have trust be monitored in the teams case and how it could be improved?
How can trust be improved in a situation as the one described in the case?