Sit Down With CLZ Concepts (Bought By Zynga)

June 10th, 2008 by Nick Gonzalez

I sat down with the guys behind CLZ Concepts: Jeff Chen, Linus Liang, James Zhang). CLZ is the application development house behind incredibly popular applications like Flirt With Hotties, Horoscope, and You’re a Hottie. After growing and monetizing their applications through SocialMedia, the team eventually sold to Zynga for an undisclosed sum. However, they’ve continued to monetize through SocialMedia.

The three were all grad students and friends at Berkeley and Stanford before Dave McClure and BJ Fogg inspired them to make apps on the Facebook platform as part of a Stanford class. They didn’t start as a success. Their first app was funny images, which didn’t pan out. But eventually they struck gold with the “Hottie” category. In less than a year, they rolled their success from “You’re a Hottie” on to a series of other apps.

The team highlighted some best practices around scaling and design. The team runs their own servers and programs in Ruby. Despite entering the crowded horoscope category, the team was able to create a successful alternative app that featured faster load times and daily updates. The team emphasized that trial and error was the main way they developed their applications and emphasized that Ruby was an advantage in quickly prototyping.

Finally, the team finishes up with their experiences with SocialMedia. They emphasized how SocialMedia was a partner they trusted, paid better, and on time. The business they built was eventually sold to Zynga’s game network.

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Tags: developers

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Naples web design 2 weeks ago 1 point
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Those 3 guys are really intelligent because it's not that easy to monetize when you tackle social media especially if a person didn't have that knowledge on how to implement things out through social media. Well with practice and experience, they have been successful not only in thier profession but with the social media marketing of their products.

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technologiez 1 month ago 1 point
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that’s a bit mean for the people who arent old enough to PAY for farmville but like it don’t you think?

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i’m old enough and i’m not against paying for games i enjoy either, but Zynga do to many nice things for cash only customers and screw the free ones. It would be better if they just made everything so it can be bought with either cash or fake currency….but not so it costs like 100000gold for something that costs 12cash like in cafe world, that **** sucks
http://technologiez.net/2010/07/25/zynga-the-google-of-games/

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alexlive 4 months ago 1 point
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This is first time i visit here.

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Dubai Web design 2 months ago 1 point
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It is also my first time to visit this site, and I am really glad that I have stumbled upon this one. This post is a good inspiration for people who are in the gaming industry.

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Dental jobs 4 months ago 1 point
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The team highlighted some best practices around scaling and design. The team runs their own servers and programs in Ruby. Despite
entering

the crowded horoscope category, the team was able to create a successful alternative app that featured faster load times and daily updates. The team emphasized that trial and error was the main way they developed their applications and emphasized that Ruby was an advantage in quickly prototyping.

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1 /people/start123/ /people/start123/following/ http://www.dentalrecruitment.co.uk/