Matt Warren

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Category: Entrepreneurship

Founder journey, startup lessons, and business strategy

  • Progress on New Game

    So the new game is going to be called Tycho City. It’s based on building a lunar base and battling other bases for the moon’s valuable resources. There’s a mix of two styles of gameplay the first is the simulation of the moon base with building and upgrading mines and energy collectors. The second is a defence game where you attack other bases by landing your troops/robots and taking on their defences.

    Unlike my previous games this time I’m taking some good advice and modeling other successful games. Rather than try to invent something brand new I am going to try to put my spin on a popular and profitable game concept.

    One thing about this type of game is just how much data there is to manage.

    This game will be heavily dependant on web servers to deliver almost everything. All of the costs, upgrade paths, graphics, assets, music, rules, build times, and store menus will be defined and controlled from my web backend. It will allow us to dynamically update and tweak the game play to optimize things after it’s released and keep it fresh with new content. But it’s a lot of Data. And that’s just on the static side of things. The server will also keep and save the game state of every player’s game in real-time.

    Organizing all of this information in a way that is going to be easy to understand and work with is not easy. But it’s a fun challenge.

    This game is going to take several more months to finish. But it’s going to be my best chance of getting a major hit.

  • Virility

    Having a game that naturally promotes itself is a challenge. The old techniques of tweeting your score or sharing the app on facebook are not enough to make something popular or have it go viral. The mechanic to make something go viral has to be much more deeply integrated.

    The virility of games like Draw Something was astounding, but it was also a natural extension of the type of gameplay. In order to play you needed to get your friends in the game. It’s growth was astounding because of that.

    I started to dissect another popular game recently called Clash Of Clans made by SuperCell which takes things to a new level. The live in game chat and team gameplay create a fascinating dynamic that works extremely well on a mobile device.

    It’s clear that the bar has been raised. Creating a top game now requires a complex server side backend, a massive amount of content, depth of gameplay which can attract new players but keep existing ones playing for a long time and a polished high quality look.

    Thinking now about creating a great game to be released in 6 months is a real challenge. How much more complexity will be expected by then?

    The added complexity of making a game naturally viral rather than tacking on twitter and facebook buttons is hard. It requires thought about how to change the game mechanics to work these things into the core of the game. Making games that are inherently social will be a fun challenge for game designers. A challenge I’m looking forward to.

  • Doing Hard Work

    There are several hard problems in computer science that seem to be getting solved in a real way. Google’s Driverless cars are perhaps the most recent example of computers taking on a challenge assumed by many to be impossible just a few years ago. And they’re doing a good job. In 2015 they will have a significant number of cars on the road. The economics and convenience of self-driving cars is so compelling that is shouldn’t take long for the technology to make it into consumer’s hands. By 2040 few people will have a drivers license.

    Computers are increasingly taking on even more of the hard work done by humans. This effect has been blamed for the slower than expected recovery in jobs from the recession — companies are making money, they are buying equipment, but they are not hiring at the same rates seen in historical recoveries.

    In the tech industry we have the job of developing these difficult solutions. Better robots, faster searching, more accurate voice recognition, more convenient payment methods etc. For the foreseeable future there is plenty of hard work to be done.

    Something is happening right now in the PC industry which will be echoed in a few years in all of these technology areas. Giant powerful home PCs are becoming irrelevant. The fast computer you bought 4 years ago is still perfectly adequate today for getting what you need done. There’s little need then for more ram, more cores, or more drive space. The technology has become “good enough” and as a result innovation has stalled out as customers have dried up.

    Expand that “good enough” concept to other technologies… phones, robots, cars etc. and things may become grim as demand for replacing usable products for something better diminishes.

    It is the reason why I think it is more important now than ever to work even harder to get yourself ahead. Produce something new, create an impact, and try to create your legacy for this world. With each passing day technology gets better at what you do to make a living. I’m working hard to make sure I’m financially and personally secure by the time the computers catch up.

    It’s going to be hard.

  • Steady Growth

    I’m finally seeing some steady progress on the iPhone/iPad app side of my business.  It’s been growing for the last few months rather steadily and with the latest updates I’ve further optimized the monetization and am now making a stable cash flow.

    The goal I had starting out was to make $200/day which would roughly be enough to pay all my living expenses.  It’s not there quite yet, but I’ve recently passed 10% of that goal.  Things are lining up now to quickly be able to double that income in the next few months.

    Getting  up to $50-$75 per day by Christmas is my goal for the next few months.  It should be realistically doable.

     

  • App Control Demo

    App Control is a Django App that I have been evolving over the last year for a backend service to support my (and my friends) iOS apps.

    It allows you to update them, push new content to them, and provide some central storage for building things like a commenting engine and to tie everyone who uses your apps together within a community.

    It also works to pull in marketing information, ad revenue, sales, updates, reviews etc and add them together to compute some higher level business numbers such as RPI (revenue per install).

    Next features I plan on adding include a generic currency/wallet system and store for dynamically providing in game content and allow price changes without submitting an update to Apple.

    I’m wondering if this sort of app would be of interest to anyone else out there who has iPhone Apps.

  • The singularity

    In the last few days I read two books. I don’t read very many fiction books but these got me thinking.

    The singularity is a term taken from physics. In the world of physics a singularity is an object or event in space where the laws of normal physics break and thing behave in wild and unpredictable ways. The term has been taken over to the world of technology to be the point in time when computers become intelligent enough to improve themselves. Once there is a computer AI as smart as a human it will not take long for it to start coding on itself and eventually becoming 2x, 5x, 100x smarter than anyone on the planet.

    When this happens (not if) the world will change dramatically very quickly. But whether or not it will be good or bad is unknown. Any futurist cannot be certain of anything afterwards.

    Will people have jobs if a computer is capable of everything we can do? With mass unemployment as factories become completely automated, followed by AIs redesigning the products and taking over business management roles will it result in a wealth of free time or crises as people have no money.

    Will removing people from the supply chain bring the prices of goods to zero? Probably not since there will be at least a few thing that will remain scarce such as property, and time. How that will be handled if no one makes any money is anyone’s guess.

    Will an army of automated robots be able to re-forest the Sahara desert and save the planet from climate change?

    It is a fascinating scenario to think about because literally every industry will change. There are so many variables and uncertainties that a thorough discussion would probably fill a 1000 page book.

    The role of science fiction is sometimes to explore these ideas and present them to a wider audience so that culturally we can be somewhat more prepared for what the future may bring. The singularity is something far more likely to happen in the next 30 years than the invention of faster than light travel or transporter pads and yet it has been off the radar for most people.

  • Entrepreneurship Skills and Phases

    Within the last week I have nailed down the final set of features and bug fixes for Automatic Blog Machine. It’s now in a stage where the development is finished and I can start focusing on the sales and marketing push and finally release it out to people like you who may be interested in using it.

    There are a few different phases to go through in the creation of a business like this. Through my past failed experiences at entrepreneurship I have found that there’s a number of steps that require different skills which can create problems for a one man show like mine.

    To be successful you need (at a minimum):

    1. idea generation
    2. development and testing of the idea into an actual product or service
    3. financial and legal organization
    4. sales and marketing ideas and execution
    5. customer support

    The vast majority of people don’t have interest in doing all of these wildly different tasks.  They all require different skill sets and different motivations.   All of these steps can be broken down further revealing more mundane day to day details which can bog down even the most determined entrepreneur.

    The job of the entrepreneur is to learn which of these pieces they have the desire and motivation to see through themselves and which are better handled by paying someone else to do it for them.  Unfortunately sometimes the way to learn these things is to try and fail.

    I have on several occasions tried to get a business idea off the ground.  As the idea generator and the software developer I usually find myself stalling at the software testing phase.  It’s so boring.  Going though a product writing test code and manually checking interfaces takes time and effort which is often the downfall of the entire enterprise.

    Your mileage may vary, but for this latest project I was able to get through the testing phase with the extra external motivation I received by attending a conference and meeting people that were actually interested in buying the final product.  That gave me the confidence to get though it.

    For the financial and business organization stuff I decided to hire an accountant.  This may have been more beneficial than I expected.  Besides having someone else deal with the paperwork and keeping me from having to dig though reams of material to figure out what the best business structure to use, how to allocate shares and file and register everything with the government.  There were a number of side benefits to having someone else do the work:

    1. Makes it feel more legitimate – I have registered businesses myself, but when you do that it somehow feels less real.  You just hand in a few forms pay the fees and declare yourself President.  Having an accountant witness you declare yourself President somehow feels less like a scam.
    2. Provides external motivation – I told the accountant what I expect to be making and when I expect to launch.  I know he’ll see the numbers when tax time rolls around so there’s pressure to actually see it through and start generating some revenue.  Going back to the accountant with $0 in revenue to declare would be a huge embarrassment.
    3. If I had to figure out how to do everything it would have taken months of dragging my feet figuring out what forms go to whom and in what order.  The accountant got through everything in about 3 days.
    4. I now have an expert on my team to ask questions about how best to organize things.  He can quickly tell me how to organize my finances, and when is a good time to register holding companies, trusts, and how to issue additional shares.

    Dealing now with the mental switch going into sales and marketing is tough.  The technical aspects of software development suits my personality but switching then to the creative aspects of creating a marketing plan, recording videos, and being persuasive requires a completely different set of skills.

    Not many of the projects I have started made it to this stage.  Most die off much earlier.  But the few things that I have successfully managed to get a marketing plan for and get the product available for sale has taught me a few lessons.

    Getting something for sale is THE major turning point.  I have met quite a few people trying to make money online and very few of them actually get to the point where they have something for sale.  The few that do have something for sale are in a much better position – they can test different marketing strategies, split test offers, find and partner with others and run customer surveys.  Once you have something for sale there’s lots you can do to grow the business.

    For any business you simply can’t make money if you have nothing to sell.  Selling other peoples things can be done profitably but in my experience it’s difficult to compete against the army of people trying to do the same thing.

    Finally, customer support will land on you whether or not you are prepared for it once you have sold something.  There are two methods for customer support.  The classical approach is to have people answer customer questions and concerns either through a call center or some other  support center.  The Google approach is to move most of the support to the community through the use of wiki’s and forums – customers can help themselves and help other customers directly.

    These five categories of skills are the major distinct skills required in a small online business.  I’m sure that as I continue to learn and hit new stages of business growth new lessons will be learned and skills acquired.