Hello,
Its been a while since I registered for the forum (4 years?!) so its about time I wrote an introduction and started participating in the forum.
Brief intro (TLDR: made some games and little money, then got a "career") :
I was always slightly against the idea of having a "career" when I was young. My first entrepreneurial venture was creating flash games (remember those?). During and after university I created a total of 17 games with a few exceeding 1 million plays and two exceeding 10 million! Sounds great right? While I was genuinely happy with their popularity I unfortunately had no idea how to monetise properly and peaked at $50 a day in adsense revenue from my website. This felt like a good amount when I was young but looking back I could have easily made 10x that with some minor improvements (such as putting ads in the damn games instead of just on my website!).
Eventually I got a job in software development and started my career as a software developer and didn't do any significant side projects or entrepreneurial stuff for 6 whole years!
Then I came across Mj's books:
They inspired me to develop my own games again. I spent 6 months building an game, released it on the app store and... nothing. The market had changed. Competition and quality was much higher now. I lost interest in improving the project any further.
Current business:
During the pandemic I had lots of time on my hands so I began work on an app in a different genre. I am a keen runner / cycling so I built in app in that area. I learned from the mistakes of the past (The biggest mistake from my previous app was that I tried to do it with my existing skill set. This time I had to learn a bunch of new skills to build what I wanted).
My app idea was to add gamification to exploring a city while running / cycling. It would connect to a customers existing GPS exercise tracking provider (strava, garmin etc) and calculate the percent of streets that they have explored in a city.
- It took 1.5 years to launch the first version and get my first user.
- Another 6 months to get my first paying customer (recurring subscription)
- Customers are now signing up through word of mouth (I've not done any marketing in the last few months and still customers are joining)
- I am now up to 1.7k users with a few percent paying
Theres still a long way to go but I hope to share the journey, and what I've learned here,
Matt
Its been a while since I registered for the forum (4 years?!) so its about time I wrote an introduction and started participating in the forum.
Brief intro (TLDR: made some games and little money, then got a "career") :
I was always slightly against the idea of having a "career" when I was young. My first entrepreneurial venture was creating flash games (remember those?). During and after university I created a total of 17 games with a few exceeding 1 million plays and two exceeding 10 million! Sounds great right? While I was genuinely happy with their popularity I unfortunately had no idea how to monetise properly and peaked at $50 a day in adsense revenue from my website. This felt like a good amount when I was young but looking back I could have easily made 10x that with some minor improvements (such as putting ads in the damn games instead of just on my website!).
Eventually I got a job in software development and started my career as a software developer and didn't do any significant side projects or entrepreneurial stuff for 6 whole years!
Then I came across Mj's books:
They inspired me to develop my own games again. I spent 6 months building an game, released it on the app store and... nothing. The market had changed. Competition and quality was much higher now. I lost interest in improving the project any further.
Current business:
During the pandemic I had lots of time on my hands so I began work on an app in a different genre. I am a keen runner / cycling so I built in app in that area. I learned from the mistakes of the past (The biggest mistake from my previous app was that I tried to do it with my existing skill set. This time I had to learn a bunch of new skills to build what I wanted).
My app idea was to add gamification to exploring a city while running / cycling. It would connect to a customers existing GPS exercise tracking provider (strava, garmin etc) and calculate the percent of streets that they have explored in a city.
- It took 1.5 years to launch the first version and get my first user.
- Another 6 months to get my first paying customer (recurring subscription)
- Customers are now signing up through word of mouth (I've not done any marketing in the last few months and still customers are joining)
- I am now up to 1.7k users with a few percent paying
Theres still a long way to go but I hope to share the journey, and what I've learned here,
Matt
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