Becoming an Entrepreneur: Change of Direction

How I got here

Almost two years ago I started my undertaking to make games for the appstore. The main reason for this was that I always wanted to make games for a living and the appstore surely made the impression that this was possible. I was also a bit frustrated with my day job back then and I had this shiny iPhone 3G in my pockets that wanted more attention. So yes, the time was right.

That's when I started working on my first to be published game ever with my friend Markus. Roughly 4 months later we launched the game.

It got some good coverage around the internet and was featured by Apple but after all it didn't really sell enough to cover the costs. Also I moved from New Zealand back to Germany which basically meant that whatever budget I had was gone. Since then I still work on games but most of the time i'm busy contracting to make a living. This brings me to the status quo where i spend about 80% of my time in contracting and 20% in making my own apps while 98% of my income still comes from contracting.

Photo by Mr__Fox: "Sailing in the Fog"

Becoming an Entrepreneur

Besides just making games cause i enjoy doing it, more generally put, i want to become an entrepreneur and use my own creativity and work on my own projects. So how do I get there?

I could just work a few months on another app and hope that this will change my time and income ratio towards my goal to become an entrepreneur.

But is that the quickest and most reliable way to reach my goal? Is that my strongest suit? While thinking about this question I realized that there are other possibilities to use my skillset that might get me quicker to my goal. The answer I came up with was:

Creating tools and components for iOS Development

Inspired by @gaminghorror with his line-drawing starter kit and Dr. Touch with his Parts Store I decided to change the direction of my business for a while and focus on creating tools and components to make a living and help other developers to accelerate their app development process.

Introducing ultramarine-ui

I spend quite a bit of time in the past weeks on my new site ultramarine-ui.com that will be the home of my components. While the main focus right now is on UIKit view components i'm also thinking about creating some tools to speedup iOS game development. There's a tool for cocos2d i have in mind but more about that in another post.

First components

The first component i'm selling is a teaser view with nice animations that is great to showcase a set of products. On top of that i built another component - a more-apps view - for iPhone apps that uses this teaser component to showcase a set of apps. I guess a few people will find that the price tags are quite high but I had a look on other sites selling source components and i didn't feel like dumping the price on my first day so please bear with me.

Free & Open Source Software

Even though i haven't got anything free for download on my site right now i will definitely look into releasing some components for free or putting something on github.

Let me know what you think about my new site and the new direction. Would be great to get some feedback.

(In case you are interested in my components you can follow me and/or @ultramarineui for occasional product updates).

Picking the right Tree

I'm currently reading 4-hour work week by Timothy Ferriss. The chapter The End of Time Management starts with a bold statement:

"Just a few words on time management: Forget all about it."

Then he illustrates that productivity cannot be measured by the pure volume of work you do and that it's about figuring out what parts are most important to achieve your goal. Makes sense, right?

I have my problems relating to this philosophy when it comes to indie game development.
While I think it's possible to cut out a few things in a game that aren't necessary for it to be fun and profitable, there is still plenty that cutting out is risky or simply impossible. In the end there will be a lot of tasks that inevitably need to be done to make the game work and fun.

Still i believe there's a lesson to be learned there.

Looking at my last two game projects I can say that I

was working quite efficiently but I also know that I could have finished both projects in less time.

I must admit though i'm not too worried about getting my next project done in less time. I'm more worried about the outcome of the next project, since my last two games weren't really that profitable. They wouldn't have been profitable in even half the time. I would even go so far and say that even the best marketing wouldn't have made them profitable.
That's where the difference between Efficiency and Effectiveness comes in which Ferris also emphases in his book.

Let's have a look at Wikipedia's definitions for both terms:

Effectiveness means the capability of producing an effect, and is most frequently used in connection with the degree to which something is capable of producing a specific, desired effect.

Efficiency in general describes the extent to which time or effort is well used for the intended task or purpose.

In terms of capability of producing the desired effect: a fun & profitable game, I think both game ideas and resulting concepts/prototypes were only capable to produce the desired effect to some extent.

This leads me to the conclusion that with my next project I'd like to spend more time on effectiveness - the right idea and concept - before worrying about realizing it in an efficient manner.

So yes, sharpen your axe before you chop down a tree but also think twice about what tree you are picking.

This article is part of the #idevblogaday initiative. Be sure to check out the other articles on idevblogaday.com.

Tree photo courtesy by Till Krech