

Stop Focusing on What You Don't Have - fourspace
http://timcheadle.com/posts/2013/08/06/stop-focusing-on-what-you-dont-have/

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mattm
Like a lot of good advice, this is easy to say but sometimes difficult to
implement. But it's good to be reminded of this. When you say "If I only had
X, I could do Y" what you are really telling yourself is that now, you can't
do Y. So you don't do it. Excuses are easy to come up but hard to get out of.

As a shameless self-plug, I've put together a course that helps developers
reduce the tendency to think that the grass is always greener. If you're
interested, see my profile for the link.

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vitd
While I agree with his premise, he doesn’t give a lot of useful advice on how
to implement his suggestion. In the case of the menswear website, how does
calling people and using a spreadsheet help? People on the phone can’t see the
clothes. Also, who are you calling in that example?

In the case of the project management idea - again, who do you call to get a
job implementing your idea?

The code idea is probably a reasonable one for some people, though coding is
often much harder than it looks.

Finally he says, "The problem is not what you’re missing; it’s that you are
not leveraging what you have,” but he gives no advice on how to do that
practically. It’s good advice, just not useful without more information.

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fourspace
My goal wasn't to give specific advice to people in certain situations. My
examples are hypothetical; maybe I didn't make that clear.

Instead, the point of the article was to motivate you to go actually make
sales, create value, and build relationships. None of these things require a
developer. Do I know who you should specifically call to test the market in a
given context? No; that's your problem to figure out. The point is that you
CAN figure it out.

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itsallbs
It's very easy to fall into this mental trap. Developers are creative people
by definition; we of all people have no excuse to pass the blame for our lack
of success to another. It's a way of avoiding responsibility and completely
counterproductive to success. Great post.

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PufferBuffer
The sad reality is, even after reading this article most folks will resolve to
once again, blaming others for the things they don't have. It's not that most
people don't know they should work harder to strive for their own, but rather
it's a lot easier to blame someone else, and humans are naturally lazy. Most
people know, but don't act, imho.

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speeder
He never addressed what you do when you need massive marketing and don't have
the funds.

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tomasien
When is that a thing? I can imagine that those scenarios exist, for example
you make a product that isn't nearly as good as a product that every savvy
user already knows about (1and1mywebsite for example), but what is a common
example?

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speeder
This is very routine when you make games for mobile.

Every successful game company for mobile had lots of investment in marketing.

This also applies for non-mobile too actually, Activision for example famously
spends more money in marketing than development, Modern Warfare 2 for example
had a marketing budget of 250 million.

Because of awful mobile "discoverability" you need marketing, there is no
other way, you just need it, people WON'T EVER find you unless they see a ad,
someone refers the thing to them, or they see front page in the store (and
when this happen, you already is doing well...)

EDIT about viral: My company in particular makes games for children, we cannot
rely on anything that looks remotely anti-ethical... All our competitors (both
with success and failures) rely mostly on marketing while they don't have a
brand.

about Marketing expenses: The need for money, is mostly to test what works,
and what does not, with some things is easy and every small company (including
us) already do, that is test campaigns in AdMob, AppBrain and so on, the
problem is the next "tier" is with companies that charge 20K USD upfront for
their basic services... We all know that you need to hire them, but for
obvious reasons everyone is secretive about WHO you hire, ensuring a sort of
barrier of entry, where newcomers must waste money around until they find the
company that really deliver.

And finally, organic growth and small marketing works, and the amount of users
do climb, the problem it is not fast enough to cover fixed costs for a LOOOONG
time, way longer than the runway.

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tomasien
Tim is, in this blog, forcing you to REALLY define need, and I think "tons of
marketing dollars for initial launch" is not a need, ever. What you need is to
prove that, when they find the game, they'll download and pay for it. Invest
$100 in marketing, and see what your ROI is. If it's high enough, somebody
with half a brain would put up the money to amp up the spend.

I do not agree that these "need" massive marketing, but it does depend on the
scale. The only game I worked with delivering has over 20,000 downloads and
absolutely no marketing, because there are a ton of blogs that write about
iPhone games. It's not a very good game, and it has absolutely 0 viral
mechanics, or else I'd posit we'd have more.

We were lucky, to be fair, but I disagree that a "startup" that is making a
game "needs" massive marketing dollars. It seems like you "need" viral
mechanics, press, devoted fans, or an incremental ad spending campaign where
you constantly re-invest the money you have.

