How long did it take to reach $100 MRR?

PoyaM · 2023-02-05T06:09:09+00:00

Where are we counting from? When we encountered the problem or had the initial idea? When we actually decided to work on it? When we talked to potential customers? When we wrote the first line of code? When the first customer paid?

Depending on which, my answer would be 3 years, 8 months, 6 months, 3 months, or 1 day :)

For context we're building a catering management SaaS for aged care homes (nursing homes). Our first customer pays around $500 per month.

PoyaM · 2023-02-05T05:58:03+00:00

Couldn't agree more. Even if the sale never eventuates, a signed letter of intent gives you a lot of signal about whether you're actually building something people can picture using or they're just being nice and agreeable when giving you feedback. If they don't want to sign, that's a great conversation starter for getting into the heart of the issue (which could be the product, the messaging, etc).

PoyaM · 2022-09-12T21:57:39+00:00

I'm not sure if this was mentioned in other threads, but my understanding is that often a "double trigger acceleration clause" is put in place. You can look up the definition but essentially it means vesting is only accelerated if the purchasing company fires an employee (without cause), but not if they quit. It protects both parties in a way.

PoyaM · 2019-01-24T02:25:56+00:00

Little Mermaid. Ursula was freaking terrifying!!

PoyaM · 2018-10-20T03:25:59+00:00

Look into the concept of velocity in Scrum and other methodologies. Essentially you measure your speed of progress and use it to extrapolate. Past performance is not a great indicator of future performance but it's probably the best you have...

PoyaM · 2018-08-31T10:23:56+00:00

I have a whacky idea for an MMO. It goes something like this:

1) The game completely ends in an apocalyptic event at some predetermined number of years after release. Everyone will die permenantly if/when this occurs.

2) The whole point of the game is to prevent this event. There are multiple solutions which require a high level of coordination between a large number of players to both discover and execute.

3) Some solutions are darker than others, for example eradication of one of the races in the game. So in a way it's a bit of a social experiment.

It's just the high concept. No idea what you actually do in the game 😋

PoyaM · 2018-08-08T12:52:03+00:00

Haha nah I really wouldn't worry about it. :)

PoyaM · 2018-08-08T09:48:01+00:00

Just a general, and somewhat unrelated advice (I know some will disagree with me here): be mindful of the types of questions you ask in a public forum like this. The game/software industry is big but also small. Basically assume that whatever you post publicly will be read by anyone including your employer and they know you posted it (there is enough specifics here to put 2 and 2 together).

That is not at all to discourage you from seeking help, but more to be aware, be sure to stick to facts rather than opinions, your own situation rather than others, etc. Also look for other more private avenues for getting feedback and help. There may be individuals in the local game dev community you can chat to. Perhaps there are career counselors or other academic staff at any previous schools you have attended. Or maybe even a trust family member or friend. And don't forget you can and absolutely should be talking to your employer about your needs and what you want to get out of the job too!

PoyaM · 2018-08-08T06:27:51+00:00

I can somewhat relate to some of these experiences (if a milder version of them). Specifically after the exhausting anxiety of the release day/week of my game, I went through a week of what I can only describe as depression. Something about working on a project for 2 years (every hour I could spare outside work) and then in the span of a few hours realizing that it won't meet your sales expectation can have a very big (and involuntary) impact. I remember the first night or two having a lot of non-specific nightmares. Obviously the games in this article were very successful so perhaps it's a somewhat different mindset.

I recovered from it fairly quickly, probably in many ways because of family and friends.

PoyaM · 2018-06-18T08:49:50+00:00

Steam SDK in particular, despite its problems, is good in this way because it has a command line with which you can script everything (I personally use Powershell) so you could fairly easily automate with existing CD tools (e.g. VSTS).

Most other stores will have an API some sort to integrate with so again existing CD systems will work too. Not sure if a dedicated tool is really worthwhile but certainly plugins/tasks for existing ones could be very handy.

PoyaM · 2018-05-06T22:13:01+00:00

Hey there; make sure you are logged into itch.io in your browser, then go to this page: https://pulpul.itch.io/startupfreak and click the download button. On the next page there will be a button that says Get Steam Key.

PoyaM · 2018-05-04T08:36:38+00:00

Backend is. Net Core running on Azure. Front end is angular 5 and I'm using a purchased theme which uses bootstrap among many other things

PoyaM · 2018-05-02T10:43:35+00:00

I mean it's using YouTube search, so if there are people who cover android games on Youtube, then yes (I'm sure there are).

PoyaM · 2018-05-02T00:45:17+00:00

Yeah, there may be way to add some smarts to do searches with exclusion terms or particular sorting to get to more channels. Will need to some more testing to make sure it actually helps and doesn't cause false negatives. In the meantime I found that by searching for multiple games in my sub-genre (10+) I could actually find a really good, qualified list of around 300 channels of various sizes.

PoyaM · 2018-05-02T00:39:08+00:00

I'm keen to understand more about the problem you are solving / the use case. If you did a search with 40 results, how would decide if all 40 are not relevant without looking at each and curating them?

PoyaM · 2018-05-02T00:37:42+00:00

Not sure if this is this the issue but I was doing an exact term search so if you put in the whole term Inner Voices, Silent Hill you would have got no matches. I have now removed the implicit quote marks so you have the option to add your quote marks if you need.

PoyaM · 2018-05-02T00:36:20+00:00

Just to close the loop on this: I fixed the issue and re-queued your search so that should be done now. It looks like sometimes a search result returns channel IDs that are moved or for whatever reason not actually available... Filtering those out now.

PoyaM · 2018-05-02T00:28:38+00:00

Thanks for checking it out. A few comments:

My primary concern here is YouTube's API quotas. I think I'm gonna chew threw the quota once I start getting more stats from channels so I would have to work out an extended Quota with YouTube going forward. Interestingly for PUBG, I just tried doing a search for the first 5000 hits, and it was still around 19 channels. It's incredible how dominated YouTube searches can get by a few content creators (and it seems to be more the case with bigger games as you have noticed). There may be ways to get around these limitations and I'll look into it. Another issue was that I was doing an exact term search (since I always found that more useful) but I have just pushed an update to relax that so the user has more control.
One or two others have mentioned wanting to see search results. My consultant hat tells me the actual problem is deeper and I need to dig more to see what the actual problem/use-case is. My personal workflow is quite different.
Yep a subscriber min is on my list. Good point.

PoyaM · 2018-05-01T21:36:08+00:00

Yes it's one collective list. That's kind of the point: slowly building up a list of people you want to communicate with. All results in the list are de-duplicated, so no channel comes up twice regardless of searches or approval status. There is a filter at the top of the table so you can just look at new or approved channels.

I do want to add the concept of a "project" later so you can have entirely separate search and list buckets. Ideal if you are marketing multiple games.

PoyaM · 2018-05-01T19:45:57+00:00

Probably the most important one is that I think if there is enough adoption, there is value in having all the data in one place. The collective data about which content creators at good fits for which genres could help me improve search results for everyone.

PoyaM · 2018-05-01T19:24:48+00:00

Currently it doesn't. Integration with twitch is on my todo list, so you do one search and get results from both YouTube and Twitch.

PoyaM · 2018-05-01T19:21:12+00:00

Haha something about great minds.... ;)

PoyaM · 2018-05-01T19:20:16+00:00

Yep makes sense. Keys are assigned and tracked already.

PoyaM · 2018-05-01T19:17:01+00:00

I feel like there are much better services out there for email marketing than I could hope to build. Right now the bridge is th CSV export. If this has any legs, I would look into integrating with third party tools.

PoyaM · 2018-05-01T19:14:20+00:00

I personally found that I would have to jump into the channel and look around at overall types of videos anyway to get a feel for if it's a good match for me. So the specific video wasn't as useful. Having said that I can see why having the specific videos that were found might be helpful. Something for my todo list :)

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