Comment by nonrecursive | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nonrecursive | Hacker News Reader

I love stories like this. Personally, it's very difficult for me to focus on one project and get it to the point where it's completely awesome and people love it. In the past year I've worked on http://openhercules.com/ , http://emailegg.com , http://omgsmackdown.com/ , http://www.whoopsapp.com/ . I've also spent time working on a multiplayer game in common lisp and just this weekend I finished putting together my first desktop app. Perhaps the most successful site I've made is http://happyjobsearch.com/ , followed by http://visualmess.com .

Which is all to say that while I spend a lot of time on side projects, I have a hard time getting from "this is good enough to show people" to "people love this and want to show other people." Saying no to all the ideas that are always bouncing around in my head so that I can focus on just one, like the guy in the article, always feels painful and risky. My internal dialogue goes, "What if this idea doesn't work out? I should just move on to the next one. That way I'm at least learning something new." What's more, when I initially release a site and it doesn't get any traction, my response is almost always to mentally run from it so that I don't have to experience the pain of disappointment.

How do people deal with that?

Dev here. I never expected it to do well or sell at all. The way I looked at it is like this "I'll roll the dice, probably won't work out but I'll give it a shot"

I think in general you've just got to get it wrong. If you look at other games by EEG, you'll see "RollRover" - a terrible terrible little puzzle game that didnt even sell 50 copies, Why do we fall Mr Wayne?

Having said that, the biggest part was luck. right place/time etc

Congrats Luca, you have achieved the ultimate goal! If you don't mind me asking, whats next?

Updates with a bit more content ( challenges room / gamecenter ) and the android version

Congratulations on your success! I wouldn't sell RollRover short. I don't have an iPhone to try it, but from the video trailer it looks like a fun and well-made game.

Forgive me for being rather curt and blunt but... have you showed other people who aren't your friends?

Not curt and blunt at all - it's a very good question.

Yep I have, though I haven't done any real marketing. Over the past few months I've come to realize that's one of my real hurdles - marketing is just not one of my skills. I'm not sure where to begin with it, though I plan on learning.

I mostly share on sites like this, reddit, and forrst. Next week I'm going to be presenting Whoops in a lightning talk to a local Ruby group, which isn't something I've done in awhile and which I'm very mentally resistant to.

Maybe it's all just a matter of not having the right knowledge or experience. Programming is easy - I always feel like if I can't see the path I'll eventually be able to find it. Same with UI/UX. Not so with marketing, getting feedback, and iterating.

Aaron SW's latest series of articles have informative about tackling the hard problems. http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/rawnerve

Made to Stick is an excellent read on the subject of branding and marketing. http://www.heathbrothers.com/madetostick/

I used to run a blog in 2008 and I got it to 6.5million page views before I quit it and I was featured in the book "Blogging Heroes" along with the founders of Lifehacker, Engadget, Ars Technica, Gizmodo and Boing Boing.

My key strategy when I was growing my blog was to find existing communities that would like what I was writing and then build relationships with those communities.

Thanks for the leads! I will check those out. If you don't mind my asking, what made you quit your blog?

It was a huge time sink. I stopped blogging when my mom was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and getting away from "trying to be popular on the internet" gave me the distance to see that I wasn't getting anything out of it.

I also changed jobs to something more interesting and now that's where I put my passion instead of a hobby.

Wow - I hope your mom is doing better. Thanks for sharing what you went through and I'm glad you found something better to focus your energy on.

visualmess was informative, thank you.

Posting a link to every project you have worked on in a HN post is not really marketing.

When I first read this it came across to me as sarcastic, belittling, and unhelpful, which would be an unfortunate way to react to someone trying to honestly share his experience of grappling with fear and disappointment. However, I'll assume your comment wasn't meant that way.

Putting those links up was not meant as a form of marketing. They were meant to give context - to show what I meant when I say, "I get these things to a point where they're presentable but they don't make people fall in love."

Do you have any suggestions on what really would be marketing?

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