How I tried to crowdfund my tuition, but got 20 potential clients instead | Hacker News Reader

How I tried to crowdfund my tuition, but got 20 potential clients instead

thenextweb.com

43 pointslalwanivikas24 comments

I like the general idea, but (to me) the investment seems way too low. $1000 for a full-fledged game, and you plan to make 8 of them? In what time frame? It also seems like this class is for people completely new to Obj-C and the like. I have to wonder how realistic it is to expect to be pumping out that quantity of games the moment you finish a two-month course.

Let's say (hugely optimistically) you work your butt off and complete all 8 games within a year. You just used a whole year to make $8000 that you've already spent.

Again, I like the idea, but I don't think there's a one-size-fits-all price that will be fair to either party. I hope you've explored the legal ramifications of this setup. If you can't make the games in a reasonable time frame, are you going to be on the hook for all this money?

Hey wizzard, rightly said. Not all apps can be finished in such limited time. That's why, I'm not accepting ideas that might take long, even if they are damn interesting. I am very carefully choosing the ideas, that are good but feasible to finish in a month. I am talking to people in detail to understand their requirements before committing anything.

Secondly, though I m taking full responsibility of delivering these (and I'm great with my commitments), I've many friends who are into app development, and some of my would be colleagues at summer academy - they have shown interest in this and are going to help me finish these apps.

Keep it up! Best of luck!

Thanks :)

That makes sense. I'm sure you know this already, but make sure you have a lock-tight contract for exactly what you're going to deliver. There's no room for scope creep in a $1k app!

The guy is based in India, $1K goes pretty far there.

Exactly! My total monthly expenses are less than $250 (rent, food, internet etc.) and it should not be a problem to devote 7-8 months for building promised apps.

Understood, but it's money that's already been spent. I just wanted to point out he'd also need some other form of income to support himself while he makes the apps, even if it's only $250 a month.

If everything goes alright and nothing unexpected comes up, that amount is going to come from my savings. I know it's a risk but I am willing to take it.

Good luck! You seem to have a lot of ambition so I bet you have a good shot at making it work. Maybe you can take orders for $5k apps while you're making the $1k apps!

Seems like a nice idea! Thanks :)

Kudos man. But seriously have you considered using the $10,000 and moving to a cheap city like Goa / Bangalore / staying where-ever you are and spending some time deep diving into iOS programming using best-selling books on Amazon and iTunes courses from Stanford?

I know MakeGamesWithUs is a YC backed company and they aren't just another run of the mill rip-off bootcamp that are popping up each day, still it'd make fiscal sense to consider the alternative scenario.

There are a lot of pros to attending one of these bootcamps: community / structure / mentorship / retaining IP to your creation / networking / companies that might be recruiting but if you are motivated enough just stumbling along yourself and associating with a local dev shop might also work wonders without burning a hole in your pocket (despite the fact that your are not paying out of pocket and crowd-funding this).

But anyways good luck to you with it, and I wish you success.

Appreciate your thoughts not_paul_graham, and totally agree with the logic behind your arguments. But for me, this course is more than just a coding experience. Living a valley experience so closely, among the kind of people attending the program has a value beyond what can be explained, at least for me. It is just like quesitoning the value of an elite MBA (that breaks-even after 3-4 years on average), which a lot of gurus are questioning these days. I might learn equally sitting in Bangalore, in one tenth the cost, but I really believe that there can be stark differences in terms of nuances, personality traits, friendships and work opportunities, if I don't attend this course.

nishithfrrole, you appear to be shadowbanned (comments appearing dead). Not sure why, I see nothing objectionable in comment history. Thought you should know.

Seriously, his comment and submission history is squeaky clean.

I checked his bio on a hunch, nothing there.

I suspect the fact that his user name accidentally has 'shit' in it earned him the ban hammer :-\

Did you see the recent change in how comments are submitted?

New comments now go to a queue where they are invisible until they approved by trusted users.

I thought that was only for a few hours and then turned off again and never turned on again? At least I haven't seen 'endorse' buttons anywhere.

You apparently need to have at least 1k internet points.

PG said he lowered it to 500.

I built a decently good-looking Asteroids clone using SpriteKit during the iOS 7 beta, and a pretty polished iOS 2048 implementation more recently. Both projects took a little longer than a weekend, and I don't consider myself a particularly talented developer. The iOS ecosystem has lots of tooling and libraries that make building simple games quite easy, so a month per game can be quite doable (depending on the kind of game, of course).

austinz, this is surely some inspiration. Would love to connect. My email is in my profile. Thanks!

Good stuff Vikas!! It's not easy to raise money in India (esp through crowdsourced funding) and you seemed to have already made good progress. Focus, choose your projects (games) wisely and I am sure you will do well.

Has elements of The Unincorporated Man to it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unincorporated_Man

Reply on news.ycombinator.com