I’m tired. So I’m selling my game that just went viral
medium.com
medium.com
With that out of the way, congratulations on the spike in traffic.
After having been on the front page of multiple programmer sites I can tell you it's just that. It's a good day. You may even get a good week out of it.
Unless you are incredibly atypical the spike in traffic will not last. There's absolutely no basis for assuming that traffic will continue at the spiked rate. It tells me your either naively optimistic (sorry to inject an unpleasant reality) or trying to sell it quick to someone else who is naively optimistic.
The upside is that the onslaught of requests is that since it's a spike, they will die down and you'll be able to catch up. The longest, and hardest, i had was a project that ended up with me stuffing envelopes every night and making daily trips to the post office sending of letters to people around the world because my offer started getting passed from message board to message board. It lasted about a month.
I'm very dubious of the belief that adding "more advantages" would get you a 10-15% conversion without any evidence to back it up, especially when you can't even be sure of the 1% conversion rate you think you can get for the current state of things.
You can't extrapolate an enduring income stream (or even an amount of work) from a single small spike.
If I may also give a brief suggestion, coming from a place of a lot of love for bootstrappers and sympathy for your situation, there is a line in your post which suggests that people compensate you for the 2.5 years you put into this when making an offer. I am afraid that this is at variance to how the world works generally and how acquisitions of small websites work specifically.
People pay for their future revenues, not your sunk costs. In the world of small website acquisitions, you'll be valued at something like 1X your previously proven annual revenue, not at a linear projection from what spike day looked like. If that number is -- let me pick a representative example -- $100, then you have a $100 site, not a $60,000 site, even if $60k is a reasonable approximation of the cost of duplicating it using market labor.
Also, as someone who also has struggled / struggles with depression: it is much much better for yourself and the world on net for you to just say "I am under stress and cannot email today, therefore, I will not email today." than for you to be adversely affected trying to get people replies to their questions about a browser game. Some people may be discomfit by this. That's fine. There is an entire Internet full of browser games. There is only one you. Do whatever you need to to not have this adversely effect you and your loved ones.
Congratulations on shipping, by the way. Very few people can do it. You demonstrably can. That's awesome. You've got a lifetime of shipping successful software businesses ahead of you, regardless of what happens in the next short while.
Also, it's not unheard of for a small physical business to make 10% profit margin and to sell for 10 times profit. So that's around 1 time revenue as well.
BCC might get a slight premium because I have better options for buyers than Flippa, it has an exceptionally long history, and there's some value from association with me, but websites are not valued like businesses or startups.
There exist plenty of excellent reasons why this is true: extreme risk from sites which are overly dependent on one or two traffic sources, implicit cost of operation often not being counted as a cost by the owner (BCC runs itself... It only requires the very occasional attention of a Rails-competent Ubuntu sysadmin. That's "free" to me but not free to the new buyer, and that sort of stuff adds up quickly when compared to five figure revenues.), transaction costs (time, training new owner or staff, etc) having to get recouped, a risk premium because it is a market for lemons and buyers feel that sellers may sell because of material no disclosed information like "I recently pissed off Google and the site may vanish from the Internet", etc.
Ultimately of course things are worth what a buyer will pay you for them, but market is about 1X for "typical" sites at the moment.
An example of that would be finding someone (or more likely them finding you) who needs to build your product and can choose between starting an $XX.000 development project delivering in X months or your product which is ready right now.
Anecdata: they opened with a $100k offer. I said that I had built it to run rather than to flip, but that everyone has a price, and that I'd be unable to turn down a million. No deal happened, obviously.
Users are generally 30-day active (trailing average). Here we're talking about a spike in traffic that the project got after some public exposure on news sites, I doubt we could predict at this point if everything will drop into the Trough of sorrow [1] or stick. Personally I tried the game and it seems to be at the first iteration in terms of usability for the masses, so I assume there will be little (if any) retention and more usability work to be done.
[1] http://andrewchen.co/2012/09/10/after-the-techcrunch-bump-li...
Some improvement feedback:
(1) develop more game-ability before explaining concepts on 5+ pages of text. Try to have a full-blown gaming engine with as few clicks as possible, and add concepts on top of it when the user levels-up.
(2) watch your page loading speed. If it's not as fast as browsing a magazine, it's too slow for a game.
(3) work to simplify the interface. Consider showing part of the vertical tabs only when the user levels-up. This should go hand-in-hand with (1).
(4) try to move at least partially some content before the login screen. Give people a reason to sign-up.
A perfect example to guide progress on those items: http://adarkroom.doublespeakgames.com/
Is it easy to introduce ads? Would it be AdSense-friendly? If so, what kind of ads would it attract?
The best way to come up with comparables is browse the "for sale" section of Flippa https://flippa.com/websites/established
A question for you: let us hypothetically assume that you have identified a particular basket of stocks worth $5,000 using this approach, applying your personal estimate of their risk and your investment goals, and purchased them. Three weeks from now you receive a call from the CTO of one company you invested in saying that a vulnerability in the hypervisor at your VPS provider allowed a compromised co-tenant to execute commands in your instance as root. What is your plan of action for preserving the value of your investment, and does this retroactively change your approach to valuing the stocks you have purchased?
This is a silly question, of course, because if one invests in publicly traded securities one does not have to operate their businesses for them. That is one of many reasons why owner-operators of businesses do not value them as if they were equivalent to investments in publicly traded companies.
Discounted cashflow = bullshit used to rationalize the sale price ( it can have some use in super long term predictable business like real estate with 10 year lease and well diversified tenants)
Hope this was helpfull
To your answer: I wanted to point out what is being valued and how it works. In this case the only thing that is being valued is the income. All risks associated must be accounted for. This was also supposed to be a hint to another question regarding how to value a website that does not yet create revenue: here you value future estimated revenue.
To your argument: You are absolutely right, of course. But still you start with expected future income.
Similarly, icu argued that you do not have just one figure. I completely agree. But that also happens if you consider a range of assumptions instead of concrete numbers. And even if you have a limited amount of potential buyers and they might pay more or less, you have to have an idea of whatever your are selling is worth.
Relating all this back to the post, I'd say that this entrepreneur is trying to do just that... Basically trying to give arguments for as high a valuation as possible.
This is why I believe comments giving an exact figure of $x are invalid insomuch that your method for answering "what something is worth" is not the optimal approach.
This was consistent with the app I sold back in Feb, which went for 2.x times earnings.
Rob Walling's Startups for the Rest of Us podcast did an episode on this recently:
http://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/episodes/episode-197-h...
Once you can prove that spending $X on customer acquisition returns $X+something, then it'd be easier for me to think of HackerExperience as a scalable business. Until then, it's a speculative venture to me.
Good luck on your journey! HackerExperience will give you some great stories to tell :)
The spike won't last, but it doesn't mean that it won't grow consistently from where it is into something much larger than it is today.
> It tells me your either naively optimistic (sorry to inject an unpleasant reality) or trying to sell it quick to someone else who is naively optimistic.
That's pretty judgmental. This obviously has the potential to grow. If he doesn't want to deal with it or maybe needs the money now, he isn't doing anything wrong by trying to sell it to someone that sees the same potential that inspired him to spend 2 years creating it.
Maybe he won't get $60K, and maybe he'll get more. Maybe somebody will offer to invest in it and allow him to draw a salary while he grows it. Maybe he'll be hired by someone that has a use for the talent and dedication he displayed by building this. Regardless of the outcome, it's clearly worth something, and if he wants or needs to sell, I hope he gets a fair offer.
Some solutions are not abaiable during a spike. For example, if you hire a moron to help during the spike, you still have to pay him after the spike has gone or fire him. (And you have even more problems during the spike, because you have to find him and coach him.) So it's better to wait until you know if the traffic increase is permanent or it's only a spike.
That is absolutely true, but investors don't invest based on "doesn't mean". The equation is discounted future free cash flow minus risk premium, and usually, minus how desperate you are to sell. If you are big and threatening (can take away Facebook's customers), then that adds some plus to the equation.
If you are trying to sell Apple we can talk about projecting future growth - the equation changes dramatically. A PHP game with a one day spike? No.
This could be the next minecraft, but more likely it'll make 1K this month, $500 next month, and so on into obscurity, is the thinking. Disagree? Show us the numbers. You'll get about 1x on those numbers, as others have ably pointed out.
I think we all agree he has done extremely well to get to this point, and that we hope he gets fair value. But I can't imagine spending that much money to basically buy myself a job in the hopes of a revenue stream that the owner has not generated for himself. I think the advice he has gotten to take a breather, and take stock in a few weeks is extremely sound. If he can make a case for his revenue #s he will get a nice price for his game. But he needs to understand what investors are thinking about his pitch. That is not bashing him or being judgemental, it is merely echoing what the market is going to be thinking. How else will he get fair value? The goodness of the investor's heart?
tl;dr - the things being written may be painful to read, but they come from people with experience and a friendly desire to explain how to do business valuation. It in no way implies an assumption of a limited upside in the future of the game.
That's the vibe I got from this post too.
Seems to me, you could find another University student looking to grow traffic as part of their studies. Collaborate on this.
Take another small share and pay somebody to do a little support for those users worth responding to.
As others have said, you could potentially benefit from this in the future.
Right now, you are just a programmer. Continue that. Do well, grow.
But, a programmer who understands some business has serious potential. Seems to me you just created the perfect lesson plan. This little project won't take that much to treat like a business and if you make a couple of friends, who knows where you all might go in the future?
You would be able to learn how to better execute on an idea, get a lot of very interesting user metrics, have a following, show income, etc...
Consider this. I would in a second. A few hours here and there just isn't going to impact your studies. However, those few hours here and there could really educate you in ways you will find difficult to realize in a strictly academic environment. This is worth more to you than you currently realize.
Nice work :)
Plus, as a dad of a 4 month old, this looks like the perfect pasttime when the small one wakes up in early morning.
Please reach out. You have done an amazing job and should keep it up.
You just made me sign up.
Your game IS satisfying (though I have yet to play it for a while, this is just my first impression). Listen to the folks here at HN, take your time, weight your options. Put your sanity first. Just wanted you to know another stranger on the internet found a bit of nostalgia and bliss while playing your project.
nitpick: I miss a command line :P
best of luck!
A few thoughts:
- 6000 registered users in a couple of days is hardly going viral. It's a promising start but too early to use that adjective (and the numbers are also pretty low).
- The fact that you are trying to sell something you worked on for more than a year just because you can't keep up with the email volume is... suspicious. Especially if the income estimates you give in that article are accurate. Why not just ignore your inbox for a few weeks and come back to it later?
- I think the answer to the question above is obvious: you know your success is temporary and you're trying to cash out while you can. Sorry for my cynicism, just being honest.
Some people don't think only on money. I created this game as a fun project, for fun, without expecting any revenue. (If I did, it would be pay-to-win).
I tried to kill myself last year a few days after I gave a talk at a FOSS conference. Some people can't handle pressure, email volume or too much social contact, specially if they have something called social anxiety, depression, and other things that I do.
I understand your suspicious.. However you are assuming I'm a crazy-for-money guy like... many people.
If no one buys the game I'll probably shut it down. For my own mental sanity.
I guess keeping it "as is", without any support, is better than shutting it down, but I don't know if I could simply ignore it.
I would try it before (if) shutting down, though.
If you do decide to shutter the server, set up a Github repo and mirror your code under a licence like GPL3, then maybe at least someone else can pick it up and keep sharing more cool stuff with it. It's what I did when I got out of roleplaying games.
Ideally, if you put up a graph of your costs per month (including what you feel you should get paid to work on the project) and a graph of donations per month, or something, then people who enjoy your game will be smart enough to help support it financially for you.
I wish you the best of luck!
Remember when that used to be called 'being shy'?
Social anxiety is a very debilitating and tortuous thing, as is any form of chronic anxiety.
It's insensitive/cruel to mock someone's diagnosis when you know next to nothing about the details.
There are larger arguments about overdiagnosis in the US, etc., which is all interesting, but if you're talking to an individual about painful experiences in their past, bear in mind that generalities cannot become rules.
Please don't kill yourself over a game. Release it AGPL and be done if you have to.
OP, you probably see Klinic every day on your way to school. They have trained counselors 24/7 at:
Manitoba Suicide Line 1-877-435-7170 toll free 24 hours
Your graph reminded me of a scene from The Simpsons where 'Disco Stu' presents a graph entitled "Sales of Disco Records, 1976-1977" showing a massive upward swing. Seeking investment for his idea, Stu indicates "If these trends continue... aaayyyy!"
Not trying to talk you down at all - but if this level of interest is unwelcome to you, the chances are good that it will get better. Most things run out of momentum pretty quickly if you're not actively keeping the ball bouncing.
Besides, most of them are probably just writing to tell you how much they like it, or wanting you to partner with them.
You don't have to answer any of them. Just put up an autoresponder explaining that this is a free game and you're a university student and can't respond to email.
I mean, this is what Google does and many/most people love Google products.
When I was a student I had totally-free online stuff I built lead to a stream of requests for upgrades, additions, bugfixes, etc. -- and the unreasonable ones are easy to discard, but some requests would be polite, friendly, and include offers to help. I'd agree to make the seemingly-small tweak, or accept the help, and then realize after a week that I didn't really have the time, or that my TO-DO list was being pulled completely out of whack....
Better to not publish your email address at all, perhaps, or make very clear that emails may be eventually read but very likely not responded to.
(I know some with social anxiety, and it sucks that society is so dysfunctional that we don't make simple accommodations which help us all realize our potentials. Hope all goes well for you.)
I read in your article that you offer a bit of support. If you manage get to make a deal with someone, do make sure that in your agreement you explicitly mention for how long you will offer support. Make it nice and short, like 3-6 months, perhaps just a few weeks.
If you are tired now, you will only become more tired if your support of the project goes on, and it will keep worrying you if there's always someone who contacts you about things of your project.
If the amount offered justifies it, perhaps find out if your university can get you in touch with a nice contract lawyer that can go over the transaction for you, but don't worry about it too much. There's not that much can go wrong, as long as the agreement is clear that everything is supplied 'as is' and the support is properly time-constrained and makes no promises beyond 'best effort', and especially if the other party is allowed to inspect the goods before receiving them, not much can go wrong.
If you are the worrying type, you could put the funds received in a savings account and not touch them for a year or so, so you'll always have funds to settle any disagreement.
I hear you are stressed out by dealing with the resulting success of your game and are willing to shutter it to save your sanity. I also hear you want someone to 'take you seriously' in making an offer for the game. Those two statements, if I am hearing you correctly, are in direct logical conflict with each other and may lead to causing you more suffering. The technical term is cognitive dissonance, literally believing two things at once. In your case you appear to hold the opinion that the game is worth something and you must be paid for it to release it, yet you thinking about continuing to manage it will lead to a loss of sanity. Resolving this logical dilemma sounds impossible, unless someone pays you a lot of money or you really intend to shutter it.
I would suggest that if you intended to shutter it because of suffering reasons, you would have already done so by now. That may be related to the fact those-who-create live to do so. I am one of those people! If that is the case, you must face the fear of continuing the game's existence.
Attempting to face a fear you are capable of facing will help move you forward past this event. Perhaps Open Source it, or take the other suggestions offered in the thread. I appreciate the fact you took the time to tell us about it. Creating brings joy.
Remember, your suffering is your choice. Only you can reduce it. Only you can wake up in the morning and be grateful you are here in this reality and then attempt to reduce your suffering by facing your fears for the day. Nobody else will do this for you as we're all trying to do it for ourselves each day. Best of luck to you, my friend; today is the first day of the rest of your life!
If you ever start to feel down or like life is not worth living, email me - address in my profile. I'll try to do what I can to help.
Going viral isn't a certain number or speed of adoption. It's a method of adoption. If most of these members joined because of referral by other friends, and they in turn are continuing to invite others, then yes, it's going viral.
HN is a finicky, short-attention span beast, by design. A front page of HN, and tens of thousands of uniques, often yields zero residual "value" (seriously, zero. The most lauded piece on here with endless upvotes and you're lucky if a single reader reposts it anywhere else or mentions it, beyond the karma seekers who stick it on /r/programming). I don't get this post. 6000 unique visitors in no universe yields thousands of emails (again, due to the short attention span probably 5000 clicked back ten seconds in), unless the game itself generates enormous amounts of operator notifications and mechanical turk type behavior, in which case the game is unsustainable for anyone.
The model of getting a project to some level of success and then offloading it is an entirely reasonable one (though really the tough luck story I think undermines the pitch), though at the current level of success this project is, sadly, currently close to worthless. Having a very temporary spike of a niche user base is not at all sustainable.
Going viral is certainly speed of adoption. By definition. It's not an absolute number, it's a growth pattern over time.
Two days is not enough to decide that something went viral.
6,000 registered users is a very low number, even if it happens within a few hours: a simple exposure on the front page of HN or Reddit, or even better, being featured on Google Play or the iTunes store, will result in user sign ups in the order of the 100k's.
I really don't know what to do. Many people told me if I hire a team, or at least one developer, this would help me get going with the game. This does make sense.
However I've been extremely stressful for the last hours. I guess this really is a bad decision, but one that would free myself for university and other projects I have.
The problem is I can't stand to spend my whole day working only on Hacker Experience anymore. I already have other projects that I want to work full time with.
Happy to hear any advice from you. I have no experience at all with business, marketing or even start-ups. I'm just a programmer.
Thanks!
That's a general lesson in life. Know yourself and know when you're being afraid, when you're being irrational. And postpone taking decisions that can wait a few days.
See, I've been wandering on HE a couple of hours yesterday, and your project seems to have some serious execution flaws (bad ui, downtimes, social based income, etc). Nothing serious for a side project but these are definite blockers if you ask for a 50k something.
Not mentionning the stack: slackware (honestly?), php and python (why two langages?), no framework. The last one could be the main reason you are struggling to keep it afloat, and that at least throws a big red flag: "I'm gonna head troubles if I'm gonna buy".
And the business side doesn't seems to be worth it.
My 2 cents on selling/buying webapps : I would be keen on paying 10K on a website-based business with 10 long-time customers paying 100$ each month. That's not the kind of deal you seems to be after, but I think this is somehow the standard for serious buyers on the market. Why so low you may ask? Because if I understand your project to the point I could buy it, then that means I can replicate your little business. I'm only buying time, and I think it would take ~10 months to build that webapp and gather some ~10 customers (maybe yours, now I know your flaws...).
And that means buying a strong problem solving webapp, not a niche online game. If the webapp is very well executed then I would maybe push to 15K per 10 recurring customers, not more. And I don't care the market size: it's for the potential 100 recurring customers that I would be in, not for the seldom social viralisation peak with an only 1 or 2% conversion.
In a nutshell: don't loose your time trying too hard to sell it. If it sells then congrats, but you should spend your time fixing the UI to keep your players onboard, writing a great FAQ that handle the tickets, and boosting your infra so you that you're not needed around when it collapse.
Because after that you're done: let it live alone and enjoy your 1000$/month. Based on my experience there's little chance you'll reproduce that for the years coming.
But that's still a good feat for your age and experience, kuddos and congrats to you ;)
Your point about maintainability might be more valid.
I implied that, when a distro is missing dependency management, it should be the last on your picking list. I'm an Arch guy myself, but my own servers run on wheezy (because 'life').
One way I managed to cope with it was setting up an autoresponder that redirects over to a FAQ to help with most common issues / requests. If something wasn't covered via the FAQ people still came back to me and I jumped in to help.
As most of the others here replied: Don't jump the ship and sell immediately - try to power through the next few days and use this as an opportunity to learn.
Cheers
Being tired doesn't allow you to think straight.
As for handling support, an autoreply to a faq can save time. Zoho also has a free plan for their support system https://www.zoho.com/support/
If you did get someone to buy it for say $60k (or $10k?), and they ended up making millions, would you feel ripped off? If they end up not even making back what you paid, how would you feel?
You can also just sit on it for a while, and see what happens, see how your attitude develops. Yes, that might mean you end up losing the chance to sell it (note, it's not clear you have that chance now), but you say you didn't really do it for the money anyway. You could wait a month or two, remembering you don't need to respond to every email or support ticket, and see what happens. Does the success continue? Does it trail off? Are you still stressed about it and want to get rid of it, or do you have a renewed enjoyment?
There's nothing forcing you to rush, you are in complete control here. I suspect you are worried about doing the 'wrong' thing, and maybe being judged for it, and maybe then feeling like you missed out (on making money, or whatever). Don't worry about it. You didn't do it for the money. It's an experiment to see what happens.
If part of your stress is feeling an obligation to your users, maybe actually turn off the freemium pays (for now), so it's all free. If you're getting enough income from adsense to pay your costs, just let it coast a bit see what happens.
First, it's hard to put a value on it. It isn't clear than the buyer would make enough revenue to keep up with the expense of keeping it running.
Second, you aren't obligated to respond to everyone who sent you an E-Mail or message. Wait a couple of weeks, and then start looking at them.
Third, you aren't considering user retention. You had 6k unique visitors today. There is no guarantee you will still have 6k unique visitors in a month.
Fourth, as long as your income from ads and payments cover the expenses, leave it running.
Finally, if you do retain an audience of 1k+, now you have a customer base for whenever you launch your next project.
- Lots of emails/press attention is a good sign and no reason to give up on a project. Focus on improving the game and ignore the emails if you have to. They don't matter
- I too had a game go viral (0 to 3 million accounts in about 6 weeks). I was getting multiple acquisition offers but up until that point it was the most exciting and stressful time of my life. I got absolutely no sleep for days on end. But it paid off and I learned more practical knowledge in those short few weeks than my entire college career.
- When the time was right I sold, not because I was tired, but because it was the right time for the game and for my future
- Shortly thereafter I developed another game which I considered selling early on like you are doing now because I wanted to move on to something else. I decided to continue improving it and it ended up lasting 5+ years and grossing several million $s, far more than I ever thought was possible with the initial version
- This is your baby. You are by far the best person to nurture it and turn it into something you're extremely proud of.
- Your growth is promising but the traffic right now is too low for you to get any serious offers in my opinion. Keep on grinding, it'll be worth it
That comes through in all the meticulously detailed, earnest and honest information you posted about it. It sounds kind of like you're trying to find a good home and trustworthy owner for a beloved cat who you can't keep in your apartment any longer. Just remember, your cat (i.e. your audience) loves you too. Good luck whatever you do!
My "show HN" went peek on HN and then back to what it was before.
He is smart: Everything seems fine. From the media we know about all the companies, which have established business models with such figures. But they are the 1%.
Taking over (from him) is already so hard: If you were the inventor of [X], you would have done [X]. Taking it over and going on: ~IMPOSSIBLE~
Also find a partner, if you were working on this with someone else, you would have much less stress. Working alone is very unhealthy and extremely stressful. Either partner with someone or balance life and work which might be hard since you have to study too. Go to forums where other programmers that love making games are and find someone to become your partner.
That could be another student at the university; someone with an active Twitter account, good charisma, etc. Offer 25% equity vesting over 4 years. That's pretty generous. Keep hacking and plugging, and do as much or as little of the interacting as you want. If the other person doesn't carry their weight -- which is not uncommon -- dump them or swap them out for someone else. Be very upfront about this when bringing them on (if you want, overly upfront -- pitch this as a short-term engagement, with possibility of going longer depending on how business goes).
Give yourself the title of CEO and CTO. Give them the title interrim president+COO.
Regarding depression, social anxiety, etc., this can help fix it. I've been there. Depression gets better when you have meaning and purpose, and when you're busy enough to not have time worrying about it. Social anxiety gets better with status. When people are competing to talk to you (rather than the other way around), and you're in a position to say yes or no, the dynamic is just different. If this were to grow into a successful company, you might be in a very different position. You've been playing with fixing this for a while. Play with this as an opportunity to try a different approach to fixing it.
Again, I don't know you. This could not apply at all. Take this as what it is -- an idea from a stranger.
The only time you can hire above is when scaling a successful product + sales model - essentially when you are no longer a startup and are becoming an established player.
Is this really true? I mean that as an honest question, because, while being a coder with a typical distaste for shallow marketing folks myself, I think these "business things" actually constitute work, if done right (first and foremost good user support).
I would imagine that there exists a similar comment in a board for marketing guys and gals, where they say:
> You want someone to program the database. People who can do that are a dime a dozen.
Pun intended.
Very harmful advice potentially.
However... I do have a suggestion for your sanity now and in the future that doesn't involve selling the company, or at least, not all of the company.
Assuming you want to keep releasing stuff direct to the public, I suggest finding a friend that you can interact with, that can interact with the public and other business partners. There are a lot of different ways to structure that relationship; some people get a "business partner" and when the relationship is described that way, usually the partner gets some control over you. This relationship can also be structured as "hiring a secretary" - if that's what you call them, you are implying your partner has less power, and often that you will compensate said partner regardless of revenue, but compensate them less.
On your end, I think, the fact that this person can deal with your quirks and protect you from the parts of the limelight you find unpleasant might be more important than their raw talent as a business person, especially if you retain more control over the business side of things. (Note, if I'm reading your personality correctly, and I might not be, you probably want someone who is willing to at least act in public like they made the decision in question. Someone willing to take the blame even if it was actually your decision. These people exist, but you need to be clear, if that is in fact what you need.)
I mean, you and your partner need to decide what your relationship looks like, how the power dynamic works, and how remuneration works, and it doesn't have to conform to either one of those models, but I've worked with people that were really, really uncomfortable with social situations; I've been that "human interface" person, and if you find a compatible person, I think it can generate a whole lot of value for both people.
I am very sorry to hear about your health problems. I don't have the same challenges as you but I do have experience of when a side project explodes. I have a piece of freemium software that has been downloaded about 700,000 times and here is what i did to manage the emails:
- set up a great FAQ and put all questions that are asked more than once in there. - if you use a mac get a copy of TextExpander ( or a similar product) and automate all your email replies. Then you can answer support emails with one command. - use a Gmail label to sort out support, and batch send emails once or twice a week. Don't be afraid to ignore whiners, complainers and the people who cannot Google answers for themselves.
Take care of your health first and best of luck!
This is somewhat similar to the situation where a FOSS developer feels the pressure from the users of his software. The more successful their software the more miserable and frustrated they become. I believe the best way of preserving your sanity in this case is just pushing back and allow others to take responsibility. Forks and pull requests exist for a reason. Chances are you're using my open source library for your regular job in which case you (unlike myself) will actually get paid for your contributions.
@napsterbr: you don't owe anyone anything. If there's any obligation it runs the other way. Take a deep breath and enjoy the ride, long may it last. One way of sharing the burden of support (which seems to be your main concern) is creating a community and granting most eager and devoted users some 'superpowers'. Makes them happy and they do a lot of work for you. You only get involved sporadically and on your own terms.
The current usage is a peak because of exposure. It will drop and the ad profit will go way down in the coming few weeks.
> These values are estimated, but I believe one can get at least $20–$25 per day. That’s about $750 per month.
Until you actually see your first payout, the estimate is meaningless. I've heard of many cases where people saw significant estimates and google turned around and shut down their accounts before the first payout.
There is an ongoing class action lawsuit against AdSense for this behavior. Relevant discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7776282
Has to be one of my biggest regrets, I could have paid someone else to support it while I was busy with my education. Perhaps the biggest kick was that the person who bought it didn't really look after the site and it went into decline anyway losing most of it's users.
Selling might be your best option, however be 100% sure before doing anything :)
There's a buzz going on around it right now, but don't expect it to be Flappy Bird. So depending on what you want (you seem tired of that game), I don't think it's a bad idea to sell it while it's hot
Like other people commented, I don't think your user numbers will hold up in the long run -- not because of the game, necessarily, but because people naturally try stuff out and then never return.
Nonetheless, I'd consider buying it, but not at any price that would make you feel good about spending two years coding the thing.
Have him insulate you from the support, monetization, PR, and so on, and let him assemble Terms of Use to be very generous towards you as a programmer in a way that you don't have to respond to reported bugs (especially concerning monetization) immediately but leisurely.
Agree with him on the priority of types of fixes/improvements and have him deliver lists of tasks to you on a weekly/monthly basis.
Have that business partner on a probation period first, to see is he supportive of your persona and then split profits with him 50/50. It'll be a great opportunity to learn from him strategems of handling stuff you cannot.
Aim long-term. These types of games are something people stick around for quite some time. Adjust monetization model accordingly. These numbers you have or project right now are meaningless from that context.
Do the right thing and good luck.
As a side note, an analogy to first-time parents is an appropriate one here. A lot of them panic a lot when they find out baby is on its way. But I'm not ready! I'll make mistakes during parenthood! Will I be able to support it!?
And most kids still turn out just fine.
Cheer up. :)
My reaction is: pay a litt major to respond to e-mails for couple of hours a day. Most reactions are: get a serious business partner. Debating that is a lot more relevant than an ad -- hence the tolerance.
If I could give you any advice, I'd say think about going to academia. Working in the software industry is all about this kind of stress, and it really only gets worse from here. It's why we get paid lots of money to sit in a chair all day eating free snacks.
If this project has been stressful, the industry is going to chew you up and spit you out. Projects follow the same trajectory: you work on a project in a bubble for a long period of time (maybe a year or two). Then, there's a usage spike the first day, the first week. Maybe it goes up (if you're lucky), but it probably goes down. You have to fight to get usage.
And then things get harder. Bug reports. QA nitpicks about a million things you didn't notice. Product Developer's decide to change something major and you re-write 20% of your code base. Some of your junior team mates can't handle stress, so their output drops. The senior folks on the team get agitated and are suddenly unaccessible to help you with anything because they have their own shit to do.
Oh, and btw now that it's already in the field with customers bitching about it, so everything needs to be done yesterday. You think about leaving sometimes, but you can't afford to be out of a job for a month, and thinking about studying for an interview yet again while working sounds even more stressful (since you haven't really used big-O notation or graph algorithms in your last 2.5 years as a web developer).
Not every job is going to be stressful, but the really good ones will. You'll work with people smarter than you doing things a lot of people haven't done before.
(I'm a former intern and not currently working there, and not a recruiter; pretty sure their hiring managers don't read Hacker News.)
Also, how much time do you really need to put into this project to keep it running?
This is also a reason why I prefer working on PaaS's for solo projects.. For the most part I can do other things and not put too much mental effort towards it.
He should step back, take a breath of fresh air, and then get back to work.
You know the rule: Don't make any decisions hungry, angry, or sleepy.
I wish you luck and happiness. Nice work.
Ignore it for a week, don't think about it.
I would hardly call that going viral, plus it's only been two days. You're too optimistic, thinking too big.
If this is anything average you'll find that most of the traffic will die off after a month.
There are so many things wrong with that blog post.
This may be a bit off-topic but reading your post, was struck by the low cost of your dedicated servers at OVH : $116 per month, for a server with "64GB ECC RAM, Xeon E5 3.7 Ghz, 360 GB of SSD (at RAID 1) and 500 Mbit of networking." seems like a really great deal - drastically cheaper than Rackspace or Softlayer for similar configurations. How good / reliable is their customer service and responsivemess in case you have a problem?
60kLOC in PHP from scratch. When I hear that, I just hear that it probably will need to be rewritten. If the buyer isn't hiring you, then that's a pretty hefty amount of code; unless it is written very well.
You are probably in the best position to fix/improve it going forward, so selling it is not an option IMHO. Instead, look around campus for a partner-dev. Even with just one partner developer, to bounce ideas and priorities off, things will become clear for you long term.
Good Luck!
As it makes for a good story press outlets will probably pick up and write about. It's semi-similar to the Flappy Bird's creator decision to remove it from the app store and all the press that followed.
Though maybe it's creator just want to cash out on it quickly and go relax on a beach with nice looking people (who doesn't?).
Good luck!
The formular for the present value of a perpetuity is just
present_value := cashflow / discount_rate
By the way, for an investor it does not matter how much effort (1 year, 5 years, 100 years) the author did put into the project. For the present value of the project only matters what monthly payements there will be. If someone can forecast these payments, he can also put a price tag on the project.
So it might also be, that there is no more interest in the game in one or two months ... then it would be roughly worth 0$ to 750$ (even if it took much effort to implement it).
$8738 ... (makes profit for N years, where N = 1)
$17221 ... (makes profit for N years, where N = 2)
$25458 ... (makes profit for N years, where N = 3)
$41217 ... (makes profit for N years, where N = 5)
$76772 ... (makes profit for N years, where N = 10)
$133897 ... (makes profit for N years, where N = 20)
$284390 ... (makes profit for N years, where N = 100)
(disclaimer: my calculation might of course be wrong, I didn't put much thinking into it)
The Flappy Bird guy ran into similar situation, but he kept it running. Perhaps there are some lessons to take away from that.
* some upfront fee
* you remain onboard for X months
* each time period is a certain % of equity
* some monthly fee paid to you until X total
Down-votes accepted but let's face it this guy is extraordinarily naive.