Category: Marketing/Business

At Joe Indie, Business is Business compares newbie game developers with newbie photographers, something I would not have thought to compare.

Newbie Game Developer: How many games do I need before I can start making money from them?
Newbie Photographer: How many images do I need before I can start making money from them?

Joe Indie’s article shows that it isn’t just indie game developers who have problems with “business sense”. The article links to photographer/blogger Dan Heller’s site, and I noticed that his other page on the subject of business sense was also pretty informative.

For instance, section 4.1 is titled “Jumping in too soon” and warns against creating solutions for a problem that doesn’t exist. For photographers, indie game developers, and really anyone with a business, your products or services should solve a need. Creating world-class, high-quality images or games is great, but if no one is really interested in what you’re offering, you’ve just wasted your time. I believe you can sum up Heller’s words as market research.

The comparison to photography businesses, however, has led me to think about a number of aspects of my own business.

If you shoot specific subjects, like horses, or fashion, or food, or sports, or Bucks County, Pennsylvania, your revenue is going to be based in large part by how well positioned you are with the media companies that buy such specialized images within any of these industries.

How would you change that sentence so that it applies to indie game development? Perhaps I am creating a congruence where there is none, but so far there does not seem to be much difference between the photography business and the game development business. As David Michael says in his article’s title, business is business.

A Lawyer’s View of EULAs sheds some light on the world of law and lawyers. I have also felt that Legalese isn’t that hard of a language to read, but then found myself drowning in possibile interpretations of the smallest words. A comma in the wrong place can change the entire meaning of a legal document, for instance, whereas in correspondence it is almost inconsequential.

EULAs are especially tricky because they deal with copyright law, most of which isn’t actually governed by written laws so much as court case decisions.

The article How to Get 35.8% More Downloads From Your Landing Page (& More Test Results from Monster) should be helpful to those people looking to increase visibility for their business and their products. It gives some tips on getting the prospective customer to feel a bit more at ease when interacting with your website. Fewer barriers to the download mean fewer barriers to the sale.

Why Your Software is Not Selling attempts to answer the questions that almost all software startups ask. It’s a bit humorous, but it finishes with a list of reasons why indie companies have trouble with sales.

#8 is you made it too hard to buy. Recently I went to a soccer-themed store to purchase an Italian soccer jersey for my father. The cost was huge, but I was prepared to buy it. In fact, I was about to buy myself a United States jersey for the same price. It would have been a good day for them, and a bad day for my wallet.

Except I couldn’t buy the jerseys. The store only took cash as it didn’t have credit card processing setup. I didn’t have that kind of cash on me at the time, and for the prices they had, I don’t know of many people who would be willing to part with that much cash, either. They lost a huge sale that day because it was too difficult for me to buy what they were selling.

If it is too difficult to pay for your indie game, you can have the most compelling demo in the world with the best word-of-mouth marketing, but people would not be able to buy it. If you require the customer to register before submitting payment details, you will lose sales from people who don’t want to register just to buy a game. If your payment processor is specific to an American audience, how will someone from England or Germany be able to buy your game? How many barriers are you putting up for your customers?

I think #1 is the biggest issue facing startups: who are you? If your customer hasn’t heard of you, how can you expect that he/she might think to buy from you? It is a elaborate way to say that marketing is important.

Sandra Rossi’s What users hate most about Web sites outlines a few problems with website usability. While the early part of the article focuses on the misuse of Flash, it does list the main problems with most websites.

I have been to more than a few websites where the ad popped up within the websites and would not go away, and it was covering a huge chunk of the article I was trying to read. No close button was available, and sometimes the ad doesn’t even display! It would be a big window that didn’t load correctly, and it would block my view.

I especially don’t like it when I have a few links that will send me to other pages within the website, while a few open a huge PDF document. A simple “[PDF]” would have helped, but letting me know the size of the file would have been better.

What Can You Build in a Day? shows that with only a little bit of time and a small amount of money, you can start making money within 24 hours of deciding to start a business. Check out
New Venture Launch Announcement for the details of setting up the web-based business that was up and earning money in under 10 hours.

In Calendar Aggregation, Seth Godin asks why there isn’t already a single place to go to find out what is happening in your area.

Isn’t Metromix exactly what he’s talking about? Do cities outside of Chicago not have similar tools available?