With a week’s worth of retrospection, I feel like I can look back on Seattle Startup Weekend and try to distill some lessons down from it.
I suppose it’s worth saying that these lessons come hard-earned; my company of eight people produced a viable prototype, but failed to land any prizes in the final competition against the twenty-one other startups at the Weekend; I have some ideas as to why.
So This is What the Future Looks Like
For those that haven’t been, the Weekend is a little surreal. It’s entirely based around tech startups – and a surprisingly homogenous class of web-app-like technology at that. I suspect that the negligible cost of remixing today’s information economy has allowed something of a gold rush mentality, complete with the shabby chic and messenger-bag cultural tide that carries tomorrow’s gurus.
My own part was as makeshift team leader – I had a dream of starting up a game company and racing to a first prototype in 48 hours, using a mixture of the Unity engine and backend metrics through an analytics engine like MixPanel.
I found out quickly that games weren’t really represented during this weekend. Information mashups, yes, automated forms, sure, but not games. Maybe they weren’t known, maybe nobody cared. Whatever the case, our initial team of three were the only game developers willing to represent there, when all was said and done.
Undaunted, I pitched the game company idea during the Friday “speed-dating” portion of the weekend, and it stuck well enough – out of the 60 ideas that were looking for teams, mine made the final cut of 20. By Friday night, my initial team of three had become a team of eight. By Saturday at noon, I promised, we’d have our game idea chosen and coding started.
It took us until Sunday afternoon to have everything done; we’d fought through idea changes, tech failures, sickness and absences, and a metric ton of conflicting priorities to come up with something viable – and a business plan around it – to show off to investors Sunday evening.
Thinking back on it, we really made a lot of mistakes.
Lessons Learned in Bricklaying a Startup
I don’t have these in any particular order, but the dust has settled, and I look at these as the top lessons from the weekend:
1. Strategy First, Then Tactics
This one should be obvious. Except, it isn’t. This advice goes double for people who just want to get their hands dirty and dig into making stuff: take a step back. You’re building a company, not just a product, and the investors ask some nasty questions about just how long you think you’re going to hold onto any profit you make. You need to have found a viable opportunity with a decent margin, growth potential, and some kind of differentiation strategy, out to three years. Sound like a buzzkill? It was to me, too, but it’s the truth.
2. Games Don’t Mean S#!$
For anyone who has notions that the outside world regards video games as godly creations and somehow worthy of an all-access pass to the venture capital priesthood, you need to throw that joke off. Trust me, the investors know that games and entertainment are a grossly heavy revenue generator compared to apps – but they’ve also heard the same figure you have: over 90% of games don’t make enough money to pay back the cost of their development. So you don’t get a free pass just because your app has lasers and explosions.
3. CloudMetricCommunitysourced or GTFO
Metrics, instant updates, cloud storage, crowdsourced, community, anywhere access – if you don’t do all this and still have a leg free to tapdance, you’re behind. Same goes for games. Investors are looking for a certain base level of features that they equate with “it prints money”, and again, games don’t get a pass. Our team felt good having put play metrics into our game to drive crowdsourced A/B testing of prototypes on the path to making full games, but the investors didn’t care. Why should they? Web apps have been doing that for, oh, five to ten years now?
4. Don’t Admit the Truth about Copying
Anybody with enough motivation can do your job for less and faster than you’re doing it. But investors don’t want to hear it. In fact, they’re so averse to that notion, they will ask you exactly how you plan to prevent it in your company forever. A lot of this is what companies will call their “secret sauce”. The thing that gets Joe Newsweek, upon seeing your latest unveiling, screaming “How does Wonka do it?” No matter how much hogwash this might be, it’s attractive hogwash and you’d better have an answer. If you’re bait for being ripped off, nobody’s going to give you a dime.
And, My Final Lesson from the Whole Weekend…
If you want to build a game, for God’s sake, just do it. Don’t ask for money. Don’t recruit a team unless you need one. Don’t crowdsource your idea. Programming is something you can pick up, and engines nowadays damn near build the game for you. So get a book, get an engine, and just go, man, go.
Unity was a delight to work with, and the fact that it spits out playable games on most of the major mobile platforms is nothing short of bankable bearer’s bonds. What I did with another game developer in 48 hours convinces me that within a few weeks I could do my own thing and be pretty happy about it.
I don’t need people, an office, or more hardware to do the games I want to do; investor cash isn’t going to do anything but increase the pressure on me and lower my total takehome.
So why ask? Get coding, already. It’s not like you’re going to hit a brick wall. This is the wall-less age of digital cities, connected nations, and wireless, glorious wireless everywhere. Nothing can stop you.
Just one thing: buy a messenger bag for your laptop, and maybe a pair of those Rivers Cuomo glasses. After all, 90% of being a guru is nailing the look.
