It seems that video games have slowly been devaluating as an entertainment medium over the last couple of years. Before the App Store and Steam arrived, there was only two ways to play games: Buy a full-price physical copy or find a pirated version. With the advent of app stores, the highest grossing mobile games are now so-called "free"-to-play games and at least four times a year, there is yet another Steam sale with 80% discounts on tons of games for the more traditional PC, Mac (and Linux!) gamers.
When everything is free or extremely cheap all the time, it is understandable that a lot of gamers get used to free and cheap being the status quo. Combined with a somewhat unwritten rule that games have to keep us entertained for many hours to avoid being branded as "short", it must be tough being a traditional game developer these days.
I do not know exactly where I am going with this, but I just have this kind of sad feeling when thinking about how some people value games. For me, video games is the epitome of art, as it often combines exciting story-telling with beautiful visual aesthetics and amazing soundscapes. So when I see people complaining about a paid expansion or give bad Steam reviews because they finished a $10 game in two hours (I hope those same people complain about ticket prices at the movie theater), I hope it is just a vocal minority that feel this way.
If I ever created a video game (which is on my Life TODO List ™), I hope people would give it bad reviews if it was a bad game — not because it was not free or kept them entertained for 50 hours.
A few days ago, I talked to a guy that plays the piano. He uses YouTube tutorials to learn new songs and told me that he would like to record himself playing the piano. I asked him if he would put the recordings online somewhere, and his reply was one I have heard often before:
“Yes, if they are good.”
I believe in releasing as much art as possible, even if the artist does not think that their art is “good”. I have often heard people claim that there is “too much bad art” out there so it is difficult to find the “good” stuff. I strongly disagree with this point of view.
Consider this: A toddler draws their first doodle and proclaims: “Look, it’s mommy and daddy!”. This example illustrates my two main points for this post:
“Good” is highly subjective. To most people, the toddler drawing will probably look like randomly connected lines. To the parents, the drawing marks an important moment in the child’s development.
“Good” is often a result of unnecessary self-imposed criticism. The toddler does not have this. They really do think that their drawing looks like mommy and daddy.
While the first point is commonly stated as “people have different tastes”, we do not talk enough about the second point although it is highly endemic in our society.
As we age, self-criticism often increases. This is not inherently a bad thing. After all, it is important to improve our skills and a healthy amount of self-criticism and feedback might help with that. However, it becomes a problem when we start giving up completely. I think there are several reasons why this happens and it is often a social issue. For example, we institutionalize criticism at an early age in our schools, we glorify high-performing individuals to the point that if you cannot perform at the same level, then it is not worth doing it at all in the first place. And finally, there are always a horde of “critics” that will gladly tell you if they do not like something.
When it comes to art, the focus is often on the end result, not the journey and the story behind the art. I am not saying that we should release everything we create, but too much self-imposed criticism is not doing any good for anyone, especially not ourselves. For example, creating a full piano cover of a song is a major achievement, and although it might not get a million likes on YouTube, it is still worth sharing, even if just one other person listens to it.
This is a wonderful time to share art, especially digital art. Having a blog is great for writing, SoundCloud is great for sharing music, Flickr is an excellent photo-sharing app, etc. So get your stuff out there. If you enjoyed creating it, other people might enjoy it too.
It is is interesting how a job title carries certain connotations and how it can even be tailored to different situations. Sometimes I have called myself a Consultant, because this is what consultancies expect. Sometimes I have called myself a Developer, because that is what hiring companies expect. Sometimes I have called myself a Software Engineer, because it sounds good to Google and Amazon. All of the titles are technically correct (I hope), but create slightly different associations and expectations.
In my current position at Receiptful, things are a bit different. I am now a Data Scientist. This is not a title I applied for or have ever used about myself. If someone called me a data scientist before I started at Receiptful, my response would be: “Well, I don’t feel like a data scientist. I’m a developer with knowledge of data mining.”
This is the first time I have not made up my own title. It was handed to me and now I have to live up to it. The funny thing for me personally is that “data scientist” is actually a title I have aspired to have for a long time, but I just never felt that I was entitled to call myself a data scientist. Data science is such a hot topic right now, and I really do not want to seem fake.
So for now, I will continue to build cool stuff and hopefully, the title becomes self-evident after a while. Time will tell :-)
Note: The post below was written back in September 2014, when I was starting to feel a bit down about how poorly the Shopify sales of my app were going — especially after being featured on the front page of the app store without much attention. I did not publish it back then, because I once promised myself that I would try to mostly stay away from online rants. However, I think it provides some context to my March 2015 post about what happened next during my period of complete independence. So here you go.
I often get emotionally involved in my software. For example, I feel physically uncomfortable when I find a bug in some code I have written. I should probably write better tests to insure my well-being. Anyway, I want to talk about a bit about competition.
Antecons, the recommendation engine that I am working on, has now been around for about a year on the Shopify app store. When Antecons was first released, there were three other competing recommendation engines on the app store and one of them had been added just a few weeks before Antecons. Since then, three or four more have popped up on the app store. Recommendation engines and data analysis must be hot business because all of these competing apps seem to be doing very well and are getting nice reviews from the customers. This is a bit of a let down for me because it does not seem like Antecons is enjoying the same success.
What I am starting to realize is that it probably does not matter that Antecons always use SSL for increased privacy and security (unlike most of the other apps), that the Antecons JavaScript code is minified to reduce bandwidth for the webshop visitors (unlike at least two of the other apps) or that I do not write fake reviews (like at least one other app). No one will pat me on the shoulder for doing what I feel is a tiny bit extra “niceness” of the overall package. Oh well.
In July last year (2014), I started working full-time on Antecons. Back then, I wrote a post about complete independence where I predicted that I could support myself for up to half a year without income. This turned out to be true, but now that we have entered a new year, it is time for an update. This is an update that I was nervous about until very recently where a story about monetary failure took an interesting turn for the better.
The challenge
A lot of people try to hide their failures, myself included. Being afraid of failure, taking risks and facing challenges, it seems like a very weird and poor life choice to give up a lucrative and comfortable position as a consultant to work without income and earning potential for an extended period of time. The explanation is simple though: Things were starting to get fun.
When Antecons launched on Shopify in 2013, it was mostly developed while doing freelance consulting work. Having a high-revenue commercial product was never really the goal. I simply wanted to see if it was possible for me to start something from scratch and make it through all the way to a finished product and not just an abandoned side-project.
When the first few customers started coming in, I realized that this product might have some potential, and it was quite a different feeling having customers that bought a service rather than buying my labor. It was… fun. So I started working on Antecons full-time in July with the vision of slowly building up a list of stable clients. I had a good relationship and regular contact with a webshop house, and they sounded very interested in offering Antecons to their webshop customers so I pushed towards a first “revenue milestone” with them as a re-seller. It was a great Summer and I built an API beta that I was satisfied with offering to potential buyers.
Fail
My plan failed. It turned out that nothing came out of my contact with the webshop re-seller and in the meantime, Shopify sales only increased very slowly. Antecons was even featured on the front page of the Shopify app store, but there were disappointingly few signups.
There is no need to go into great detail about the technicalities, because the main problem was that I neglected sales too much so I failed to sell. That makes sense now, but I did not realize it soon enough… so I failed. Period. The end.
Late Fall came, I was not making any money and the product was not going to generate significant revenue anytime soon. I had to take on a few hours of consulting work again to pay the bills which meant that I had less time to work on Antecons and in the beginning of December, I was hired full-time as a Python developer for Neodev.
I had mixed feelings about starting a new job, because it felt like a defeat to stop working on Antecons. Both the job and my colleagues were great though, and it was sometimes quite difficult to explain to friends and family how having a rewarding and well-compensated job could still feel a bit like a step back or a let-down. Nevertheless, it was difficult to leave Antecons behind. As it turned out though, the departure was short-lived.
An unexpected journey
It was exactly one day after signing my new contract that I was contacted by Adii, a successful entrepreneur with experience in the e-commerce field. Adii was looking for a recommendation engine to improve a product upsell feature in a young startup called Receiptful. Initially, I was skeptical and without hope, because I had basically given up on monetizing Antecons since it was not making any real money. But after a few weeks of communication, we decided to work together and I was “acquihired” (yes, that is a real word) and Antecons was revived before it had even drawn its final breath.
Fast forward to today and I have been with Receiptful for a month, working on integrating Antecons as part of the Receiptful system. It is really great to be able to work on Antecons and data analysis in a full-time position and it has also presented some new challenges, but that is a topic for a different post.
Working independently was a great experience. It was an unexpected journey with an unexpected ending. A new and different chapter has now begun: Life in a startup.
