Apologies
Well I guess I should apologize for the radio silence. This lapse was a doozy. Sorry for that. I clearly need to build in a day of the week where I sit down and write rather than code. It’s the only way I can have any hope of maintaining this site. And beyond writing for it, anyone who’s looked at it can see there’s plenty of design work to do as well.
Site Update
On to the real point of this post though: FindFamiliar is almost done. Well, at least the MVP (minimal viable product) is. It’s hard to put into words how excited I am about this. It’s a big deal to me. I’ve been working on this thing for a long time. I’ve had to build a whole new skill set in order to be able to do it, and it’s taken me a long time. It’s also been uncertain whether I’d even be able to finish in time. I’ve been in a race against the clock against my finances, and hoping I could pull this gamble off. Granted, I’m a long ways from out of the woods, but that’s probably a different post. I’m shooting for a victorious tone here rather than impending doom.
At this point, I would say that FindFamiliar is almost feature complete. We have a lot of work left to do, mostly in test and debug, and some major chunks to sort out, like being able to take money, but I don’t anticipate too many more full days of coding. Right now, the site is in a place where you can navigate to it, create an account and log in, try to build a character, and usually get back a valid result. You’ll also usually have a character that makes sense. In essence, our product is a broken, borderline trash. I’ve been dreaming of this day for months.
Yes, it isn’t ready yet. No it doesn’t produce perfect results yet. But, it’s a product. Most people would be dissatisfied with it, but it works. It does something. Rather than talking in the abstract, I have something I can show people. I can push a button and have the site do something. Other than throw an error that is. This is a big deal. We have a lot of fine-tuning to do in the days ahead, but…we have a product.
For those wondering what’s left: I need to account for race adjustments and powers, flesh out building an animal companion for those who get one, build in spell memorization and generate an inventory for a character. That’s it for the actual game systems that need to be represented. Beyond that, we need to be able to take payment, generate gift codes and I need to flesh out the API some more for the front end. Lastly, we need to pick a hosting provider. From that point on, it’s just bug fixing until I think it works well enough to go live. Most of it is pretty close though. Maybe you disagree, but I think that’s a pretty short list, and I’m practically bouncing in my chair.
Why am I so excited about this? There’s the obvious things, like hoping it is enough of a success that I can keep going as a self-sufficient entity, but that’s just the base level. I’m also excited because I think I’ve built something that is really best in class. I’ve only found one competitor site to FindFamiliar, and it’s flawed in comparison, at least in my opinion. The intersection between software developers and tabletop RPGs is pretty major, and yet nobody else has really put anything like this together. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to pretend I can interpret that as a market signal, and my impending success. It could easily be that nobody has an interest in this product. It’s way too soon to tell how the financial side is going to shake out.
I see it like this: There are all kinds of dynamic character sheets. HeroLab is a product based around allowing people to easily create player characters (and is really good at that), but nobody is doing NPC generation, and specifically trying to take all of the work out of that. That’s why I’m excited. I’ve found a small corner of the world, and created what I think is a best in class software solution for a niche problem. I’m proud of that. Even if it fails financially, I’m still proud of the work I’ve done.
Finally, it’s a first big and important step: I’ll have created a product of my own. I have a company now, and soon we’ll have a product. Just being able to say that is a big deal to me. Maybe I’ll do a post just on my business at some point here. Both the nitty-gritty of setting it up as well as the ideas I have going forward. The IRS tells me it’s a disregarded entity, but that’s just, like, their opinion.
The Long Tail
I’m hoping FindFamiliar won’t fail financially, obviously. And I think we’ve got a decent chance of success on this front. Success for me in this case is a pretty low number. It’s basically enough for me to meet expenses between now and whenever my next project comes out. My whole plan here is just to keep myself above water until something hits. And if nothing hits, then, I don’t know. Maybe I get a job somewhere.
The Internet is a powerful thing though. It gives you access to hundreds of millions of people. If you pick a particular demographic group you want to create a product for, there’s a good chance that most of them have Internet access. There are obvious caveats to this, but I’m not going to waste time pointing out all the groups you could sell to who aren’t on the Internet. The point is that it’s possible to find these people. Furthermore, when you’re just two guys, it doesn’t take a lot of people to make a product a success. We’re not a big organization, and so we have lower needs than big organizations. It also means that we can play in spaces that big organizations wouldn’t normally waste their time with.
As was observed in the book The Long Tail, the number of people interested in a particular thing asymptotically approaches zero. Whatever it is you produce, some people will find it and want it. If you doubt this, just take a look at some of the lowest selling games on Steam Spy. These games often look like hot garbage, and are still moving a few thousand units. If those games are being produced in a low cost of living area or country, and are cranked out by a team of a few people, moving a few thousand copies at $5 each is a pretty good living. And the numbers shoot up quite a bit once you get past a quality threshold that is pretty easy to clear. Jeff Vogel has made a pretty good living producing games for a niche market of gamer that nobody else wanted to waste their time with for years; though there has been a resurgence there recently.
My plan, such as it is, is to keep tracking down these niche markets. I want to play out on the right hand side of the long tail, producing things for people that are underserved, and hope that I can make enough products of interest for people that I can make a decent living. I’m not shooting to get rich. I want to live comfortably, and forge my own destiny.
That is why I’m excited.