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I agree up to a point. There's more to think about here than just finding the right market -- though that's a must. The problem is that doing this while workin

by rubeng 16y ago

I agree up to a point. There's more to think about here than just finding the right market -- though that's a must. The problem is that doing this while working full time is freaking hard. Doing an entire year of development after hours is just brutal. The longer the time to launch the more likely you are to not see it through to the end. So if you're taking on a project that's going to be in development for several months before you can even charge a dime -- finding something to get excited about is huge. If it's just something you're going to build in a couple of weeks then that passion can totally be lacking there because marketing is going to be much larger part of the effort (it typically is but typically not to this extent). In any case, I highly recommend sticking with something you can launch very soon. Probably no more than 3 months. I went 6 months and it was tough. It's an exhausting effort so take advantage of that motivational boost that launching gives you.

chokma 16y ago
>"The problem is that doing this while working full time is freaking hard. Doing an entire year of development after hours is just brutal. The longer the time to launch the more likely you are to not see it through to the end." I agree. Working that hard is difficult to keep up. 6 hours a weekday and 8 hours a weekend is 38 hours additional work a week... I am currently working on an open source browser game as a hobby project, and am discovering that it is much more work to get it right than I thought. But I decided in the beginning that it should be live after the first week or so and now I publish the current alpha every other week. Sometimes, this requires more refactoring, but I think this is balanced by the fact that the game is already in a state where it is not a closet project. If you make a commercial product, be sure to have potential customers and a marketing plan before you sink a whole year of work into it. A customer of ours spent half a million for a _good_ piece of software and now its been waiting for other a year to gain traction. Business customers are interested, but it seems like the marketing department is utterly fubared. They even cannot get around to set it up internally to solve their own needs...

by rubeng 16y ago

chokma 16y ago

>"The problem is that doing this while working full time is freaking hard. Doing an entire year of development after hours is just brutal. The longer the time to launch the more likely you are to not see it through to the end." I agree. Working that hard is difficult to keep up. 6 hours a weekday and 8 hours a weekend is 38 hours additional work a week... I am currently working on an open source browser game as a hobby project, and am discovering that it is much more work to get it right than I thought. But I decided in the beginning that it should be live after the first week or so and now I publish the current alpha every other week. Sometimes, this requires more refactoring, but I think this is balanced by the fact that the game is already in a state where it is not a closet project. If you make a commercial product, be sure to have potential customers and a marketing plan before you sink a whole year of work into it. A customer of ours spent half a million for a _good_ piece of software and now its been waiting for other a year to gain traction. Business customers are interested, but it seems like the marketing department is utterly fubared. They even cannot get around to set it up internally to solve their own needs...