Failures inspire young developers

Jason citron created many products.

These products flopped.

Microsoft offered $10 billion for one of these products.

He rejected the offer since he was so confident in his success.

Let’s find out how he built a product that is currently valued at $15 billion.

Early in his youth, Jason began learning to code.

Jason's father taught him programming and IT.

His father wanted to help him earn money when he needed it.

Jason created video games and websites in high school.

Jason realized early on that his IT and programming skills could make him money.

Jason's parents misjudged his aptitude for programming.

Jason frequented online programming communities.

He looked for web developers. He created websites for those people.

His parents suspected Jason sold drugs online. When he said he used programming to make money, they were shocked.

They helped him set up a PayPal account.

Florida higher education to study video game creation

Jason never attended an expensive university.

He studied game design in Florida.

“Higher Education is an interesting part of society… When I work with people, the school they went to never comes up… only thing that matters is what can you do…At the end of the day, the beauty of silicon valley is that if you have a great idea and you can bring it to the life, you can convince a total stranger to give you money and join your project… This notion that you have to go to a great school didn’t end up being a thing for me.”

Jason's life was altered by Steve Jobs' keynote address.

After graduating, Jason joined an incubator.

Jason created a video-dating site first.

Bad idea.

Nobody wanted to use it when it was released, so they shut it down.

He made a multiplayer game.

It was released on Bebo. 10,000 people played it.

When Steve Jobs unveiled the Apple app store, he stopped playing.

The introduction of the app store resembled that of a new gaming console.

Jason's life altered after Steve Jobs' 2008 address.

“Whenever a new video game console is launched, that’s the opportunity for a new video game studio to get started, it’s because there aren’t too many games available…When a new PlayStation comes out, since it’s a new system, there’s only a handful of titles available… If you can be a launch title you can get a lot of distribution.”

Apple's app store provided a chance to start a video game company.

They released an app after 5 months of work.

Aurora Feint is the game.

Jason believed 1000 players in a week would be wonderful. A thousand players joined in the first hour.

Over time, Aurora Feints' game didn't gain traction. They don't make enough money to keep playing.

They could only make enough for one month.

Instead of buying video games, buy technology

Jason saw that they established a leaderboard, chat rooms, and multiplayer capabilities and believed other developers would want to use these.

They opted to sell the prior game's technology.

OpenFeint.

Assisting other game developers

They had no money in the bank to create everything needed to make the technology user-friendly.

Jason and Daniel designed a website saying:

“If you’re making a video game and want to have a drop in multiplayer support, you can use our system”

TechCrunch covered their website launch, and they gained a few hundred mailing list subscribers.

They raised seed funding with the mailing list.

Nearly all iPhone game developers started adopting the Open Feint logo.

“It was pretty wild… It was really like a whole social platform for people to play with their friends.”

What kind of a business model was it?

OpenFeint originally planned to make the software free for all games. As the game gained popularity, they demanded payment.

They later concluded it wasn't a good business concept.

It became free eventually.

Acquired for $104 million

Open Feint's users and employees grew tremendously.

GREE bought OpenFeint for $104 million in April 2011.

GREE initially committed to helping Jason and his team build a fantastic company.

Three or four months after the acquisition, Jason recognized they had a different vision.

He quit.

Jason's Original Vision for the iPad

Jason focused on distribution in 2012 to help businesses stand out.

The iPad market and user base were growing tremendously.

Jason said the iPad may replace mobile gadgets.

iPad gamers behaved differently than mobile gamers.

People sat longer and experienced more using an iPad.

“The idea I had was what if we built a gaming business that was more like traditional video games but played on tablets as opposed to some kind of mobile game that I’ve been doing before.”

Unexpected insight after researching the video game industry

Jason learned from studying the gaming industry that long-standing companies had advantages beyond a single release.

Previously, long-standing video game firms had their own distribution system. This distribution strategy could buffer time between successful titles.

Sony, Microsoft, and Valve all have gaming consoles and online stores.

So he built a distribution system.

He created a group chat app for gamers.

He envisioned a team-based multiplayer game with text and voice interaction.

His objective was to develop a communication network, release more games, and start a game distribution business.

Remaking the video game League of Legends

Jason and his crew reimagined a League of Legends game mode for 12-inch glass.

They adapted the game for tablets.

League of Legends was PC-only.

So they rebuilt it.

They overhauled the game and included native mobile experiences to stand out.

Hammer and Chisel was the company's name.

18 people worked on the game.

The game was funded. The game took 2.5 years to make.

Was the game a success?

July 2014 marked the game's release. The team's hopes were dashed.

Critics initially praised the game.

Initial installation was widespread.

The game failed.

As time passed, the team realized iPad gaming wouldn't increase much and mobile would win.

Jason was given a fresh idea by Stan Vishnevskiy.

Stan Vishnevskiy was a corporate engineer.

He told Jason about his plan to design a communication app without a game.

This concept seeded modern strife.

“The insight that he really had was to put a couple of dots together… we’re seeing our customers communicating around our own game with all these different apps and also ourselves when we’re playing on PC… We should solve that problem directly rather than needing to build a new game…we should start making it on PC.”

So began Discord.

Online socializing with pals was the newest trend.

Jason grew up playing video games with his friends.

He never played outside.

Jason had many great moments playing video games with his closest buddy, wife, and brother.

Discord was about providing a location for you and your group to speak and hang out.

Like a private cafe, bedroom, or living room.

Discord was developed for you and your friends on computers and phones.

You can quickly call your buddies during a game to conduct a conference call. Put the call on speaker and talk while playing.

Discord wanted to give every player a unique experience. Because coordinating across apps was a headache.

The entire team started concentrating on Discord.

Jason decided Hammer and Chisel would focus on their chat app.

Jason didn't want to make a video game.

How Discord attracted the appropriate attention

During the first five months, the entire team worked on the game and got feedback from friends.

This ensures product improvement. As a result, some teammates' buddies started utilizing Discord.

The team knew it would become something, but the result was buggy. App occasionally crashed.

Jason persuaded a gamer friend to write on Reddit about the software.

New people would find Discord. Why not?

Reddit users discovered Discord and 50 started using it frequently.

Discord was launched.

Rejecting the $10 billion acquisition proposal

Discord has increased in recent years.

It sends billions of messages.

Discord's users aren't tracked. They're privacy-focused.

Purchase offer

Covid boosted Discord's user base.

Weekly, billions of messages were transmitted.

Microsoft offered $10 billion for Discord in 2021.

Jason sold Open Feint for $104m in 2011.

This time, he believed in the product so much that he rejected Microsoft's offer.

“I was talking to some people in the team about which way we could go… The good thing was that most of the team wanted to continue building.”

Last time, Discord was valued at $15 billion.

Discord raised money on March 12, 2022.

The $15 billion corporation raised $500 million in 2021.

> Say Hello To The Lean-Hedge Model

People think starting a business requires significant debt and investment. Like Shark Tank, you need a world-changing idea. I'm not saying to avoid investors or brilliant ideas.

Investing is essential to build a genuinely profitable company. Think Apple or Starbucks.

Entrepreneurship is risky because many people go bankrupt from debt. As starters, we shouldn't do it. Instead, use lean-hedge.

Simply defined, you construct a cash-flow business to hedge against long-term investment-heavy business expenses.

What the “fx!$rench-toast” is the lean-hedge model?

When you start a business, your money should move down, down, down, then up when it becomes profitable.

Many people don't survive the business's initial losses and debt. What if, we created a cash-flow business BEFORE we started our Starbucks to hedge against its initial expenses?

Lean-hedge has two sections. Start a cash-flow business. A cash-flow business takes minimal investment and usually involves sweat and time.

Let’s take a look at some examples:

A Translation company

Personal portfolio website (you make a site then you do cold e-mail marketing)

FREELANCE (UpWork, Fiverr).

Educational business.

Infomarketing. (You design a knowledge-based product. You sell the info).

Online fitness/diet/health coaching ($50-$300/month, calls, training plan)

Amazon e-book publishing. (Medium writers do this)

YouTube, cash-flow channel

A web development agency (I'm a dev, but if you're not, a graphic design agency, etc.) (Sell your time.)

Digital Marketing

Online paralegal (A million lawyers work in the U.S).

Some dropshipping (Organic Tik Tok dropshipping, where you create content to drive traffic to your shopify store instead of spend money on ads).

(Disclaimer: My first two cash-flow enterprises, which were language teaching, failed terribly. My translation firm is now booming because B2B e-mail marketing is easy.)

Crossover occurs. Your long-term business starts earning more money than your cash flow business.

My cash-flow business (freelancing, translation) makes $7k+/month.

I’ve decided to start a slightly more investment-heavy digital marketing agency

Here are the anticipated business's time- and money-intensive investments:

1. ($$$) Top Front-End designer's Figma/UI-UX design (in negotiation)

2. (Time): A little copywriting (I will do this myself)

3. ($$) Creating an animated webpage with HTML (in negotiation)

4. Backend Development (Duration) (I'll carry out this myself using Laravel.)

5. Logo Design ($$)

6. Logo Intro Video for $

7. Video Intro (I’ll edit this myself with Premiere Pro)

etc.

Then evaluate product, place, price, and promotion. Consider promotion and pricing.

The lean-hedge model's point is:

Don't gamble. Avoid debt. First create a cash-flow project, then grow it steadily.

Check read my previous posts on “Nightmare Mode” (which teaches you how to make work as interesting as video games) and Why most people can't escape a 9-5 to learn how to develop a cash-flow business.

We're opening up Maki through a series of Medium posts. We'll describe what Maki is building and how. We'll explain how we built a SaaS in 100 days. This isn't a step-by-step guide to starting a business, but a product philosophy to help you build quickly.

Focus on end-users.

This may seem obvious, but it's important to talk to users first. When we started thinking about Maki, we interviewed 100 HR directors from SMBs, Next40 scale-ups, and major Enterprises to understand their concerns. We initially thought about the future of employment, but most of their worries centered on Recruitment. We don't have a clear recruiting process, it's time-consuming, we recruit clones, we don't support diversity, etc. And as hiring managers, we couldn't help but agree.

Co-create your product with your end-users.

We went to the drawing board, read as many books as possible (here, here, and here), and when we started getting a sense for a solution, we questioned 100 more operational HR specialists to corroborate the idea and get a feel for our potential answer. This confirmed our direction to help hire more objectively and efficiently.

Back to the drawing board, we designed our first flows and screens. We organized sessions with certain survey respondents to show them our early work and get comments. We got great input that helped us build Maki, and we met some consumers. Obsess about users and execute alongside them.

Don’t shoot for the moon, yet. Make pragmatic choices first.

Once we were convinced, we began building. To launch a SaaS in 100 days, we needed an operating principle that allowed us to accelerate while still providing a reliable, secure, scalable experience. We focused on adding value and outsourced everything else. Example:

Concentrate on adding value. Reuse existing bricks.

When determining which technology to use, we looked at our strengths and the future to see what would last. Node.js for backend, React for frontend, both with typescript. We thought this technique would scale well since it would attract more talent and the surrounding mature ecosystem would help us go quicker.

We explored for ways to bootstrap services while setting down strong foundations that might support millions of users. We built our backend services on NestJS so we could extend into microservices later. Hasura, a GraphQL APIs engine, automates Postgres data exposing through a graphQL layer. MUI's ready-to-use components powered our design-system. We used well-maintained open-source projects to speed up certain tasks.

We outsourced important components of our platform (Auth0 for authentication, Stripe for billing, SendGrid for notifications) because, let's face it, we couldn't do better. We choose to host our complete infrastructure (SQL, Cloud run, Logs, Monitoring) on GCP to simplify our work between numerous providers.

Focus on your business, use existing bricks for the rest. For the curious, we'll shortly publish articles detailing each stage.

Most importantly, empower people and step back.

We couldn't have done this without the incredible people who have supported us from the start. Since Powership is one of our key values, we provided our staff the power to make autonomous decisions from day one. Because we believe our firm is its people, we hired smart builders and let them build.

Nicolas left Spendesk to create scalable interfaces using react-router, react-queries, and MUI. JD joined Swile and chose Hasura as our GraphQL engine. Jérôme chose NestJS to build our backend services. Since then, Justin, Ben, Anas, Yann, Benoit, and others have followed suit.

If you consider your team a collective brain, you should let them make decisions instead of directing them what to do. You'll make mistakes, but you'll go faster and learn faster overall.

Invest in great talent and develop a strong culture from the start. Here's how to establish a SaaS in 100 days.

Generative AI hype: some thoughts

The sudden surge in "generative AI" startups and projects feels like the inverse of the recent "web3" boom. Both came from hyped-up pots. But while web3 hyped idealistic tech and an easy way to make money, generative AI hypes unsettling tech and questions whether it can be used to make money.

Web3 is technology looking for problems to solve, while generative AI is technology creating almost too many solutions. Web3 has been evangelists trying to solve old problems with new technology. As Generative AI evolves, users are resolving old problems in stunning new ways.

It's a jab at web3, but it's true. Web3's hype, including crypto, was unhealthy. Always expected a tech crash and shakeout. Tech that won't look like "web3" but will enhance "web2"

But that doesn't mean AI hype is healthy. There'll be plenty of bullshit here, too. As moths to a flame, hype attracts charlatans. Again, the difference is the different starting point. People want to use it. Try it.

With the beta launch of Dall-E 2 earlier this year, a new class of consumer product took off. Midjourney followed suit (despite having to jump through the Discord server hoops). Twelve more generative art projects. Lensa, Prisma Labs' generative AI self-portrait project, may have topped the hype (a startup which has actually been going after this general space for quite a while). This week, ChatGPT went off-topic.

This has a "fake-it-till-you-make-it" vibe. We give these projects too much credit because they create easy illusions. This also unlocks new forms of creativity. And faith in new possibilities.

As a user, it's thrilling. We're just getting started. These projects are not only fun to play with, but each week brings a new breakthrough. As an investor, it's all happening so fast, with so much hype (and ethical and societal questions), that no one knows how it will turn out. Web3's demand won't be the issue. Too much demand may cause servers to melt down, sending costs soaring. Companies will try to mix rapidly evolving tech to meet user demand and create businesses. Frustratingly difficult.

Anyway, I wanted an excuse to post some Lensa selfies.

These are really weird. I recognize them as me or a version of me, but I have no memory of them being taken. It's surreal, out-of-body. Uncanny Valley.

As a marketer, I joined Twitter on August 31, 2022 to use it.

Growth has been volatile, causing up-and-down engagements. 500 followers in 11 days.

I met amazing content creators, marketers, and people.

Those who use Twitter may know that one-liners win the algorithm, especially if they're funny or humorous, but as a marketer I can't risk posting content that my audience won't like.

I researched, learned some strategies, and A/B tested; some worked, some didn't.

In this article, I share what worked for me so you can do the same.

Thanks for reading!

Let's check my Twitter stats.

• Tweets: how many tweets I sent in the first 28 days.

• A user may be presented with a Tweet in their timeline or in search results.

• In-person visits how many times my Twitter profile was viewed in the first 28 days.

• Mentions: the number of times a tweet has mentioned my name.

• Number of followers: People who were following me

Getting 500 Twitter followers isn't difficult.

Not easy, but doable.

Follow these steps to begin:

Determine your content pillars in step 1.

My formula is Growth = Content + Marketing + Community.

I discuss growth strategies.

My concept for growth is : 1. Content = creating / writing + sharing content in my niche. 2. Marketing = Marketing everything in business + I share my everyday learnings in business, marketing & entrepreneurship. 3. Community = Building community of like minded individuals (Also,I share how to’s) + supporting marketers to build & grow through community building.

Identify content pillars to create content for your audience.

2. Make your profile better

Create a profile picture. Your recognition factor is this.

Professional headshots are worthwhile.

This tool can help you create a free, eye-catching profile pic.

Use a niche-appropriate avatar if you don't want to show your face.

2. Create a bio that converts well mainly because first impressions count.

what you're sharing + why + +social proof what are you making

Be brief and precise. (155 characters)

3. Configure your banner

Banners complement profile pictures.

Use this space to explain what you do and how Twitter followers can benefit.

Canva's Twitter header maker is free.

Birdy can test multiple photo, bio, and banner combinations to optimize your profile.

• Versions A and B of your profile should be completed.

• Find the version that converts the best.

• Use the profile that converts the best.

4. Special handle

If your username/handle is related to your niche, it will help you build authority and presence among your audience. Mine on Twitter is @marketershruti.

5. Participate expertly

Proficiently engage while you'll have no audience at first. Borrow your dream audience for free.

Steps:

• Find a creator who has the audience you want.

• Activate their post notifications and follow them.

• Add a valuable comment first.

6. Create fantastic content

Use:

• Medium (Read articles about your topic.)

• Podcasts (Listen to experts on your topics)

• YouTube (Follow channels in your niche)

Tweet what?

• Listicle ( Hacks, Books, Tools, Podcasts)

• Lessons (Teach your audience how to do 1 thing)

• Inspirational (Inspire people to take action)

Consistent writing?

• You MUST plan ahead and schedule your Tweets.

• Use a scheduling tool that is effective for you; hypefury is mine.

Lastly, consistency is everything that attracts growth. After optimizing your profile, stay active to gain followers, engagements, and clients.

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