If you don’t hear from a startup, it might be dead. But here my startup is, alive. No matter what happens, we will succeed.

Twitter server notification bot tutorial canceled

I was writing a tutorial for how to make your own Twitter server notification bot, but I’m canceling it because, honestly, I have more pressing matters to attend to right now, such as this Pantsu versus Baka project/program. It’s not like I have income, y’know.

I still have the source code publicly available with a little bit of documentation. That works just enough.

But I’m not going to write tutorials anymore under these circumstances because I definitely shouldn’t. I don’t need to engage in certain activities and I should refrain from engaging in some of them. This decision is aligned with my new outbound marketing initiative.

So the neural network tutorial is also being canceled too.

Pivots

This is what the Pantsu versus Baka/Strange Platformer Game game looked like after five days of development:

And this is what it looked like after fourteen days of development:

The project has had many pivots. The Fortnite multiplayer game started out as a completely different game than what it is today. As did many other products.

This is no different from optimizing an objective function using a gradient descent algorithm.

Some project constraints

I can fail to make a game of extremely high quality. I can even fail to make a fun game, even though I promised to make fun games. I just started making fun games, anyway, so I currently don’t have a lot of experience with that.

But what I can’t fail at is making a simple and thus inexpensive game, which it seems is what I’m doing. Next time, I’ll make a game with the constraint that I can’t use a game development framework to encourage and enforce simplicity.

Marketing and selling efforts

I want to market to Japanese people. And I partially can since I know a little Japanese. That’s an effort for the future.

Anyway.

It seems that when selling a product, the goal is to get either a “yes” or a “no.” I’m not really selling anything yet, but I am marketing it.

My product has an advantage that most other products don’t have: it’s a web game allowing prospects to easily try it with little friction.

The game has a Positive Response Rate of 14% out of the twenty-three people I’ve contacted on Twitter. The Positive Response Rate is a metric that I’ve found and created for this video game startup. It helps show how much the people I contacted like the game using a Positivity of Response value. It’s above zero, which is better than being at zero.

I haven’t really followed-up on any prospect, because I’m focusing on initiating contact with prospective players. And I don’t have a product to sell–but I do have relationships to build with the players, however long it may take.

When I do follow-up with prospects, I’ll be engaged in a complex sales operation and process as defined by Peter Thiel in his book Zero to One. I can use a complex sales process with this low-priced product (the eventual video game service) because I don’t need a high number of sales. My efforts are not efficient, but they are effective. And these efforts will lead to the accomplishment of my task which is to generate income. I must remember this.

I’m one-hundred percent confident that if I were to make deals in-person, I would close a great number of deals. My commitment to the players will encourage me to work with them.

A unique business model and system

itch.io hosting

This Pantsu versus Baka project requires a server for user accounts. So, the latest version of the game will eventually not be hosted on itch.io (note to self: the last version hosted on itch.io will be tagged in its Git repository as final itch.io version). This will affect distribution, but I’m relying on outbound marketing for this project and not inbound marketing. So, the loss will be nominal.

I also have to decide on the final name of the game for the domain.

Server solution engineering

I don’t want to pay for a cloud service anymore.

Then my startup can use an on-premise solution. My specification requires it to be always on (almost like 99.99% uptime) and consume nominal power thereby generating little heat.

I ordered a 256 megabytes of RAM Orange Pi Zero single board computer to function as the on-premise server. Using less than ten watts of power and having costed $13 USD total, this on-premises system will be the more cheaper and more effective choice than paying monthly for a cloud server. I don’t expect to have a lot of customers and the Node.js server that I envision won’t be using more than thirty megabytes of RAM. I must be resourceful and careful using this system, because it has some exotic constraints.

Revenue model component

Should I use a one-time subscription system? Or a recurring subscription system like when the Aion MMORPG was first released to help pay for the server system? Or should I use a virtual arcade game system reminiscent of arcade game businesses of yore?

I must decide and my choice for this component of the startup’s system will affect its sibling components and my bottom line. It must be inexpensive, satisfy my middle constraint of time, and performance can be subpar as performance is my startup’s most flexible constraint, currently.

My ultimate aim

I hope I’m not making a system that’s too complex for me to operate. And I must hold on to the faith that if any anomaly occurs, I can resolve it (e.g., my plan of using MongoDB as a database seems to be flawed as MongoDB doesn’t seem to be compatible with the Orange Pi Zero’s 32-bit ARM microprocessor). My unwavering devotion to reaching prosperity would drive me in such a scenario.

As it does now.

My true ambition is to give birth to a new system, a new lifestyle, as I discontinue my current one full of deficiencies and inherited from a system that was full of even more deficiencies.