At 34 (but with no kids) I agreed with my wife that I could have 4 years with a sanity check at the end of year 2.
I also agreed that it would be an ABSOLUTE rule that I could not put any of my own money into the company. This included the $10 for buying the first domain.
I ended up selling 20% of my company to a friend for $5k when it was just weekend hacking with him getting diluted to a $2.5m valuation once I've been full time for 40 months.
[Edit] It massively helps that my wife is a partner at a law firm so we can pay bills etc, without having to have saved the cushion in advance. I also arranged to leave my previous employer with a 6-figure exit payment.
> It massively helps that my wife is a partner at a law firm so we can pay bills etc, without having to have saved the cushion in advance. I also arranged to leave my previous employer with a 6-figure exit payment.
I'm happy for your success, but I feel like this should have been mentioned up front. This kind of massive leg up almost certainly does not apply to OP.
Fair, but there's lots of other things that get missed when trying to give short feedback.
I have a degree from a prestigious university and I've built relationships in the area I'm now trying to do business. I joined a golf club and a yacht club, I made friends with a former CEO of an NYSE listed company, I watched all the start-up school curriculum videos, I've been repeatedly rejected by YC (though we got an interview one time) which means I think through what we're doing every 6 months. I made friends with a journalist.
There are a lot of things I've done that wouldn't be available to someone with low social or financial capital.
I've been trying to hunt down decent iPhone/Android games with decent polish/production values and no sinister monetization, but it just isn't working out.. Not counting Apple/Google/Netflix subscription options, I've only found maybe half a dozen games that are high enough quality that they could make it on a game console or PC.
I feel like this is an untapped market again, since some of the most successful and most popular games out there treat their customers with respect. Or at least, did at one point. The issue is that there's no way to discover games like that for customers, and no funding from publishers to make them.
(I wish I had some clever idea about what to do to re-energize that market.. I was thinking to make a review site a la TouchArcade, but I have no idea how to get it to take off and there aren't enough games to fully populate a site like that)
I'm making ultra small games like infinite runners, and other procedurally generated generated games.
The problem is risk vs reward. Even a modestly sized game will cost millions since you need to compete with some of the biggest names in the industry.I really tried to make a graphically intense game with Unity's HDRP, but I'm still not able to match the polish of a AAA game.
Aside from that, there's too many games being put out right now. People only have so much time and money after all.
I used to play a lot when I was younger (back in ZX Spectrum times), but now don't have the patient (or time) for big games that require any kind of commitment. For instance, I played occasionally sudoku on my tablet/phone and when I started to play a little bit more I bought this sudoku [1] for both Android and iPhone. I also play occasionally some games from these guys [2], namely "Smash Hit" and "Pin Out".
What are your games? Share a link, maybe one or two of us may get curious and play with it a little bit!
That's what really kills me. There are so many great devs out there making awesome stuff, and I can't **ing find any of it to play because I'm constantly being bombarded with terrible big corporate shovelware casino crap
Throughout my career I'd survived 7 redundancy rounds. One time I chose not to survive. When management raised the idea of moving my team to Ireland I negotiated for exit payment rather than making the usual case about how important my role was.
Were you in fintech or other highly classified work? I've only heard of employers paying (former?) employees for basically a year of their salary on "garden leave", where the employee is kept on the payroll without doing any work in order to prevent them being able to bring trade secrets to a competitor
I was a data scientist at an insurance company. Was a fairly standard redundancy based payment but with a little bit extra to avoid it being a redundancy and to get a mutual non-disparagement agreement. Basically the bonus for the year, 3 months garden leave, 8 weeks redundancy pay, taxes, pension contribution, and share scheme buyout etc.
When I'd avoided redundancies at previous employer (large bank) some really great terms had been offered.
I also agreed that it would be an ABSOLUTE rule that I could not put any of my own money into the company. This included the $10 for buying the first domain.
I ended up selling 20% of my company to a friend for $5k when it was just weekend hacking with him getting diluted to a $2.5m valuation once I've been full time for 40 months.
[Edit] It massively helps that my wife is a partner at a law firm so we can pay bills etc, without having to have saved the cushion in advance. I also arranged to leave my previous employer with a 6-figure exit payment.