I came up with the concept of Football President a couple of years ago and after doing nothing on it for many months, I finally started building the game earlier this year.
I've been bootstrapping the development of this game, I'm working on it full time alongside my consultancy work. After reading some of the articles on here about lean startup methodology and testing the minimum viable product - I decided to spend some of my time promoting the game and building up a community alongside the development efforts...
This landing page is the first step towards testing the marketing channels / message. I'm going to be driving traffic to the page soon but before I did, I thought I'd post it on here and get some thoughts on how effective the page is.
I'd love to know what works... what doesn't and if there's any way I can improve it! Please feel free to be as brutal as you like! :)
Posting on here is also a good idea! Someone else might informally have a great idea and want to hook you in. Perhaps you could add something in your profile that lists what you do and how one might contact you?
My HN profile has my email address, thanks for the heads up re: the contact form and sorry you had to fill out the entire form to figure out it was not working!
I understand where you're coming from. I've contracted long enough to have had my share of nightmare projects - late payments, feature creep, poorly planned specs etc. I think I'm getting good at sensing which projects should set my alarm bells ringing.
Unfortunately my free time gets in the way of JFDI so I thought this was the best way to kill two birds with one stone.
I can't afford to compete with those hourly rates or the payment terms.
I'm based in the UK so as well as cost of living, I have to factor the strength of Sterling into my hourly rate as well when dealing with international clients.
My strength is communication and understanding of your requirements so I'm targeting a different type of client; perhaps putting bargain basement in the title was misleading?
I'm learning on the job unfortunately so whilst I'm a quick learner and an established polygot programmer, it might take me slightly longer to get certain things done until I'm more familiar with the workflow / processes involved in the app development cycle. We might also run into unexpected difficulties.
To alleviate the risk for anyone choosing to hire me, I'm willing to offered a fixed price quote - I'll swallow any delays due to my unfamiliarity with ObjC/Java/Android/iOS app stores.
How do I get in touch?
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If you have an idea that you've been sitting on / or you think this sounds like the perfect opportunity to get your MVP built...
Firstly please check out my site here: http://themvplab.com
and if you're interested, my profile contains contact information.
Thanks, really interesting to read bearing in mind your involvement in the industry. I've heard of a few of the players you mentioned - didn't get around to contacting London Venture Partners because I didn't have any connection to them and to be honest I'd never heard of EGG who look very interesting! :)
I'll look into this more in the next few days - would you mind if I reached out to you? Is it your first name @ riddle.com?
Thanks for your input and I take on board your closing note because I'm coming to the same conclusion myself.
My initial plan was to quit my job and go full time on this in conjunction with my freelancing/contracting but the latter is almost a full-time position in itself and I haven't been able to save enough to invest into the game hence the reason why I started to look into raising finance.
I've been contemplating changing my plan and maybe finding a stable job and using my salary to fund myself to MVP stage.
Good point, I was looking through a bunch of slide deck templates and they had the product description / game overview after the market sections hence the reason I've laid it out that way. To be honest, I prefer it the way you describe as well, I'll switch them over.
Regarding finances, I had a cash flow forecast for the next 3 years but it was based on modest financing and organic growth. I'm working on a scaled up version - to the investors I sent a business plan with the old forecasts with a small addendum of what the scaled up model looked like.
I came up with the concept of Football President a couple of years ago and after doing nothing on it for many months, I finally started building the game earlier this year.
I've been bootstrapping the development of this game, I'm working on it full time alongside my consultancy work. After reading some of the articles on here about lean startup methodology and testing the minimum viable product - I decided to spend some of my time promoting the game and building up a community alongside the development efforts...
This landing page is the first step towards testing the marketing channels / message. I'm going to be driving traffic to the page soon but before I did, I thought I'd post it on here and get some thoughts on how effective the page is.
I'd love to know what works... what doesn't and if there's any way I can improve it! Please feel free to be as brutal as you like! :)