My previous work on gaming came to a standstill several months ago. Many things happened to cause me to abandon my foray into the gaming market.
- Project Darkstar was shut down by Oracle. It has since re-emerged as Red Dwarf Server. I hope this project finds great success, but the risk involved was making me uncomfortable. As a one person shop, there were too many uncertainties and too frequent changes to keep up with my limited time.
- Observing and learning the Game market – it is very crowded. I knew this when starting, but the competition continues to improve. Games which feed the masses (think Farmville) continue to grow, and nothing I would be creating would likely change that.
- Timelines are too long. Making a high quality game, my project plan was extending into the multi-year when taking into account server design, client development, and graphics. Add to that integration into portals, marketing, and so on – it quickly became too much time invested for too little chance of return.
So I made a couple of games, worked on distributing them, and then came up with a new method to start anew the process of value creation. Instead of going B2C for my next project, I am planning on launching a B2B niche product with a much better price structure and target market. Development is already underway, and I’ll be posting here over time once it is nearing completion.
Key Success Metrics
In keeping with my learning in the single-founder startup market, here are my key success criteria I used to judge market opportunities. Expect to see a post on the idea generation process at some point.
- Idea to Launch planned to 6 months of part time work or less. I want to have everything up and running as fast as possible. My current project has been through design, and is about 50% of the way through initial development, and about 2 months have passed. So far, so good.
- Product should target a niche where competitors already exist, but fewer than 10. This is to ensure I don’t have to create the market from scratch. In this case, I will be offering a solution at a far lower cost point and with much greater ease of use compared to my competitors. I will be going down the road of cost+ and differentiation (ease of use) compared to my competitors.
- Product should have a sales price. Previous efforts of mine focused largely on the free or freemium markets (freemium being 90/10 free/paying customers). I still like those business models, but I have found the required volume reduces potential revenues too much for niche products. It also tends to extend the break even time by a significant amount, since you must constantly add infrastructure and scale for non-paying users. In this case, I am looking at a $20-$30 price point, recurring.
- Keyword competition should not bee too high. In my target niche, very few keywords are very highly competitive, and ample traffic flows to some very low competition keywords.
- Market has a long tail (Many possible sub-niches) or the market has a ways to grow before becoming mature. In my case, there is not many possible niches, but the market is still in its infancy for non-enterprise customers.
Overall, you’ll be seeing more about my product in the coming months as I prepare to launch. I will also be releasing some tutorials based on my technology choices which took me some time to figure out, based on the lack of documentation for exactly what I am trying to do.
