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Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ok let me update it. Opportunities are always there for enterprising, confident and contrarian thinkers who will take several chances with low downside and try to create new things rather than compete within existing paradigms. Disclaimer: Not financial advice but personal observations
This discounts the high failure low success rates of entrepreneurship, which is dangerous advice in a country with a broken healthcare system and no social safety net.
This guy made a lot of really questionable decisions. Put his future and family at risk. His only hit was porting someone else's hit game to iOS. He himself admits he is working again now only so he can build a stash and gamble it all again. I hope he finds success some day, but given his track record, I'm very skeptical of his conclusions.
Similar recent interview with him on indie hackers : https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses/a-dark-room
Apples cut of 30% drops it to $553k. Since it was a port of someone else's game half goes to them, so his actual income was $278k for the 16 months from start to end of 2015.
Still a significant take-home but makes it more understandable why he had to take on contract work when his subsequent games did not hit iOS pay-dirt. I wish him the best, iOS is a brutal market.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They're also not independent trials. If you just failed 9 times in a row, you're probably not the best at startups.
Or maybe you learned tons and it makes your 10th attempt more likely to succeed? Ultimately these ponderations are kind of meaningless in the absence of great data to frame them with.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Regret minimization framework. Looking back from your old age would you wish you had done something like this? Can you earn it all back with a good fall back plan on your expertise ?
And if you can’t earn it back, are you prepared to work until you die?
The math on this makes no sense at all. > - Live off of $15k a year. Don't buy a house. Don't buy a fancy car. Just save. - Do this for a year. - Land a job that makes you $100k a year. Save the rest. Max out your 401k contribution. - Celebrate by living off of $30k a year. - Do this for three years. - Land a job that makes you $140k a year. Save the rest. Max out your 401k contribution. Get a Roth, put $5k a year in…
I like that. I think it's kind of deep.
"If we spend a second thinking about this, if 9 out of 10 startups fail, then we only need to roll the dice 10 times and the last startup will (by statistics) achieve success." That is not how statistics works. : With a 90% failure rate, your chance of failing 10 times in a row is (9/10)^10 ~= 35%.
They're also not independent trials. If you just failed 9 times in a row, you're probably not the best at startups.
Also, the sad reality is that only a very lucky few will create games that become popular enough to generate a living wage without somewhat aggressive monetization techniques, such as ads and in-game purchases. This guy seems to really dislike his corporate job, but apparently not enough to monetize his games well. If anyone else wants to follow in his footsteps, you should do some soul searching before you put in your notice and decide if you can live with a near-zero chance of success while sticking to your principles, or if you want to have a much higher chance of success but with the caveat that your users will be seeing ads and buying power bars from you. Life is full of crappy trade-offs.
This is incredibly depressing. It hits home for me because I'm in a very similar situation. I and one other guy almost went broke making Clicker Heroes, but it turned out to be a great success. But so far since then every project has not been worth doing. > I didn't do ads, I didn't do micro-transactions, scummy energy bars, and all those other bullshit monetization tactics. We did this in Clicker Heroes, and I don't…