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Don't build your castle in other people's kingdoms

howtomarketagame.com

21–30 of 125 posts

Re: Don't build your castle in other people's kingdoms

#21

I got about 20% of the way through and clicked off after the author went down a whole analogy rabbit hole.

The title (and the section headings) communicates the analogy really well, much of the following article really was a fun if indulgent deep dive into it.

Re: Don't build your castle in other people's kingdoms

#22
post #7
post #6

One thing about domain names: Choose both a registrar and top-level domain for your domain name carefully. Neither your registrar nor your chosen TLD registry should be in the habit of suspending domains at the drop of a hat, or be at risk of going out of business suddenly. For TLDs, I have said before¹ that if you mostly trust your local government, your national ccTLD should suffice. In fact, it should be your defa…

And if you have an exotic/fancy tld, have a backup .com/.net domain ready and maybe live at all times

I'd argue that on today's Internet, if you don't have a .com domain, you do have an exotic/fancy TLD and therefore need to have the .com domain live and redirecting to your exotic TLD.

Re: Don't build your castle in other people's kingdoms

#23
post #17
post #16

Here I am reading, following this reasonable argument and... boom pop-up "call to action" interrupts the hell out of it. I realize the conversion rate could be lower, but why not put this CTA in a non-pop-up form at the end of the article? If I really enjoyed it, that seems like the point where I'd be on board with signing up.

Agreed. Just out of principle, I'm never signing up for anything that attempts this method.

Yep. Jump in my face, and I'm not only not going to sign up for your newsletter/install your app/whatever, I'm going to actively avoid ever visiting your site again.

Your metrics may show that you get 0.2% signups with this method rather than 0.15%, but they likely don't show the much larger number of people who won't be coming back to your skeevy site, ever.

Re: Don't build your castle in other people's kingdoms

#27
post #5

The advice is, in essence, to prioritize your mailing list over audiences on proprietary platforms like Twitter and TikTok. This may work for some, but mailing lists seem like they would be really ineffective for a lot of use cases.

The advice is more generalizable than that: move your audience into content in spaces that you own -- not spaces that Zuckbook or Google or TikTok own.

Re: Don't build your castle in other people's kingdoms

#29
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IIUC, there are many such TLDs, but you should really only use these if you yourself are a citizen, and your organization is based in the country in question.

Really? What other countries offer such guarantee?

My country's TLD (.pt) holds Portuguese courts as the ultimate arbitrator. There are simpler administrative procedures for suspending or claiming domains, but in case of conflict courts have the final word.

I imagine most countries' TLDs operate in the same fashion.

Re: Don't build your castle in other people's kingdoms

#30
post #12
post #3

This lesson extends to almost everything in life. Too many people wrap up their goals and aspirations to things that are really someone elses thing at the end of the day. It frequently doesn't end well. This is a really great article.

Sadly you can't build apps that can send notifications on the most popular phone on the planet without subjecting yourself to arbitrary censorship by Apple and a 30% cut of revenues. You also can't build apps that use decentralized backends that receive notifications on that platform. All notifications have to come from the centralized app developer. Sharecropping is beginning to be the only way.

I did hold that belief for some time, but I solved it with the most reliable notification-method I came across thus far, and that's plain simple email from my own domain.

I understand this is not possible for specific apps that need smartphone notifications to function properly, but when you think about it: a lot of (web)apps don't need that.

In general, one might need less notifications than one thinks.

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