Jeff Hangartner, the founder of the gaming start-up, Bulletproof Outlaws has been a professional developer of games over the last half a decade. Creator of Pixelation, the 1st Pixel Art Forum and also originator of the Pixel tutorials which have been published in the form of a book. Jeff has always been a pioneer of the gaming industry.
CG Today is proud to present Jeff’s exploration as he shares the whole process of creating a start-up right from day 1. With the belief that gaming development is coming back to its original “one programmer in the basement roots” idea, Bulletproof Outlaws is chronicling every step of its start-up process from strategies, to marketing, setting goals and outsourcing, successes and failures. The aim is to help other developers who have ideas but are intimidated by the whole start-up process and are not sure how to go about it.
You can visit his website Bulletproof Outlaws to know more about him or send an email to get connected.
I’m pretty sure there’s only like 5 people checking my site right now, because I haven’t started my big marketing push yet. But how am I supposed to know if my marketing does anything if I’m not keeping track of page hits? So I signed up for Google Analytics like all the cool kids do. Back in the Goals post I wrote that goals should be “specific measurable goals, with a time-frame, and [you should] review those goals as you go.” If I invest a bunch of money in a method of marketing but my site traffic doesn’t go up by a specific amount that I think it should, then I can look at the numbers and say “Logically, I know I should stop spending money in that method” and stop it, tweak it, or try a different method(s).
Our business coach told us one of the fastest ways new companies tank is by blowing their budget on ineffective marketing. I’m told that a lot of advertising services will do some pretty sneaky stuff. Like if you don’t get any business out of the ads you place with them the first month, they go “You have to give it a couple months to really kick in, trust me, Kid, who’s the advertising executive here?” and take a puff of their evil cigar and twirl their evil moustache and an inexperienced businessman goes “oh, okay, I guess that makes sense…” and pays for another month of ineffective advertising.