Category: business

I’m only half-joking, but I’ve only recently realized this. I know that the french have no word for it, but it seems I do! The thing is, the whole ‘being an entrepreneur’ thing creeps up on you. I know that people often describe themselves as entrepreneurs, especially in silicon valley, but I have a stricter definition that most, along these lines:

To be a true entrepreneur you need to have actually started a company that has made a profit. you need to have more than one successful product, and you also need to have managed a product where the work is done by other people.

The reason I say that, is there are a lot of people who are really talented, and very successful, and that comes from their ability in that specific skill, not specifically skill at running a business per-se. In other words, you can be an awesome artist, and do well from it, despite being a pretty poor businessperson. That’s not a criticism, in any way, it just gets rolled into being an entrepreneur, which at least in my mind means something else.

The reason I say this, is redshirt. I didn’t design the game, do the art, write the code or any of that sort of thing. Mitu did. I was the publisher, so I made strategic decisions and invested money, in the hope that I’d get that money back and make a return on my investment. That’s how entrepreneurs work, and how they can invest in your coffee shop* without knowing the first thing about making coffee. They probably need to know good coffee from bad coffee, but more importantly they need to understand business/marketing/finance and the most important thing of all: picking the right people and the right business model.

The reason I’m suddenly happy that I’ve had a success at this, is that it’s one of those very intangible skills that I like to challenge myself with. It’s the same reason I trade on the stock market. Judging my my recent performance there, I’m not so good at that :D. Both stock-picking and entrepreneurship are things that NOBODY KNOWS how to do. Studies have shown monkeys picking peanuts can do as good a job as many pension fund managers. There is no mathematical formula for beating the stock market or investing in a business. None. Some people get lucky for a long time, but there is no absolute formula. It’s a combination of research, a lot of gut feeling and a lot of analysis.

In other words it’s a game!, and I unlocked an achievement. Woot. Wheres my little steam badge?

*I drank coffe 20 minutes ago, and this is the reason this pops into my head. That is exactly how advertising works, subconsciously but incredibly powerfully.

Positech has been around a long time. I am OLD. I remember before VHS. I remember before CD’s. i was there when Sauron was defeated and men were shown to be weak. As a result, I’ve had a website for a long time, and probably due to mere inertia, it’s got a lot of SEO from inbound links, and a lot of (my) games on it, and therefore, it acts as quite a good funnel for traffic and sales. I’ve also advertised a lot over the years and pointed at it, so that has boosted traffic too.

Lets look at some numbers.

In the last year, my direct sales have been $170,000. That actually surprises me. I thought it was less than that. Not bad for an indie website in these days of ‘everybody buys on steam’. If I look at web traffic I get these stats over the last 365 days:

2,700,000 unique visitors according to awstats

23,000,000 pages according to awstats.

That seems pretty good to me. Maybe some of that is my games checking for updates? If I check google analytics, the site got 1.8 million visits. 417k were from organic search. That’s a decent figure. I’d love to know how it compares with other indies sites, and smaller portal/bundle sites. I should also state these figures ignore redshirts site and the gratuitous tank battles site, both of which have their own base domains.

What this has got me thinking is that in effect, I own a mini-portal. I’d wager indies get a fair few emails along the lines of ‘We are an exciting new game store and we would like to grab 30% of your revenue despite having virtually no traffic, if you agree to sell through us!’. I know I do, and I wonder if those sites have less traffic than me. I have signed deals in the past that have earned under $10k a year in sales through a channel, even under $5k. 5% of my direct sales is more than that. You can probably see where I’m going with this?

I have zero time and mental bandwidth, but I do muse over the idea of saying to indies who refuse to sell direct because ‘it’s too much hassle’ something along the lines of ‘I’ll do it for you, and take 15%’. This is just an idle thought, and I’d have to be very impressed with a game I’d add to my own site. But it is worth a thought.

I have been slowly investing in my site over the year. Check out the forums. They now support facebook, google and twitter as logins, and the individual forums have custom graphics. ooh!