Why did I stop writing? I can think of two reasons. First of them was that it was a really busy time for me and I simply failed to allocate time for it. This is a lousy excuse though, a modern man can always find time to write at least one post a week. Heck, it doesn’t take more than 2×30 minutes a week. First 30 minutes to write up the draft and second one to improve it. I usually like to go through more than 2 iterations of each article. I’ve found out I can piss off way larger crowd with polished posts spiced with bad jokes.

Secondly I didn’t set any goals for the site. It’s my personal blog – my home on the interweb. I never treated it as a business tool nor am I planning to. I don’t sell anything through my blog nor write anything in hope of getting hired. It might have a small personal brand development value, but that’s it; nothing measurable.

Not setting measurable goals was probably the biggest mistake. The best way to address the issue would to simply approach it as business – set goals and divide them into smaller milestones. The problem with this approach is that it would require more commitment to blogging than I’m willing to put out. So I’m setting one simple 2013 goal for this blog – reach an average of 100 daily organic visits for a month.

So how could I do it? The one and only solution is: Blog more (Ok, I guess SEO could help but that’s completely against my principles of this being my personal space on the Internet). At the moment this blog gets 30-60 organic visits a day so the goal doesn’t seem that unreasonable.

Usually PTC programs like Google AdSense and Facebook Ads are simply too expensive to advertise mobile applications. You might easily pay more for each click on AdSense than what your app sells for. Things are a bit better on Facebook, but you will probably still en
d up paying at least 0.1$ per click. Achieving positive ROI for 99 cent app with such click prices would expect unrealistic conversion rate.

However the lowest possible price per click for AdMob was just one cent. As our game has 3 unlockable categories each at 1.99$, the maximum we could make from one player is 4.179$ (with 30% Apple tax subtracted that is). These odds are way better than any viable alternative, one maximum paying customer can support over 400 clicks on the ad.

We started a campaign with 1 cent ads in selected countries in EU. The first few days were amazing, we got over 50 000 impressions a day with close to 700 click. The best part – the conversion (download) rate was almost 10%! However soon things started going downhill. Our campaign started on a weekend and we concluded later that click through and impression rates were about 5 times better on weekends than on weekdays.

The number of clicks and impressions started falling daily only raising on weekends. They never hit the level of first 2 days though. I wouldn’t be surprised if the system was deliberately built to do this and things would have improved once we raised the price of click. That actually makes sense as we use AdMob to monetize Number Game for Android. Minimum we make per click is also 1 cent. This means that AdMob is actually losing money on the cheapest campaigns. They have to pay all the income to publisher and will lose money on taxes and infrastructure upkeep.

We were quite content with the performance of our first campaign so we decided to expand it to our best selling game on iOS – Number game for iPad. The ad was rejected multiple times on grounds of “being misleading”. We changed the wording on the ad and in the end removed everything but the application logo. It was still rejected.

I contacted the AdMob customer support and apparently the reason wasn’t the ad itself. It was the landing page (iTunes app profile). They didn’t like that we used “superlative” claim “The most addictive logic game since SuDoku”. This shows that a) They haven’t played the game b) they can disapprove your ad based on any reason up to and including not liking your application logo/description or simply having a bad day.

The 10 day campaign ended and we had gone through about half of our budget. At this point the ROI of the campaign was almost profitable. As the app is monetized with in-app purchases we hoped that some users who downloaded it might make a purchase later on. Some of them actually did.

To combat the dropping impression/click-through rates we decided the change the settings of the campaign; we made it global. That was a mistake. We burned through the second half of our budget in few days with less than 1% conversion rate.

What did we learn

1) Do not select all countries. You just can’t expect Chinese traffic to convert as well as UK. You will end up paying the same amount for it though.

2) If you target Germany/France/Spain or any other major language make sure you translate your ad, landing page and app. We had very low conversion from larger non English speaking countries in EU as we only had our ad and landing page in English. That’s a pure speculation though, we didn’t try translations.

3) Don’t disregard Eastern Europe. Most of Eastern and Northern Europe speaks English and unlike larger countries don’t expect to have all content served in their native tongue. In fact, the second most profitable market after USA for Kids Jigsaw Puzzle Megapack is Czech Republic. We have sold more in Czech Republic than all of Central Europe combines.

4) Don’t use any adjectives in your app description or ad. If you do, AdMob will just disapprove it. Sarcasm aside, being disapproved for using a simple slogan is just plain stupid.

5) Weekend ad performance is up to 5 times better than during working days. Optimize your campaign accordingly.

When talking about games, gaming and their connection to film industry we have to start by defining the state of gaming industry and its development.

The story of modern gaming probably begins with “Pong” released in 1972. Even though it wasn’t the first videogame made it was the one to take gaming to masses. It even caused the very first lawsuit in video games history!

Pong was obviously nothing like modern video games and had no resemblance to movies. However from there on things started evolving fast. The first sign of what was coming was PacMan, the yellow ball munching pills while being chased by ghosts. It was the first game to feature a distinct character and a basic backstory (he was based on a horror story parents from Japan used to make their kids eat their vegetables).

Soon game franchises followed, Super Mario being the best known one. These games didn’t just feature a character but also a storyline. I admit Super Mario is not the best example of storyline in games. Strange monsters called Koopas attack the Mushroom Kingdom turning everyone into bricks and to make things perfect nick the princess. From there on an overweight Italian Plumber takes on the task of saving her killing half the population of Mushroom Kingdom (remember, every brick you break in the game used to be a citizen).

The way Mario looks was defined by technical constraints imposed by the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). He was wearing a hat because animating hair would have been too difficult. He has a mustache to hide his mouth. Drawing it would again have been too difficult at the time.

Time passed and technology progressed. Games became 3 dimensional and at this point have become close to having photo real graphics. So have the game storylines and narratives.

That’s where games and movies meet. I don’t mean games being made based on movie or vice versa. I mean that both games and movies are mediums to tell a story using audio-visual materials, just games also have an additional element of gameplay mechanics to consider.

But why should anyone in movie business even consider games? There are two reasons. First one beging:

70 billion dollars is the expected value of global game market for 2013. Why not to take a piece of the pie?

Second reason is that games are very much like movies – your end goal is to leave the consumer with an emotion. If you are good at making films there’s a high chance you’ll be rather good game designer also. Of cause you won’t probably be programming it and you won’t be drawing/animating the graphics.

However the great part is that the barrier of entry for games is rather low. A team of 3 people can create a game that sells thousands upon thousands of copies. A local example is Teleglitch, a game made by exactly 3 people. One to do the coding, one for graphics and one to handle the storyline and narratives.

Games are easy to distribute, you no longer need sell physical copies of the game.  With various Android app stores, iTunes app store and many other marketplaces, selling a game has never been easier.

I suggest all filmmakers to research games as a potential to expand the scope of your current and future projects.

I stuck to the option til about 1.5 months ago when I first laid my hands on Samsung Galaxy Note 2, Samsungs 5.5” flagship smartphone. We were simply getting something to eat with my co-founder at supermarket closest to our office. Samsung had set up a stall with Galaxy Note 2s and hot girls presenting them. That’s a combination one can’t just walk by so we stayed there and took a look. Both of us had heard something about the device – I was interested in the actual multitasking with 2 windows, my co-founder was intrigued by the 1024 levels of pressure sensitivity.

We spent about 20 minutes at the stall. The girls were really nice, but the thing I was in love with in the end was Note 2. 20 minutes was all it took to make my S2 look small as an iPhone (that concludes the mandatory joke on iPhones in every Android related blog post). So as a Christmas bonus we got Note 2s for everyone in Aplefly.

I’ve been using it for close to a month now and I can bring out only one negative thing. You will look ridiculous talking to it. You’ll look like there is a satellite dish attached to the side of your head. Other than that, it’s the best piece of technology I’ve laid my hands on, besides – who uses a smartphone to make calls anyway?

First of all, it’s fast. Boy it’s fast…4 cores at 1.6 GhZ and 2 gigs of ram make it almost as powerful as my computer few years back. It sure allows smooth switching between apps and great gaming experience even when playing with HD settings.

Next thing worth mentioning is the stylus. A nice thing while taking notes no doubt but other than that I considered it rather worthless addon. I was wrong again. As the screen detects the proximity of stylus even before actual touch it opens the mobile web to mouseover events. Something that could never work with regular touch screens.

Enough about specs and features, there are thousands of articles and YouTube videos covering that. The real question is not about the specs but about how is it to use on daily basis?

The thirst thing people notice about Note 2 is it’s size. And almost exclusively the first comment they make is about it not fitting into regular pocket. This is just wrong – it does fit into normal pockets just fine. I admit it can be a bit tricky to get it out in a car seat, but you should be using a hands free while driving anyway.

From features point of view I’ve begun using handwritten notes during meeting. Not on paper of course, but in the Note using the stylus. It’s really comfortable and let’s you avoid the awkward moment of silence while typing in the information client just told you on iPad. Only it won’t be silence really as the only sound in the room will be the annoying letterpress sound iPad makes. It’s better than regular paper-notes because I can’t lose them and I can easily share them with rest of the team.

Second thing is that I’ve been using my iPad a lot less recently (and I don’t just mean during the meetings). 4.2” screen of my old S2 was not large enough to read longer texts or even browse web comfortably – I used to do all that on iPad. Now I read all my emails on my phone. Note has demoted my iPad to e-book reader status. That’s practically all I do on it besides development.

Gaming experience is way better on bigger screen. I try out many games as it’s practically mandatory as an indie developer, but now I enjoy it quite a bit more.

Do I recommend switching your small phone for phablet? Absolutely.

Many people oppose the idea and I believe most of them are being hypocritical with their arguments. Most common of which are listed above.

I want my personal life/persona kept separate from business

Truth is, your personal and professional online-life are probably already mixed. Sure, you don’t friend the fat guy with dreadlocks who kept talking about his gamified location based social photo sharing app last night at the conference afterparty. You do, however, have business partners, competitors and perhaps even key clients in your friends list.

Keeping the business contacts at LinkedIn only is rather difficult if you want to keep up to the latest developments and industry events in your area. Facebook events is the best way to inform the community about an event. Someone who rejects all like-minded people will just be left out because there is no one to invite him.

I want to stay anonymous

That’s a synonym for “I want to call people names I learned from Jersey Shore without my mother knowing”. A comment you wouldn’t sign your real name should never be made.

Of Course Facebook is not exactly a drivers licence to prove one’s identity, but an account that goes back 5 years and has public content should be sufficient for a blog comment.

Taking the last points into account we can conclude that If your excuse for not using Facebook comments is keeping personal and business life separate, what you really mean is you don’t want to mix real life with karma whoring.

I don’t want people contacting me on Facebook for business

That’s probably only legitimate reason. You have LinkedIn (Or Zerply if you are cool enough) for that. Yet for me it’s simply not true. I use Facebook for business and I have nothing against people contacting me there. I don’t usually add someone I’ve never met as a friend, but I’ll sure answer his messages.

Yet, you probably don’t have separate business and personal phones either. That’s why it’s hard for me to see the problem in using Facebook as a business tool.

My readers might not have a Facebook account

This might be true, if you are running blog at i-wear-tinfoil-hat.com, but in most cases your readers will at least have an account. Yes, they might not be signed in on the device they are reading the article on or other 10^100 pseudo reasons they can’t access it. If they really feel the need, they will come back later on another computer/phone/tablet and post the comment. If they don’t the comment was probably not going to be worth much anyway.

Facebook improves comment quality

Common problem with anonymous comments on technical articles (Hacker News for example) is people going on about insignificant technicalities/single sentences rather than the point of the article. This produces an environment driven cynicism and arrogance. I’m sure things would be different if every single account was verified.

The most common type of comment under a blog post is something in lines of “Good job!” or “Nice article!” which is great. Just try removing the “nofollow” attribute from the author’s website link and see how many compliments you get from guys called “Free photoshop templates” or “Divorce lawyers in California”. If you get a positive comment from someone who has been verified by Facebook you can be sure it is sincere.

If you disagree with this writing feel free to present your arguments. But present yourself first.

Why don’t I just read the entire article in first place? I just skim the top of hackernews or /r/programming for something of interest if I have few minutes of free time.

I read the articles I’ve marked whenever I have a free moment. Usually that’s during bus rides from and to the office. That gives me about 2×35 minutes to read stuff I’ve either marked or come to me from blogs I’ve subscribed to every day. The important thing is, I’m only aware of the title and the content of the article.

Few days ago I stumbled upon an a blogpost about different kinds of software trials. It was a great read. Half way through the article I recognized the context; it sounded a lot like what a guy I know is doing. I opened the page in safari and it was their blog. I didn’t know that having read the entire article! I think that’s a great opportunity lost. I am a potential customer and you’ve written a piece of content I’m interested in, that’s a huge step towards my wallet. However it stops there unless you provide even the most basic call to action. For example “check out our services”.

Google Reader, Pocket, Instapaper and others have turned articles into a single feed, which is great for me as a reader. However it sucks for corporate bloggers as I won’t see your sites layout. I won’t see your header or logo. All I’m interested in is the article at hand, it’s up to you to deliver information about yourself or the product to me without ruining the post. Simple naming your startup and linking to it once or twice in the blog post will go great way to converting a random passer-by to customer.

Every week I get approached by someone with a “game changing” idea. All they need is someone to execute it. “Hey, I’ve heard you are good at IT stuff, let’s start up!”. Well, no.

I don’t know you

Startups and babies have one thing in common; you don’t do them with someone you just met. We will have to work together for years, sometimes 24 hours a day. Chances are we just met and you just handed me your card or at least I don’t know you well. How could I trust you with part of my business?

There are thousands of issues that can ruin the relationship between startup founders, many of which can be foreseen. It might not even directly be your fault. Perhaps you have an over-controlling spouse that wants you home by 6 every day? If that’s the case, forgot about startups in general.

I’m not passionate about the subject

Passion is the fuel that powers startups, it helps get through tough times and get things done. My passion is games. It isn’t a hard and fast rule, but unless your idea has something to do with games I probably won’t be interested. People often approach me with a random idea they had, but without the spark in their eyes. That’s a sure sign of approaching failure and I’m not going to buy first class ticket on the Titanic.

You expect me to invest at least 60 000€

It’s reasonable to for MVP to take 6 months. We could release an earlier version, just to be ashamed of it, but 6 months is probable. If we consider just 8 hour work days 5 days a week it totals about 60 000€ by my normal consulting rate.

Time is money; why should I invest mine in your idea? And if I do, why should I accept only 50% or even less of the equity? After all, I have made an investment of actual work while you played around with excel spreadsheets and sent out a few press releases? Sarcasm aside, during first few months of startup development, hackers are doing all the work and taking all the risk. If we fail fast you have lost almost nothing whereas I have lost months of intense work.

You’re are easily replaceable

Let’s face it – good hackers are scarce resource. That’s why you are talking to me. However conferences, meetups and other places where startup industry players gathers to escape the daylight are filled with available marketers and business monkeys.

Only thing you have is your network. As a “business guy” in a startup I expect you to have Barack Obama as a 2nd level LinkedIn connection and Zuckys number on speed dial. Well, anyway much wider network than I have. If you don’t – I probably don’t need you.

jason_tko criticized the previous remark on Hacker News with: “This comment belies a stunning lack of understanding and respect for what actually goes into the business side of typical tech startups – the sales, marketing, user acquisition, hiring/team building, negotiations and every other thing that business co-founders actually do.”. This is completely valid and I probably crossed the line. Business is as important part of startup as is technical execution. Otherwise it might just be cool pet project. The question here is about delivery – I can deliver the technical execution, and can prove it with (technically) similar past projects. If the business side has a track recors of doing the same he falls into the category described in next paragraph.

There are exceptions of course, people who have already proved themselves, but that’s an entirely different ballgame. Experience in other fields does not matter – even if they come from tech industry, startups are nothing like your average business plan.

“I don’t know the IT stuff”

I don’t know anything about construction, medicine or farming. Common denominator here is, I’m not planning to do business in any of these fields. If you say outright that you know nothing about IT, it means you won’t respect nor understand my work, will set unreasonable goals and probably won’t be pleasant to work with. At least get some basic knowledge of the technical side if you want any hacker to take you seriously. And lose the darn tie.

How to make me consider it

I can think of two cases where I have seriously considered taking the role and might actually do it at some point.

One of them was a guy approaching me with an idea for a piece of software he desperately needed himself. Not desperately, but enough to invest money into it. He was straightforward from the beginning – he knew the industry, knew the problem and could provide the first clients and testers. Later on he hoped to sell it to some bigger player – not change the world/cure AIDS or eliminate hunger. It was barely a startup as he wasn’t hunting millions, just a quick cash and to scratch his own itch.

Second case was a team of 2 developers asking me to be the third. They had a better business model and market research than most MBAs that have asked me to join. They also acknowledged that the task was so big they would benefit from having another set of hands. I can respect that.

What did these two cases have that others haven’t? First of all, I knew the people for some time, one of them for about 10 years. Secondly they had well defined goals and business models. You are not Steve Jobs, you do not have a reality disorientation field. Vision is not enough. I want to see numbers and research before I decide to make the investment of my time and effort.

I am considering making separate business cards for people who want me to be their technical co-founder. They will only have a QR code on them – to this article.

Big thanks to Fuzzwah from Hacker News for editing the article.

If you are aware how WebCT platform works, feel free to skip the following paragraph. If not, the courses were organized by weeks (I think “week” in this case lasted for 2 or 3 real-world weeks). Every week we would get new materials, exercises and an assignment we had to submit by the end of it, plus the equivalent of final thesis.

The beginner course was complete disappointment, I clearly had a better grasp of C++ (and Estonian) than the lecturer, which was one of the reasons I decided not to go to university years later. Java course was rather interesting however. I hadn’t done any serious Java development before and it got me started. As I obviously had researched extra material by the first week, the entire course seemed way too easy since second, but I didn’t mind. The lecturer and other participants were awesome. That spark an idea..

..an idea that took about half a year from the end of the course to hatch. The level of the provided university courses was low, the entire process was way too long and the environment barely usable. I knew I could do better. Hence, at the age of 16 me, a law-student friend of mine and another guy from the Java Course incorporated what could be translated as “Online training group ltd”. The law student was an adult and had to take the only seat in board of directors as I couldn’t being underage. I still had the majority of the company though.

The third partner was also underage and couldn’t get his parents to sign the consent to become partner. So I held his share for the time being. Neither did we have the money for it, but we managed to get a loan – how we got there is worth an article of its own.

We started off with a simple goal – to teach programming to others like us. At time, it was nearly impossible to learn any development in our native language without attending university. To get into the “inner circle” you had to go through several layers of trolls in internet forums and IRC, we decided to provide the safe entry point. As we were targeting people our age we decided to keep the price low. Way too low.

We quickly built our training platform and started off with few courses. Things we’re going pretty well, we recruited other people (who we mostly knew from internet and were also our age) to teach platforms they knew. Our design wasn’t the best but a friend of mine had recently started a web development company. With the earnings from our first few courses we bought a whole new design from him and decided to build version 2 of the platform.

Trainings is a field where you need to be licenced. That was a bit problematic as we were just few teenagers. Luckily the law-student-co-founder discovered we don’t need a licence until we provide 120 hours of training a year. As all our courses were online, we could decide how long one lasts in real time” As you might guess we never crossed the 120 hour limit.

That’s when things started going wrong. First of all, we had a choice of either going on with the same model, or switching to information-product based approach. Instead of having training groups we would simply have packages of videos/text/tests and assignments. We decided to stay with the original idea. In long run, that sealed the doom of the company. From there one, most of the development was done by the other “technical cofounder” (we obviously didn’t use such terms nor considered us a startup. I’m sure I didn’t even know the term startup). More precisely whenever he got an idea he just added it to the system without consulting anyone else. In time the platform grew to be a horrible mess from backend point of view.

When a young ambitious designer joined us he completely remade the site. However the code-base was unreadable. We later on called it “hieroglyphic code” as random letters were used as variable names and the author failed to answer any questions I had. I’m pretty sure he couldn’t read the code himself.

At one point I just gave up and decided to write the entire system from scratch dumping all his code. I strictly forbid him to ever touch the source code again. From that point on we didn’t get along anymore and didn’t speak for long time. That wasn’t the only reason of cause. He wanted to keep on just giving almost-free courses in “hipster-like” environment, I wanted to build a business. He didn’t even ask for his share in the company when he got 18. In sake of honesty, he later asked for a share from the courses which used his materials.

By that time we had noticed that our initial target group was wrong. There were some young people taking our courses, but majority where companies and even universities training their IT departments. Almost all participants were way older than us. We didn’t draw any conclusions from that and moved on with our initial plan.

The problem was the initial approach had proven to be flawed. It required too much commitment and engagement for trainers point of view, for relatively low return (we paid our trainers 40% commission from net profits of the course). But we were sure the technology was to be blamed. The administration interface was rather uncomfortable, it took some time to grade all the works and set up the materials for new course). New system fixed all that.

So on the third year of operation we upgraded our platform again, instead of upgrading the flawed business model. As you can guess, the problems didn’t go anywhere. Trainers constantly forgot to update materials/answer questions/grade assignments. Even I grew tired of printing countless diplomas for graduates and sending them out almost every week. Some of the courses cost less than 20 euros, so we had loads of clients yet we hadn’t made any substantial profit.

Things got so bad that I couldn’t motivate myself nor the trainers to go on with the courses anymore (despite the contracts). Once I had to refund 2 courses because the trainers didn’t bother to add new material I knew enough is enough. We just stopped and in the end, took the platform offline. What we were doing was just not motivating for our trainers nor for me.

Our trainers got so little at the end of the courses it didn’t keep them coming back daily. If one had actually been teaching 40+ courses at time (which would have taken less than 8 hours a day) he could have made above industry average salary. The problem was, no one taught more than 3 courses at time.

Most importantly, what did I learn from my first 3 year business venture?

1) Just do it. Even though we failed I don’t regret the try. I got the taste of entrepreneurship at 16, at 19 I was already experienced in fields of contracts, accounting etc. We didn’t go bankrupt, we just stopped the operations while actually having some money in the bank account. After another quick failed venture I started my consulting/software development company Elkest Solutions which pays the bills ever since.

2) Hire an accountant even if you think you can’t afford one. I’m never ever planning to do any accounting myself. I’d rather be mauled by a bear than do another fiscal year report ever again.

3) Don’t be afraid to piviot. I could be polishing my Porsche right now instead of writing that post if we had dared to make the move.

4) If your product/service is worth it, don’t be afraid to charge for it accordingly. Had we raised our prices over time, we might have developed into something much bigger.

5) Be very careful with who you go into business with. That’s something you’ll hear repeated time after time, but won’t understand until you’ve experienced it.

6) Technology won’t solve all your problems.

7) You are never too young/old for anything. Our clients included several universities and public companies who were satisfied with the courses…mostly taught by 16-19 year olds.

8) I personally learned to deal with customers and complaints. I can now keep calm talking to any client (which was a challenge at 17), even if I have to explain him how to type URL into an address bar.

What inspired me to write this post was that my computer didn’t start this morning but went into an infinite reboot cycle. Luckily a simple shift-reboot fixed the problem but I wouldn’t have worried about my data even if it hadn’t.

Some time ago the hard drive of my beloved MacBook failed (not a rare thing, I know). I luckily had a backup uploaded to my companies server so I thought I’ll be on track once I got the computer back from repairs. However when I downloaded the archive from the server I found out it had been corrupted. I have no idea what caused it as only few people have access to the server and neither of them should have any motivation to mess with my backup!

You can imagine I was furious..until I remembered I downloaded the backup to one of my age-old spare computers because I needed the template for price estimate. That wasn’t a fun experience either as I only later remembered the darn thing didn’t have Microsoft Office installed. However the backup archive extracted flawlessly. By complete coincidence I had created myself another backup which ended up saving my files.

Since that I’ve drastically changed my backup policy. First of all, I subscribed to CrashPlan. For only 5$ a month it automatically backups yout data to their cloud. This (or any similar service) is a must-have for anyone. Be warned though, the initial setup process can be rather long, especially if you have loads of data to upload. As I proceeded with almost clear harddrive it wasn’t an issue. Also don’t forget to exclude movies/music and other folders that contain heavy yet easily replaceable content.

I also keep all my source codes at dropbox. Especially the ones that are not in any distributed version control system (pet projects or just experiments). This is a manual process and something you can easily forget though. For me, dropbox serves as a last-resort backup solution where files can easily be outdated. You could probably script an automated solution, but I’ve never bothered. I feel rather safe with CrashPlan.

After the last crash I also got myself a time machine. Even though it might seem a bit costly, it will well be worth the while if you ever actually need it. The problem with time machine is obviously that it’s a physical device. They can break exactly like your computer, get stolen or million other things.

Most importantly, I always have at least 3 backups of my data. Even if 2 of them fail, at least one will hopefully be operational. You could probably even go further than that by having an extra backup at S3, but I think 3 is enough.

I think I’ve jumped a bit ahead of myself. When talking about pet projects, we should first define a pet projects. Working full time as an engineer and developing something you hope to turn into startup/business in some time is not a pet project from my point of view. Pet project is something you take on just for fun, for the kick you get out of creating something cool. This doesn’t mean your pet project can’t make any money, many do. Nor does it mean your pet project can’t grow into startup or a product.

For example, my game studios first product, Number Game (Number Game Classic on iOS), started as a pet project. A friend of mine kept bugging me to make an Android version of number game for so long that I finally gave in and built the prototype. She was happy and we only had to polish it to be a product later on.

Probably the most common reason to start a pet project is to learn a new technology. I’ve done it on several occasions. Back in the days when Ajax still stood for the dishwashing liquid I built a text-based multiplayer RPG just to play around with the concept. Some people form IRC channel I used to have back then actually spent over 24 hours playing it, even though the game was rather pointless. I never actually released the project, but it would have generated some money for sure. Just not enough to be worth the trouble I guessed.

At last Garage48 in Tallinn I was in a team that built an application with HTML5 and Node.js. HTML5 is my playground, but I had never used Node.js before. Few days ago I found myself with some free time and decided to build my first multiplayer HTML5 game (remake of classical paper-soccer) with Nodejs. Again, it’s an awesome learning experience and I know me and my friends will have a blast playing it. If it works out fine I might actually publish it. Just to make sure, I even registred paper-soccer.com and paperhockey.com :).

Screenshot of the prototype

Another reason to start a pet project is to scratch a small and very specific itch. For example, one community I manage has a web-based chat room. It doesn’t play that well with some Android browsers (yeah, I know, this blog does not have a mobile optimized theme. It will get one soon, being a dick about that won’t change anything) and had a growing Android user base. So I had to create a native application for the chat with about 20 loyal users. That was my first of many to come Android applications. Making people happy while doing what you like is reason enough to take on a new project.

Growing ones digital mojo or giving back to the community (same thing, different name) with open source project is one of the initiatives I’m yet to try. But I will probably do it soon in one of its the primitive forms of WordPress plugin. I just need a plugin I haven’t stumbled upon yet and don’t mind sharing it if I ever happen to actually write it.

At opening paragraph I mentioned that all my pet projects besides the multiplayer paper-soccer are dead. That’s not completely correct though. At December last year I wrote a series of HTML5 game development tutorials mostly for inner circle, which I’m hoping to publish here once I find time to review them. Unlike most other training materials/tutorials I’ve produced over the years these were written with intent to be published.

Pet projects are a fun way to develop yourself as a programmer and help others. They can also take your mind off what you are currently working on. After spending 10 hours a day building a social network for dogs using WordPress (That’s not me being sarcastic, I actually once had to build such a thing. Trust me, it was even less fun than it sounds), switching to cool project is more relieving than hot shower after jogging in cold rain.