Plinan's Road to Where He Wants to Be

After the Monday Morning Meeting (MMM) today, I had about 30 minutes of emailing before starting what I have lined up for the day:

1. iPhone App Business Webinar

I attended an online iPhone app business seminar, hosted by @graiz, founder of Raizlab. Very good session and helpful overview on the current iPhone app market. It got me excited once again about the future of our studio and also reminded me how wonderful technology is that we can connect people from different parts of the world to join together as if we are in one room. Definitely reminded me that I need to reach out and network more. Good thing GDC is just around the corner for me to find even more inspirations!

2. Website update for studio. I am leaving for GDC in two days and realized I need to make the website look more polished soon because I will be handing out business cards. After about two hours, it is now looking better but still need more content and visual for it to be an attractive game studio website.

3. Tracking improvement. Book sales has been slow again over the weekend and I used this opportunity to update our website and tracking system. Because I am using a print-on-demand service that doesn’t give us real-time sales data, nor any customer info / customer source, I can never know for sure if a particular marketing activity is performing well or not. I’ve finally figured out a way to get around the problem by utilizing Amazon Associates and NovelRank. Still not perfect but hopefully from now on we’ll have a better idea what’s working and what’s not.

4. Machine business – accounting and choosing a legal structure. Later tonight I spent some time on tax / accounting issues and on legal business structure. LLC or S Corp? Not the easiest choice and still need more to research a bit more.

The slow book sales once again affected my moral, which in turn lowered my productivity over the weekend. Learning to cope with up-and-downs in the business is a new challenge for me. Last.fm and ice cream helped, but nothing feels better than seeing the sales go up. I still have about three weeks to meet my goal for this month. No time to rest!

(photo curtsey of wizmo on flickr)

Headache. New website is having major problems as I start testing the site and found out that, despite the developer’s claim that the site was complete, it was buggy with messy design and incomplete features. I lost my trust in the developer and decided to look into alternatives, especially hosted shopping carts. Our current site is hosted on one of the biggest online store shops, but the hefty transaction fee and limited customization is pushing us away from keeping it.

After spending a day researching, I found that:

1. Bigcommerce seems to be one of the biggest and most popular shopping carts, but also has a reputation of slow updates and overly exaggerated marketing.  I quickly signed up for a trial and gave it a test drive. The dashboard is clean and easy to use, and the default store template looks very professional. But you need to pay extra for the SSL certificate and the slow new features are two major drawbacks.

2. 3DCart vs CoreCommerce: they both seem like good options. I signed up for trial on both sites as well. The dashboard at 3DCart worked fine but looked a bit dated. The dashboard at CoreCommerce looked more modern but somehow didn’t seem like it’s done. The drop-down menu of tabs with the took up too much space on screen and was difficult to read. I concluded that CoreCommerce would be the one to go, but the default and free templates (they claim they have hundreds of template, but most are the same templates with different colors) aren’t as good as their competitors.

3. I was very tempted by Shopify, the “2.0″ version of shopping carts, but the 1-2% transaction fee and the requirement for a credit card for trial turned me off. Our machines are high in unit prices, but the profit margin is low thanks to a competitive retail market. So we really can’t afford transaction fees that are based on sales. Shopify looks to have very good design and visual, but lacks many features you’d find on other shopping carts.

Inclusion, the perfect shopping cart hasn’t been invented yet. Fellow entrepreneurs, here’s your opportunity to make the world a better place (for SMB owners like me )

The machine business sometimes require many conversations with customers. It makes sense because if you were to spend a thousand dollars on something, you’d want to make sure it is good and the people you are buying from is trust-worthy. I sometimes find myself talking and emailing customers back and forth trying to sell some machines. You’d think that having an ecommerce website is all you need to do retail online. But the fact is, a business is still a business, no matter if you put it online, or have it in the mall. Customer service is key. Helping your customers to find the right product, to agree on a price, and to pay for it isn’t as easy as it sounds. I’ve lost customers because the price I quoted was too high, and I’ve lost customers because the payment options didn’t work for them. Thanks for various 1-800 services, Google Voice, and MagicJack, we have a pretty good phone system set up and I have the office number forwarded to my cell phone so I can take calls asap in case if I have to respond to something quickly. And this was what I did this morning – customer service to accept payments and sell machines.

Lunch was with a couple of friends in the entertainment industry and got to learn about their businesses and industries. Very interesting stuff and very motivating. That’s always the great thing about talking to people – you learn and grow and get excited. The wife and I agreed that we should do this more often.

Chatted with a friend who has been thinking about starting her own company in the evening. It’s always good to talk to like-minded people who are entrepreneurial. It reminded me of how I was feeling when I was juggling a full-time job and my side projects. And talking to her made me appreciate how lucky I am to have the opportunity to do this now. Let’s hope I get to do for as long as I want

12:09 am. still got one more thing to do before I can sleep. time to test the new website. even though I am pretty tired, i have to do it so the web designer team in India can work and give me an update when I wake up in the morning. the blessing and the curse of this flat world.

Today is by far the most boring day since I started working on these projects full-time  — figuring out the legal side of things. I spent the whole day doing research on business legal structures online and with the book “The Small Business Start-up Kit for California” by Nolo . Having three separate projects means I have to make separate decisions on their business structures and understand the different tax laws/regulations for each industry. And you can never feel like you’ve done enough research on these laws/taxes/policies as there are always more materials to read before you can make a decision. After a long day of cramming legal languages into my head, some rough decisions were finally made and I am also in search of a good accountant who understands SMBs, especially in the area of media publishing and software.

In the mean time, we are re-thinking the design of the cover as the current design doesn’t stand out when it’s shown on the internet. The design is good when you have the book in hand, but online since all the images are much smaller, you can’t really see the words on the cover. We are also going to improve the text on the back cover while we are at it.

We found out today that you cannot change the title of your Facebook page once it’s created. Very inconvenient as we just want to make a small change on the capitalization of a word. But at least we haven’t made it public yet so we don’t have to ask our fans to join again.

Boring days are the origins of boring blog posts. Hopefully I will get to spend more time on designing the game tomorrow.

The weekend, as planned, was used to rest and recharge. As such, only a few hours did I spend on random admin and leftover tasks – doing expenses, catching up on emails, and finishing the Unity3D book. Yes I finished it on time as scheduled. Here’s my first attempt at building a game with Unity3D, following through the book. I am one step closer to building my own game! You can try this test game here on your browser:

First Unity Test Game: (Unity3D web plug-in required and it might take a while to load)

http://plinan.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/web_build_b01.html

Monday Morning Meeting. It had been almost three months since I had to go to a meeting first thing on a Monday morning. My wife who is helping me with marketing the book suggested we have a regular meeting to keep us on track, and today was the first day we had our Monday Morning Meeting to discuss performance last week and goals for this week. I bought a whiteboard yesterday and markers to use during the meeting. Although we were having the meeting in a small bedroom, it felt like a proper meeting and was very productive. Last week turned out to be a good week for the book sales after a slow week prior, and our small investment in Google AdWords showed positive ROI. The numbers are too small to be statistically significant, but definitely encouraging. We set some new goals and got busy working right afterwards.

The rest of the day was spent on setting up proper metrics and Google keyword research for the book.

I spent the evening working on the game studio with some good feedback from a good friend in mind. The next step is to create a prototype level that will help people understand what the game is like, and also for me to test and see if the idea is any good. I started putting ideas into a formal game design document, and found it funny that I was once again a writer, typing away the ideas, stories, gameplay mechanics…etc. on the computer.

The day ended once again before I finished everything I wanted to finish. Every since I stopped getting paid by the hour, the value of my time has gone up tremendously. Wasting time is no longer just “slacking off” and “wasting company time”, but a serious delay in “getting to where I want to be”.

Most of the work I did today was done before I went to sleep last night.

Thanks to the tea I had before bed yesterday, I couldn’t fall asleep and ended up finding myself sitting in the kitchen with the laptop open. Ten emails from the web designer, the beauty of having someone else half way around the world working on your project is that things are getting done when you are asleep in the middle of the night. And of course the site wasn’t done, and later on I was informed that due to a “HOLI” festival, they will not give me an update until Tuesday. I should really ask them to send over a few pictures of the festival since I wasn’t invited. If I do I’ll post them here.

After replying to all those emails, it’s about 3am and I was still high on caffeine, so I was onto the next task. The idea was to try to let people understand what the book is about very quickly, and use visuals to help people understand and remember the message. It was drawn on a piece of paper, scanned into the computer, and then digitally enhanced. Our first time trying something like this so we’ll see how this goes. I still need to find a good Paint.net/GIMP equivalent on the mac. Seashore wasn’t cutting it for me.

I didn’t wake up until almost noon and the low quality of sleep prevented me from being productive. Good thing I got some work done when I was awake at 3am. That’s the good thing about working for yourself – flexibility. Imagine if I had to go to an office and work from 9am. I would have been a walking zombie in the office, unable to get anything done.

Finally almost done with the Unity3D book! Only a few pages to go and I made three playable builds for Mac, PC, and the browser. I will try to post the test game here when I finish it. Very happy that studying Unity3D is on schedule to be finished by Monday.

It’s 1am now and I should definitely go to sleep. Even though working in the middle of the night was very productive without any distractions, the time wasted the next day made it a costly habit. Time management, gotta do better at it.

Morning was exciting – my wife woke up with a great new idea to better communicate the core concept of the book to potential customers and we got working right away. It’s always better to work with a partner, to have someone to bounce your ideas with. Also ordered some business cards for GDC. Seeing the studio name on a business card made everything real all of a sudden. Can’t believe I am actually doing it! Unity3D studying is almost done, with only one and a half chapters to go, on track to finish the book by the end of the month and I was really happy to see my volcano having smoke coming out of it today.

The boring part of my day was spent debugging the website for the machine business. This has been the same task everyday with no end in sights. Nothing new here and I am waiting for the day when I don’t talk about the development of this site. It’s especially painful because the site is made with OSCommerce, not the most eye-pleasing piece of software unfortunately.

I am spending a lot of time in front of the computers. The only time I am not in front of one is when I eat lunch and dinner. (Breakfast is always cereal with email checking on the side. Actually, it’s more like email checking with cereal on the side.) I know I need to stretch, and what’s better than doing 30 minutes of yoga to keep my body fresh and my heart young? I started doing yoga every two three days and have been feeling really good every time I do it. A lot of these poses are painful to do, but afterwards I feel refreshed and energized, ready for the next challenge. I’d definitely recommend it to anyone who feels tired or unmotivated. Our minds are closely connected to our bodies, and having “genki” bodies keeps our minds awake! Power Yoga and Rodney Yee, consider me your new fan.

Today started with a series of errands for the machine business – customer service, setting up hosting server, and testing the new website. Testing the new website is never fun. On one hand you are happy you caught these bugs, on the other hand you are unhappy that the developers didn’t catch these obvious mistakes themselves. Lesson learned: spending more time selecting a good vendor will save precious time later.

After a healthy bowl of soba for lunch, the afternoon was filled with learning particle systems with the game engine Unity3D. Achievements today = making fire and smoke. I never knew it took so much effort to make these things that seemed trivial. It gave me a new perspective on things and appreciated more what other independent studios have accomplished with only a few people on the team. Case in point – Lazy 8 Studios. COGS is a very unique game and a highly regarded candidate at IGF this year. Hopefully I’ll get to speak to them next month at GDC.

A few things happened today for the book that got me excited. First there was a customer inquiry from the website. Very exciting as we just added a “contact us” form last night. Also I found a problem with the website where the purchase button didn’t work. Duh! Fixed it right away. We also started our customer research – crafted a survey and an overview document for the research. I also realized how excited I still get whenever a copy gets sold. It’s such an emotional boost that needs to happen more and more!

Finally I am going to talk about something random and unrelated to my projects. I saw this picture on flickr this morning and kept it in the browser the whole day. It’s such a cool picture depicting the type of entrepreneurial spirit I admire. Despite the cold weather, the snow, and the low traffic, this restaurant still keeps its door open and its appearance clean. I am not so naive to think that “if you build it, they will come” is always true. But having the endurance to survive the cold weather, the heavy snow, the low sales, the bad economy, is probably one of the most important things I’ll have to learn to do.

Even if you don’t agree with me, you’ll have to admit this IS a wonderful picture. courtesy of GadgetLam on flickr.