Hey all! š Iām Ryo, a Sr. Design Technologist at PlayStation. I do web dev with React/TS/Node and game dev with Unity/C#/C++/OpenGL/DirectX. Feel free to ask me any questions! š¤
Use your own money. If you want to build a product, build it from a place of financial stability, because startups are moneysinks.
Use technology you've never used before. Get experience with it under your belt, or work with someone who has. Nothing worse than building a production stack with experimental tech.
Forget about marketing. It's easy to work on your product and get lost in a hole of development and not do the due diligence of marketing your brand and product properly.
Try to build a product from the beginning that scales to infinity. Build an MVP that works, and iterate from there. Every major company has had a rewrite or shift of their codebase, and like John Romero says, the future you will always be a better coder -- so leave it to him.
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Validate your idea before you develop your product. So many people leap into startups with a problem they'd like to solve, without ever creating small-scale experiments or interviewing potential clients.
Organize your development and fundraising in separate rounds. You're either making your product, or you're looking for investment. Never both at the same time. Spend a week building out your product, then another week reaching out to investors. Then keep alternating. If an investor reaches out during dev week, tell them to wait until investment week. It's a great strategy to see who takes you seriously.
Talk about it your idea as much as possible. It helps flesh it out, iron out any kinks with your plan, and it's a marketing tool (depending on who's ear you bombarde).
Partner up with a business/money person if you're not good at it. If you're the CTO of the company, who's going to be the CEO or COO? Those are usually the roles that lead the business and it's operations, and help guide the product in a profitable direction.
I'm a programmer who likes games, and wants to make games for a living. At the same time, there are some really cool non-game things I want to work on -- especially if they use C or C++.
I wholeheartedly remember talking about your product, especially with people who are experts in the area. It's a great way to see the holes in your idea before they become showstoppers. So many things can be fixed at early stages that'd be unmanageable beasts later down the line.
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this comment was pure gold
I wholeheartedly remember talking about your product, especially with people who are experts in the area. It's a great way to see the holes in your idea before they become showstoppers. So many things can be fixed at early stages that'd be unmanageable beasts later down the line.