Business in a Blog

The Startup.com movie was nothing if not a roller-coaster ride. We see the ups and downs of the GovWorks founders Kaleil Isaza Tuzman, Tom Herman, and Chieh Cheung as they try to navigate the process of starting a company from scratch. One of the most surprising points by the end of the movie for me is that the third founder, Chieh Cheung, was the only founder to profit from the company after being bought out for 700k somewhat early on. The remaining founders walk away with nothing after the company is forced to file bankruptcy and sell the company after burning through $60 million in capital over 3 years. We see multiple points of contention where members of the company seemed to have been outpaced by its growth, starting with Chieh, all the way to Tom Herman himself when the power struggle boils over into a dramatic scene ending with his termination and escort from the building. I found myself confused early on seeing so much emphasis towards wooing investors before a product had eve...

Our fourth speaker was John Dimmer, a personal friend of the Andrew Fry's as well as an important member of Free-Range-Media. I really enjoyed having John come to class because he provided insight to what I would consider the most difficult aspect of starting a business, financing. John talked about some of his background before becoming an entrepreneur; Going to school for finance, working for a bank, working as a repo man, etc. He stressed early on the importance of learning the basics of accounting and financing, as well as learning how to read contracts and knowing when it would be a good time to seek legal council. One of my favorite lines from the talk is that, "Accounting is the method by which a business keeps score.". I think it makes sense to put business in this sort of game perspective, where you are forced to acknowledge the inherent competition involved in it all. When the idea of starting a media company came up between Andrew and John, they sought out Jo...

In class we learned about the four basic forms of intellectual property protection known as Trademarks, Copyrights, Patents, and Trade Secrets. Given that video games are primarily a form of art, it can be difficult to figure out where protections would be most appropriate. Any sort of names or symbols associated with the company or any of it's game products would certainly be trademarked, to protect anybody else from taking over the brand and profiting from or representing it in a way that would be counter to the companies goals. Copyrights would be used to protect any of the specific artwork produced for any of the games, as well as any music, story-line literature, or any other form of expression used to flesh out the world we develop. What we did learn in class that I had never heard of previously is that source code can also be protected with a copyright as a form of literature, and this would certainly be something to look into when creating these mobile apps. As far as the i...

In class we had an exercise exploring the importance of providing mission statements, vision statements, and values for your business. Not only do they set a standard for the company as a whole to aspire to, but they outline a focus that every employee can take into consideration any time they make a decision affecting the company. When potential employees, investors, or customers want to know exactly what sort of company they might be dealing with, these statements provide a good idea of the sort of things we might consider of importance. It's difficult to come up with statements that are simple enough to comprehend, yet powerful enough to inspire, but we gave it a shot anyways. My business idea is of a Mobile Game App company, so my focus was on creativity. These are the rough drafts of what I would consider my business statements: Vision: Develop a brand immediately recognized by any gamer, by inspiring creativity and fascination from within our virtual universe. Mission: Re...

Pricing my product is an interesting task. When it comes to games, mobile app games in particular, there is such a variation in the ways you can generate profit. A flat fee for buying the game, a subscription based charge, in-app purchasing, etc. But for my game in particular I've settled on going for free-to-play, with the option of in-app purchases. This might seem like a poor business model on the surface, but from my personal experience it has been the most effective revenue structure for mobile games. To this day I have not downloaded a game that wasn't free to play, and I find subscriptions particularly bothersome. Because my attention span for mobile games, or most games in general, is typically short; I tend not to invest much initially. The only money I've personally ever spent on mobile games in fact was through in-app purchases after I had found myself particularly invested in the games actual player community. Worldwide Mobile Game revenue surpassed both PC and ...

Unfortunately I didn't make it to class for this speaker, and judging by my classmates blog posts I definitely missed a good one. From what I've gathered in the readings, Brian has a very unique outlook on how to go about running his business. He is the founder and CEO of a web design company named SiteCrafting, who's vision statement is posted on their website as "Thriving employees, organizations, and communities creating impact through technology". He seems to have found his calling in web design while teaching elementary school students, deciding there was a market for a web design business after being approached by parents and friends now and then to help design them websites. Web design wasn't nearly as easy back then as it is now, and plenty of people were looking for somebody that had the expertise required to do it. Brian's business grew through word of mouth, and still does to this day as he's skipped marketing altogether and relied on the pr...

I was excited right out of the gate when I heard our second speaker and entrepreneur, Robert Coons, was involved in the creation of a mobile app. There were a number of really great points brought up in the talk, but certainly my most enlightening was the idea of being valued for a database. I understand the concept of accumulated information being worth a pretty penny to a company that needs it, but I had never really even considered the fact that there were still demographics here in the U.S. that are largely untapped. I suppose growing in the world today it's easy to just assume everything that can be known about the modern consumer is largely already studied. You can't throw a ball without hitting an article espousing how closely we are all being monitored, and it's hard to ignore the truth in that. Nonetheless, Robert and the company he is a part of, Scout, tapped into the veteran market in a way that appears to be worth more than I would have imagined. I think it'...

Our first quest speaker was Erik Hanberg, a published author and entrepreneur. There was a lot to like about Erik's story, most notably the way he clearly and intellectually walked through his experience transitioning from the mindset of an employee to an employer. I genuinely connected with the way he was explaining the early frustrations and curiosities of taking that risk to step out on your own and put your time and energy into starting a business for yourself. Some of the things I found surprising about what he was saying was how many ventures he was a part of simultaneously, and how many books he had already written. IT was eye-opening the way he walked through the differences in revenue production between audio books, paperbacks, etc. Erik's story about pretending to write a book in order to gauge the public interest was fascinating, and I think it's exactly that kind of creativity that would lead somebody down the entrepreneurial path. I had never really considered ...