Misc

This is the first day since I started daily on the blog when, honestly, I had no desire to write. I am kinda tired, a combination of waking earlier than I’m used to and a lot of work at the office, so all I wanted to do was lie down and sleep.

Anyway, this didn’t happen and I have to thank the frame of mind set by the 30 days challenges I set myself every month. I’ve written a little bit more about it a month ago.

After 30 days of writing daily (which is proving to be 2 month now), the second 30 days challenge was to not drink any kind of Cola drink because they keep me up at night. Well, I am glad to be able to say that I’ve done it :)

It’s been 30 days since I’ve drank my last glass of Coca Cola Zero. And, man, was it hard. Especially in the first 2 weeks. But now I am ok with it and look forward for my next challenge.

The thing is I’ve started my third challenge while the other one was still running: I’ve decided that every morning shower would be a cold one. The advantages behind it can be found here or here, but I am also ahead of the trend, since the people at the Bucharest town hall announced that we might not get hot water during the night (communism more?). The most important gain for me is that I am not cold in the mornings anymore (I am actually quite alright).

I have one more challenge running right now, but that is still in its first 2 weeks, so I will talk about it a little bit later.

Still, I have to say that for me, the concept of 30 days challenge works. And it’s great.

Photo from Shutterstock

Today was a full day. Both at work and in terms of events. Radu Georgescu [romanian], the first official advisor MavenHut has, just announced he sold Avangate, the biggest company he sold. The price is not public, but I bet it was good for Radu :)

I’m thrilled to announce we have just closed a very strategic transaction with Francisco Partners. With this transaction, Francisco is acquiring Avangate and investing additional capital to further accelerate our already impressive growth. Francisco Partners is one of the most respected private equity firms in the world with over $7 Billion under management and we are extremely pleased to find an investment partner who shares our vision of Customer Centric Commerce. Even more importantly, the capital investment will help us further scale up our operations, deliver expanded platform capabilities, and better serve and support you, our customers.

More information on it here.

The other thing that happened today (not as big, obviously) was that How To Web published a short interview with me, as a prequel to the talk I will be having (along with my co-founder, Cristi) at the event this year.

1. What are the main skills it takes to build an engaging game for social media nowadays?
Looking back to the last two years, the most important skill we had was understanding the metrics and acting on the lessons from them. Of course, understanding what metrics to follow and what to A/B test is another skill you should have (or, at least, cultivate).

I’ve attended tonight the Mobile User Acquisition meetup at TechHub Bucharest. I am very interested in mobile right now, so I took some notes I think you might find interesting. Actually, that’s me, in red, in the picture above.

Here are my notes, exactly as I wrote them on my phone, with some explanations next to them (though you can watch the entire meetup here)

— idevice.ro (Andrei marinescu recommended it as a good blog to get a review from if you have an app targeted for the Romanian market)
— admob (good platform to do paid user acquisition)
— flurry (good platform to do paid user acquisition)
— FB ads per install – great tool to drive paid acquisition if you know how to use it
— jump start on Appscend apps – guys at Appscend use their existing apps to promote the new ones, thus getting some jump start for them
— don’t buy reviews? Andrei Marinescu said you shouldn’t buy reviews on blogs that do reviews since you will not get good results
— iOS users use zonga for more time than the Android users (Sergiu Biris said this)
— you can reply to user comments in Google Play (Sergiu Biris)
— android users more critical, iOS offers better monetization
— more Android users from South Korea (I think Andrei Blaj said this)
— more translations (Andrei Blaj)
— Don’t Panic Mobile Developer’s Guide to the Galaxy (free PDF mentioned by Andrei Marinescu – Thanks!)

—- not to do
— app must work from day 1 (so do not go on the store with an app that doesn’t work)
— get good ratings from the start (better not to have ratings rather than have bad ones)
— don’t overuse push notifications (or you might get abysmal usage)
— simplify app as much as possible (do not overcomplicate things)

Photo from TechHub Bucharest

I usually like working during bad weather (as long as I don’t have to go somewhere or anything similar). In my experience, I am among few that are not affected by bad weather.

If I think about it, a lot has changed in that aspect in my 3 months in Dublin. I mean, I’ve been there since January till June. If you do not work in bad weather, you will not work in Dublin. Or anywhere in Ireland for that matter. Or, closer to the truth, you will only work about 5 minutes per day, in the summer, in between clouds :D

OK, I love Ireland, so don’t be too upset if you are Irish and you think it’s the sunniest place in the world.

Here are some tips to start your day when it’s raining outside (or it’s just a dark fall day).

Take a cold shower in the morning

I know, it’s awful. Trust me, I know. On the other hand, though, if you can make this (or, at least, change the water to cold in the last 30 seconds at the end of your shower), you will feel a surge of energy in about 10 minutes, after you stop shaking. That surge of energy is present in your body for the rest of the day.

Try to work on more tedious tasks

While I don’t have a problem with working during bad weather days, I find it really difficult to focus on creative tasks. So I try to do the least amount possible of creative work, while grinding away on the tasks I avoid normally. This way, even if my productivity is not the best, I still do some work.

Dress appropriately

This goes without saying, but if you are not dressed well, the cold will get in your bones and it will stay there. And it will be really difficult to shake the feeling of coldness.

Walk for several minutes outside

OK, if it pours, try not to. But if it’s not the worst rain ever and I walk for several minutes (even by parking the car a little bit further from the office) I feel a lot better once I get inside where, usually, it is warmer.

Some of the tips above might seem suicidal (really, cold showers??), but they work for me. If you have more suggestions, fire away in the comments section.

Rain from Shutterstock

I am pretty good at focusing on the job at hand, most of the time. Unfortunately, though, I still have websites that I shouldn’t visit that I do visit (some of them way too often, and they are almost imprinted in the muscle memory).

In order to solve this issue I use on all my computers StayFocusd (on Chrome). It is an extension that allows you to block specific websites for a while (or even forever) and it syncs between multiple Chrome installs on different computers. I actually have some sites that I will be able to read in 13241. Soon…

The extension is pretty simple to use: you have a list of blocked sites, of allowed sites and you can use either to block all but the allowed ones, to allow all but the blocked ones or to block all :D I actually did this by mistake and I had to uninstall the extension, since Chrome considers the extension options as being another website – albeit local, not world wide web (this is the way Chrome is built).

If you have bad self-control with the websites that you read, I think StayFocusd is a good option for you to try.

When we started MavenHut there were just the 3 of us: me, Cristi and Elvis. And it’s been just us for the next 9 months, when we started to add new people in the mix. It wasn’t easy, because getting people to understand that the fact that we are a startup doesn’t mean that the company will cease to exist in the next 3 months is not as easy as it seemed initially.

Still, we managed to create a great team at MavenHut. And Cristi is gonna be at TechHub today, from 6:30pm, to tell you how it happened. Of course, not by himself, but by being part of a panel that includes Teodor Ceaușu (VP of Engineering and Country Manager for Romania at Ixia) and Robert Knapp (Co-Founder and CEO of CyberGhost). They will be talking about Building Amazing Team (in tech, obviously).

If you are, at all, interested to hear some tips on how to find people, how to help them be their best and, obviously, if you are in Bucharest, come to TechHub! Tonight, at 6:30pm, at another great meetup (I tell you, the Thursday meetups at TechHub will become the place to be if you are interested in startup and tech).

If you want to understand the VC world, read about investment, understand the views of both investors and ex-entrepreneurs, there are some blogs you NEED to read:

1. Both Sides of The Table – Mark Suster

It’s, in my opinion, one of the most outspoken blogs out there. They guy is a VC now, but he used to be an entrepreneur, so he always has good opinions from “both sides of the table”. I like his blog and some of the articles I recommend are How to Get Busy People to Take Action When You Send an Email (very important, especially if you are cold emailing, though you shoould look for an intro) or Why Startups Need a Well Articulated Strategy (And How to Think About Yours) (self explaining)

2. Feld Thoughts – Brad Feld

The co-founder of TechStars, he used to be an entrepreneur, also. He is also an accomplished writer (he and his partner wrote a book about the life with an entrepreneur which I’ve found really interesting, and he also wrote the first book I’ve read on investing, VC’s and the like, Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist). One model of the articles you may find on his blog is this: Being a Great CEO

3. A VC – Fred Wilson

The first VC blogger I’ve heard of, Fred Wilson is a rockstar of the VC world. Writing daily since… whenever I can remember blogging, I’ve first found out about him from a Romanian blogger and entrepreneur that was always citing him (Dragos). Again, lots of articles, lots of info, you should look specifically in the archive. An interesting thing, he is a dedicated Android user, in love with the OS and what it means (so he mentions often the way he uses the mobile phones in his day to day life).

Do you know other VC or entrepreneurs blogs?

Photo from Shutterstock

In the last two days I’ve used mindmaps for something we’re building. It’s the first time I ever used mindmaps and the learning curve wasn’t that easy.

Again, I use mindmaps to understand the stages of a game (what happens if… and if… or if…). It’s kind of similar to the logic schemes we used for algorithms in high school.

Back to mindmaps. The best tip I got for you is this: first of all, map the most desirable outcome. The one that SHOULD happen. It is gonna be so much easy to add exceptions to that.

I know, pretty obvious, right? Yeah, it wasn’t for me, at least in the beginning. And I re-wrote some parts several times.

Have fun!

P.S.: the tool I use for mindmaps is MindJet (OSX only, I think). If you have other suggestions, fire away in the comments below.

Working in gaming has its upside and downsides.

One of the downsides is that people always say: “Ah, so fun, playing all day, the perfect job!”

Other people dismiss it from the start: “Pfff, gaming! That’s not even a real industry!”

Even people close to me (good friends or family) have this false impression, that it’s something simple and cheap to do. On a casual talk with a friend, I mentioned a $2 million budget for a game. He was impressed and said: “That’s a lot of money! A game with a big budget, right?”

And… not so much (see the GTA5 numbers below).

Let me tell you some numbers about the gaming industry:

Global revenues in gaming: $56 billion in 2011 (the report here, page 5). In another report I have (not public), the numbers estimated for 2013 are closer to $70 billion.

The total market for casual/social/mobile games in 2013 (estimated) is about $18 billion.

Half a billion people play computer games. Out of them, about 150 million pay, in one way or another, for games.

The biggest money makers in mobile are:
– King’s Candy Crush Saga, more than $600,000 per day (yes, per day!) – Source: 1, 2
– Clash of Clans (more than $600,000 per day – source) and HeyDay (more than $300,000 per day – source) bring a big part of the $2 million per day revenue for SuperCell, the Finnish company that created them (source)

Finally, GTA5, the title launched last week, was in production for 8 years and, in the first 3 days, it had revenues more than $1,000,000,000 (yes, billion)! (source). It is the fastest selling entertainment product EVER! Before Avatar, before Titanic, before StarWars, before anything. And, to put it in context, it had a HUGE budget: $260 million.

Actually, I’ve seen some reports saying that the gaming industry surpassed the movie industry in the last 2 years or so (I can’t find the report now, sorry!).

Next time, when someone says “Pfff, gaming!”, just smile. You know better :)

Screenshot from Newzoo report

Timisoara is a city in Western Romania, 600kms from Bucharest. This is how much I drove today to be present at Startup Weekend, first Timisoara edition. Well, I’ve also had some other things to do here, but I’ve been present to the launch of SW, nevertheless.

I have to say I am not a big fan of Startup Weekend. It feels… rushed and forced :) And, obviously, it’s this way by design, but I am probably getting old, because I wouldn’t see myself doing all nighters like this. Even if, while building MavenHut, an all nighter would be just part of the job (fortunately, not that many actually happened).

Today, while listening to the judging criteria I understood that Solitaire Arena and the idea of multiplayer classic games that pushed MavenHut forward would’ve never been chosen at Startup Weekend. Because we didn’t have nice graphics (something required, as I understood) or a great, specific need to fill (though boredom is one of the biggest pains of a human being).

On the other hand, though, I think Startup Weekend is a great learning tool for a startup newbie. Leadership, team work, focus, Minimum Viable Product building, all of these concepts have their place here. If I would be someone that wants to understand what working in a startup looks like I would go to Startup Weekend. By the way, they really need designers (in all startup weekends) so, if you are, you will be really valued going there. Startup Weekend means a lot of developers, business and communication people. And this is what a startup will actually need, at some point.

Finally, I hope the result of SW Timisoara will be that at least one team starts a product and keeps working on it afterwards. That would be a great success. On the other hand, the fact that about 100 people got together to create things together is already a big win :) I am just becoming a grumpy old man.

P.S.: Just to be clear: I am not a big fan of the concept for Startup Weekend. It’s a personal choice. On the other hand, I really think we need these kind of things to happen more often. Because we need more entrepreneurial people in Romania and this is the only way to make that happen: in small steps, one Startup Weekend and one meetup at the time. So, if I can help in any way, I don’t need to like it, it just needs to push the startup world one step further. Which it does.