I, Entrepreneur: First 6 years

After two decades of employment in companies small and large, I became an entrepreneur six years ago and am still going. This is amazing in strange ways. Let me explain.

The War of Many Battles

I wanted this all my life. For years, I observed other disciplines and studied business to prepare for entrepreneurship. I saved for two decades, both money and skills as my initial capital. Then finally took the leap.

It is WAR with the problem you are trying to solve on one side and you on the other. All within a context: geography, resources, weather. In business, context is competition, investment climate, inflation, zeitgeist, etc.

So how you experience entrepreneurship really depends on

• Side 1: the difficulty/complexity of your product/service (problem)
• Side 2: who you are
• Context: global economic climate and your competition.

You may pick a product easier to ship and then struggle to stand out against competition. You may pick a difficult product to stand out but struggle to even ship. Likewise, when investor/customers have money, competition is up. When they do not, survival is hard but competition is low.

Thus, entrepreneurship almost always diverges to infinite difficulty.

Development

I started a tech-heavy studio to build a high-risk, innovative project, with two great cofounders, Kür?ad Karamahmuto?lu and Fevzi Altuncu . We developed Steel Swarm: Apocalypse, full time for 4.5 years with no outside investment.

I architected and implemented all code for SSA to pre-alpha stage. This took about 20K lines of C# code and about 10K lines of hand-built scriptable asset code in almost 4 person-years. Work my cofounders tackled was no less.

By 2021, we had a 5 vs 5, playable demo with swarms and destructible environment, that proved the highest tech risks were taken care of. It was time to incorporate and engage investors.

Legal, Finance and HR

We found Benjamin Premack and learned about law. We executed competitive analysis and financial models.? We internalized SAFEs and term sheets. We found long term advisors we trust in Don Daglow and Jason Della Rocca (and later William Rhys Dekle?? Africa Games Week ). We got so good at pitching that we received 19 investments in 25 meetings to raise our pre-seed round.

After a decade studying corporate recruitment, I saw hundreds of interviews. Armed with ideas about what worked and didn’t, we hired an amazing team. They performed beyond my wildest expectations and soft-launched open-alpha.

Our first hire was the wonderfully talented veteran Kerem S. Hunal immediately started to develop SSA's visual language. Later my engineers built another 80K lines of C# and 170K lines of asset code in 5 person-years.

We are not done. We will continue to fight to win. Yet I celebrate my team: Mehmet Altuner , Samed Duman , Tuna Akyurek , Mehmet Karda? , Serdar Oygen , Yi?it Yal??n , Yusuf Emir ?CAL , Sarper Do?an , Ekim Tan ?z?i?li .

I also cannot overstate how grateful I am to all our investors. Your trust enabled all this.

Why

Difficult problems and long hours weren’t new to me. But, learning business skills way outside of my comfort zone was. Despite all preparation, this requires massive, continuous determination and grit. Not only for technical problems, but also for awkward networking events and fruitless pitch meetings.

Every day, we have to perform to grow our unstoppable team and to cultivate an engaged player base.

All of this is hard, back-breaking work, done in the face of terrible odds.

Yet, entrepreneurship is also uniquely rewarding. You come to work every day, interact with your team, your players, and your product. You realize you played a part in building all this… from scratch… from thin air…

Maybe, just maybe, this will work... The stress and the grind will then be rewarded by not just money, but by knowing that you created games that entertained players and built an institution that grew developers.

Until then, the fight goes on.

Here is to another six years…

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