A Step-by-Step Guide and Two Books That Will Help You Launch a Startup, Game, or Anything Else – And How It's Connected to Understanding People

?? Business Model Generation and Value Proposition Design by Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur are the books you need.

Both books start with one simple fact: You must know your customers. If you don't, everything you build is based on your own fantasies.

It doesn't matter what you're building; what matters is looking into your customer's eyes. It's surprising how often this is overlooked.

?? This is especially true for games. Many developers are so caught up in their own ideas that they create their dream game. This often ends in zero sales and total disappointment.

If you want to make money from your game, here's a step-by-step guide on how to work with your audience.

?? Step 1: Gather a focus group. Start with the genre and setting of your game, and reflect on yourself. Why are you doing this in the first place? Share your story on Twitter, TikTok, and Reels. Ideally, have sketches or early visuals ready. People absorb most information visually. Your TikTok account or Discord server can be the start of a community.

?? Step 2: Communicate regularly. Build a community management plan. Engage at least once a week. Involve people in your process. Making a TikTok video with a simple "Hey, I need your help" is easy and free. The response might exceed your expectations.

?? Step 3: Until you test your ideas on your audience, they're just hypotheses. This applies to both startups and games. Passion for your product is the same for indie developers and startup founders. And here's an interesting statistic: the more passionate you are, the more likely you are to fail.

Why? Passion and belief are needed to start and carry on. But they also have a downside. You might cling to a hypothesis so tightly that you end up building something doomed to fail. Example: blindly believing in your game's greatness without any marketing.

?? Step 4: Talk to people one-on-one for an hour or more to uncover insights. You can do this with people who play your specific genre or those who play something else entirely. This helps you understand what people value and what works. Plus, you might get ideas from related genres.

Talking to 30-40 players of your target genre in a month or two? Totally doable. What will you learn? Everything. How they play, why they play, what they value, how they discover new games, and so on. ChatGPT can even help you create a detailed questionnaire; just upload this post to it :)

?? Step 5: Games and startups share one more thing in common: the hypothesis that something will work. What are the big players in the mobile market doing? They look for what's working and copy it. One of the industry's pain points is the lack of innovation. The same happened with AAA games on PC/consoles. Who doesn't remember the long chain of Assassin's Creed, Call of Duty, and FIFA titles with minimal changes?

Especially in indie games, it's crucial to see your product as a set of hypotheses. We went through this with Roboholic. The hypothesis was that a robot shooter would appeal to the audience. Then Roboquest came out, and it seemed like the hypothesis was confirmed, right? Wrong. There are so many details inside. A game is a complex experience, a combination of many mechanics and motivations.

That's why we did playtests. To understand if what we thought was a feature actually appealed to players. It turned out it didn't. And the team had the strength to listen to the players and significantly change the game.

Whether you're making a game alone or with a team, you should think about the process.

Hypothesis -> Testing -> Analyzing Results -> New Hypotheses

The faster you go through this process, the faster you'll find the gold among the dirt. Good luck! ??

This post is inspired by a lecture by Steve Blank (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UkiHbRmKR4o), a Silicon Valley veteran with 30 years of experience. He is considered the inventor of customer development (custdev).