I was reading Thomas' blog (http://www.asharewarelife.com/ ) today and he was talking about why Pyrogon failed. He actually touched a point that I have been thinking about for a good while now. Recurring business.

I've been in these forums for a long time (by the way, for the ones that didn't noticed, I'm Akura ;) ) and I've seen that most people here seem to want Real or GameHouse or any other to pick their games so they can focus on development only and not marketing. This doesn't seem like a bad plan, except when you get picked up, let the portals sell your game, and then you release a second game and the portals don't pick it up. Unless you have a very big community, which isn't easy, specially when a portal sells your game, you will have no target audience to sell your second game to.

One would think that this isn't a big deal, and people don't really care that much what you did in the past and are only looking for the current thing, but upon pondering, I've found that I and many others are tempted to buy something, even more expensive or worse quality if it is from a brand they are used to buy from. I look around this room and only see Sony and Microsoft stuff (excluding the monitor which is a Samsung). All the other gadgets (tv, console, video, mouse, keyboard, digital camera, etc, etc) are from either the other two brands.

Bottom line, I don't think being picked up by a big portal is a good thing. It may help on the current game, but leaves a hole in the wall for the following ones.

Bruno

The paradigm I tend to like best is Jay Abraham's (www.abraham.com) model of building a business that's analagous to the Parthenon. So you don't just have one pillar holding up the roof -- you build a stable base first and then add more and more pillars.

So my stable base is direct sales, but I also add other pillars, i.e. other streams of income, such as licensing and publishing. The risk I see in the portal model is that it jumps to building pillars before laying a solid enough foundation. A little shake, and the pillars come falling down along with the roof. My various pillars will crack and fall at some point, but I can always add new pillars as long as the base remains sturdy. Another book that espouses this model is Robert Allen's Multiple Streams of Income.

My wife, Erin, has been following the same paradigm with her business, also basing it around multiple streams of income. She started with web consulting (making web sites for small businesses) and used that as her stable base to build her own web site. She built a vegetarian web site (www.vegfamily.com), filled it with content, built a newsletter mailing list, and put up a message board. She began selling books on the site via Amazon's affiliate program (pillar 1). Then she started selling advertising on the site (pillar 2) and selling featured promotions in her newsletter (pillar 3). Then she joined the Vitamix.com affiliate program (pillar 4), which has done extremely well for her. Then she wrote her own book, self-published it, and began selling it through her site (pillar 5). She's already on her 5th or 6th printing now. Then she began selling her book wholesale to niche bookstores and natural foods stores (pillar 6). Then she signed up with three different distributors to get her book into mainstream stores (pillar 7) and also started selling her book through Amazon.com (pillar 8). Finally, she added a donations button to her site (pillar 9). At one point she was also selling vegan chocolates, gift baskets, and other items through her site, but those pillars eventually cracked and were replaced by others. Now she's beginning work on a new book that will eventually generate even more streams of income.

The nice thing about this Parthenon model is that once you have your stable base, you can afford to take some risks. You can just keep trying new things to see what works, all the while having a secure income. Your risk is lowered because your income isn't dependent on any single source. Our different streams of income are constantly in flux. One month my wife will sell hundreds of books but little advertising, and the next month it might flip-flop. And then suddenly she'll get an affiliate check that's much bigger than expected, or a distributor will place a new order.

This is an issue ive been trying to get straight in my head for a while now. Steves Parthenon model suggestion has been my gut feeling. Generate your own independent sales, and only once you're happy with this 'base' should you go via portals.
I dont know about anybody else, but this makes me much more comfortable regards the way forward.

Unfortunately the old way of building the stable base would appear to be writing a whole bunch of games and starving for 4 years.

Cas :)

Originally posted by Dexterity
The paradigm I tend to like best is Jay Abraham's (www.abraham.com) model of building a business that's analagous to the Parthenon. So you don't just have one pillar holding up the roof -- you build a stable base first and then add more and more pillars.


Steve, what resources did you get from Abraham? What initially caused you to start looking for and thinking about this strategy?

Anthony

Originally posted by Justiciar
Steve, what resources did you get from Abraham? What initially caused you to start looking for and thinking about this strategy?
[/B]

Years ago I first bought a Nightingale-Conant audio program of Jay's called Your Secret Wealth. I think I picked it up on ebay.com for around $20 (it was $60 new). I was probably broke at the time I bought it, so the idea of making more money was appealing. :)

Then later I bought a collection of audio recordings of four of Jay's live seminars, about 100 cassette tapes total. I don't remember exactly how this offer came to me (direct mailing maybe). He sold them for $1000 for all four. Each original live seminar was priced between $5,000 and $25,000. Jay never gives the same seminar twice, so there was different material on each seminar.

It took me a full 18 months to go through the whole collection, listening to a little each day while I ate lunch. It was like getting a massive dosage of marketing brainwashing, and so much of what I do today was a result of what I learned from those tapes. It wasn't so much that any one technique was all powerful but rather the new mindset that was programmed into me -- nontraditional ways of thinking about marketing and selling that actually work in the real world. One of the biggest things I learned was the importance of testing.

Jay didn't actually do most of the talking at his own seminars. He would invite other speakers too, such as high-end consultants who were experts in their fields or people who had already built huge businesses in competitive industries. I think Fred Smith (founder of Fedex) was one of the speakers, and the story of all the hardships he had to overcome was just amazing.

One of the seminars had a lengthy segment called the hot seat, where seminar participants would be drilled for at least an hour about all the aspects of their business, and then Jay and a panel of experts would pick it apart and come up with all sorts of ideas to grow the business in new ways. I'd say a small business for this kind of seminar was one that generated "only" $1 million per year in sales, and they were spread across many different industries.

Jay offered a full money-back guarantee as well. His guarantee was that I would make back at least 10x the cost of the program within the first 60 days, or I could return the tapes for a full refund. $1000 was a lot of money for me to risk at the time, but I felt Jay would honor the guarantee, and I half expected that I would end up returning the tapes within 60 days. But to my surprise, he was actually right. I did make about $10,000 in the first 60 days by applying what I learned. I still have the tapes. :)

I guess one of the general strategies I like to use when I need to educate myself in a new area is that of total immersion. If I need to learn marketing, I don't just buy a book and read it. I might buy 10 books, several audio programs, maybe attend a seminar or get a seminar recording, and try to find experts and pick their brains. If I like an author, I might buy up and read every book they've ever written as well as a few of their audio programs. This works really well for me -- it's sort of a way of brainwashing myself to adopt the mindset of people who are getting the results I want. If I just read a single book, I might think, "Wow, those ideas are just what I need," but then six months later I won't have applied any of it. But if I totally immerse myself in the material, it reprograms my brain to think the way the author does, and I actually start using the ideas.

As a quickie example, just one simple idea I got from Jay was to keep in frequent contact with past customers. Many indies have a free newsletter but never email their customer list too (often for fear of being labeled a spammer). I've been emailing our customers regularly for several years whenever we release a new game, and that list converts far better than our newsletter. In all that time we've received only one complaint, and that person actually changed his mind within a few hours and said he wanted to continue to hear from us after all. When someone has already bought a product from us, they're usually happy to hear about our new releases, as long as we don't bug them too often. Even so, we include an opt-out link at the bottom of every email, so if customers don't want to hear from us again, they don't have to. Only a small percentage have opted out (well below 5%). I realize that some see this as a controversial strategy; I don't share that viewpoint though. I expect our customers want to hear from us when we release a new game they might enjoy; not to give them the opportunity to have more fun in their lives would mean that we really don't value the service we provide. This is part of the mindset I got from Jay -- you must believe in your business' value to the point where you feel it's almost a crime NOT to tell people about it.

I dont see there's any reason NOT to use the portals. Thats not what everyone is saying.

Or at least the way I read it..

What theyre saying, is that you dont build your business around someone else doing the selling for you. Because even though they may be more efficient, they then hold the power to cause your business to fail (by simply not doing the sales anymore, you end up being left without a sales stream).

I'm sure as hell going to use the portal sites, but not as my primary focus or method of selling.

I see this the other way around of what you say. While I agree with Steve's pillars analogy, I do not want to have my games on Real for the first few months or even years of my company launch. The reason for this is that if you are unknown, chances are, that if both real and zoombapup.com (:)) offer game X, customers are more likely to buy from Real. This leaves a, in my oppinion, large hole on your customer base while improving Real's.

When you bring 10,000 visits a month (or how many are adequate), selling through Real will be a 'bonus' every month when the cheque arrives, but until then, I don't see how it benefits you. It just basically makes you follow the retail industry (developer does game, publisher publishs game, developer barely covers costs with royalties, publisher CEO buys a new Porche) on a smaller scale.

Bruno

Thanks Steve!

/em ruminates for a while

Anthony

>it's sort of a way of brainwashing myself to adopt the mindset of people who are getting the results I want

I can't emphasize enought the wisdom in that statement.

I too have had huge success with Jay's material and have spent much more than I ever thought I would on his info products. However, the results I have seen have been tremendous and well worth the investment.