Entrepreneurship and the Handmade ethos
What does it look like to turn a Handmade project into a sustainable business? How can the Handmade ethos set our software apart from its competitors? And how might we sustain the development of important software, if we're not sure how to sell it?
Topic: Entrepreneurship and the Handmade ethos
Hello everyone! Welcome to another fishbowl. I'm excited about this one. Let me start by introducing our guests.
- Abner Coimbre (@Abner Coimbre), host of Handmade Seattle
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- Allen Webster (@Allen4th), creator of 4coder and member of the Dion Systems team
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- Andrew Reece (@Andrew (azmr)), creator of WhiteBox
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- Demetri Spanos (@demetrispanos), Y Combinator alumnus and general fount of wisdom
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- Nick Seavert (@Nick Seavert - JangaFX) and Morten Vassvik (@mv), founders of JangaFX, creators of EmberGen
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- Phillip Trudeau (@philliptrudeau), co-creator of the game Sir Happenlance and the Spear of Density
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- Zeanith (@Zeanith) (I don't know your real name sorry!), the community member who suggested this topic!
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In by default bois
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All these guests are here because of their experience with software entrepreneurship in some form. Handmade Seattle is now an independent business, WhiteBox has received multiple grants and employs several community members, 4coder is of course a well-loved editor in the community and so on.
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So my name is Nick Seavert as mentioned, I founded JangaFX in 2016 and since then we've generated millions of dollars in sales. We have 16 employees, we use Odin-lang exclusively (a fantastic handmade project), our software for visual effects is used in almost every major game studio, and we have numerous other products in the works. For myself, I live in Austin, TX, USA. I enjoy racing (gokarts/formula 4), gaming, volunteering, entrepreneurship, and general arts. Twitter: https://twitter.com/nickseavert
I manage everything business, and know a lot about how to sell software, direct products, find needs in the market, and more*
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Mine will be longer
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(We're all typing out our blurbs 
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my background:
I've been working as an independent consultant, or as part of a founding team, for the last 17 years (overlapping with the final years of my PhD). I've also worked for a couple of years as a professor doing research, which has some conceptual overlap with entrepreneurship (even if the incentive structures are very different).
I've been advisor / angel investor in about 15 garage-level startups, including four valued over \$100M and one valued over \$1B, so I have seen the entire arc from nothing to great success a few times over (even if, unfortunately, the "great" part was not in my own companies :) Perhaps needless to say, I've also seen 11/15 not achieve those levels of success :)
From a technical perspective, I'm a computational mathematician/scientist. Most of my work has been somewhere around AI/ML/Optimization/Robots/Quant-Finance.
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I started a leatherwork business
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Hi everyone, hope this isn't too long-winded! I was a systems programmer throughout my 20s. First, a lucky break at Kennedy Space Center 
That experience shaped the rest of my career (you can read my essay about their philosophy: https://observer.com/2017/07/a-look-into-nasa-coding-philosophy-kennedy-space-center-programming/) You'll see I mention Handmade as the only movement "out there" that had a similar philosophy. I wanted to make Handmade stronger, so Casey let me organize the Handmade community. With the help of an amazing dev team we founded Handmade Network.
I met Jonathan Blow and I worked under him for ~3 years on the Jai compiler, a bit of Sokoban, and the Braid HD Remake. Here's an old interview where Jon and I talk sometime before he hired me: https://handmadedev.show/ep-10-2016/
After Jon I did a stint for Cyan Worlds on Myst VR (the game shipped last year.) They gave me a proper sendoff here: https://cyan.com/2022/04/13/some-sad-happy-news-to-share/
Finally you may remember Casey ran Handmade Con for a couple of years but then stopped. People asked me to take over and Casey gave me the greenlight 
I very quickly realized I'm just as much into human interactions as I am into computers, so I started running Handmade conferences full-time. Here's the 2022 announcement post: https://media.handmade-seattle.com/self-hosted-conference/
That experience shaped the rest of my career (you can read my essay about their philosophy: https://observer.com/2017/07/a-look-into-nasa-coding-philosophy-kennedy-space-center-programming/) You'll see I mention Handmade as the only movement "out there" that had a similar philosophy. I wanted to make Handmade stronger, so Casey let me organize the Handmade community. With the help of an amazing dev team we founded Handmade Network.
I met Jonathan Blow and I worked under him for ~3 years on the Jai compiler, a bit of Sokoban, and the Braid HD Remake. Here's an old interview where Jon and I talk sometime before he hired me: https://handmadedev.show/ep-10-2016/
After Jon I did a stint for Cyan Worlds on Myst VR (the game shipped last year.) They gave me a proper sendoff here: https://cyan.com/2022/04/13/some-sad-happy-news-to-share/
Finally you may remember Casey ran Handmade Con for a couple of years but then stopped. People asked me to take over and Casey gave me the greenlight I very quickly realized I'm just as much into human interactions as I am into computers, so I started running Handmade conferences full-time. Here's the 2022 announcement post: https://media.handmade-seattle.com/self-hosted-conference/
When I am not busy with the conference, I'm building a terminal emulator called Terminal Click. Each month we host Handmade meetups in Seattle where I demo the terminal. I will also give a terminal talk at my own conference this year (self-promotion at its peak... this was my plan ALL ALONG.)
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Honoured to be here! I'll try to be brief:
I collaborated with Miles ( @notnullnotvoid , https://twitter.com/notnullnotvoid ) to program & produce an indie game on Steam. It released in October 2021 with positive reviews and it turned a profit. I'm proud of that, since many debut titles don't get there. These days I'm at WhiteBox with @Andrew (azmr) , helping with features and bugfixes.
I'm only representing my own personal opinion, not that of anyone on the Happenlance or WB teams!
Most indie game devs who finish a game become disappointed with their work's performance, but I feel they don't take their product seriously. As an indie game dev, you must acknowledge you are an entrepreneur running a small business and take on that role explicitly.
In the business-guy-technical-guy dichotomy, I guess I leaned more towards business-guy, although I wrote roughly half the game code.
Prior to this game, I was a high school student trying to ship games, then a uni student trying to ship games, then just a guy trying to ship games.
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I randomly messaged Morten when I saw him post in a programming server 
He was very skeptical of course 
And I offered $200
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I had inklings of the idea for EmberGen around 2007 when valve released their particle editor for half life 2 episode 2. I was hooked on visual effects for my own mods back then but had no way to make the assets I needed other than using valves existing texture library. The other tools were far too expensive for me at that point. In 2012, that's when I started to seriously consider making a new tool and of course, it wasn't until 2016 that I started the journey to actually making it a reality. From 2014-2016 I had experience in other startups to gain the knowledge I needed to do my own company. Those other startups failed which told me what not to do. Originally I'd planned to call EmberGen "ExploGen" but that was taken 
And I offered $200
just checked, it was actually $300
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just checked, it was actually $300
Thankfully we're all very well compensated at this point
Originally I'd planned to call EmberGen "ExploGen" but that was taken
For reference, what was the user experience of EmberGen's competitors like at the time?
Blue screen of death, full hard drives, computer unusable for 12-24 hours
was?
well that was my next question 
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So you have to do it over and over and over again
when you're making "design tools" (in the broadest sense), immediate feedback that lets you iterate on ideas quickly is so useful
this video (among others of Bret Victor) was definitely part of the milieu that inspired WhiteBox
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Naievity
Me: This sounds a bit hard to do
Nick: No you're wrong. It's definitly possible
that's just about how the conversation went
I was wrong, Nick was right
I need to screenshot this
We had built hype for many months prior thankfully and had an email list to send the announcement to
Solving a real problem ensures that you'll have a long-term sustainable business
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"solving (real and useful) problems for people in a way they're willing to pay for (and will actually benefit from)"
there's plenty of not-useful problems to solve. there has to be an actual real tangible problem to solve that makes it valuable. people are willing to pay for non-useful jank, too
to me this is like the difference between "what is art?" and "what is good art?" 
Solving a real problem ensures that you'll have a long-term sustainable business
This might be one of the reasons for the volatility and risk of game development!
Games are probably a pretty bad bet (entrepreneurially)
(entrepreneurially)
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If you want to make games, its better to build a software company to make a lot of money and pour said money into a game that you don't mind if it doesn't make its money back
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I have a few game ideas for JangaFX one-day
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Seems like unity is making the mistake of not making any games at all
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My journey of entrepreneurship with 4coder was mostly accidental. Not that I didn't want to do an independent business - I did - but I never thought hard about how to do that. 4coder was a project that came out of my interests as a programmer, and it found enough of an audience that it sort of became a side business. I was also at a point in life where extra income was very helpful (I was attending college and paying rent) so I had some incentive to actually convert my little side project into a business.
I'll throw in a topic segue here too. As someone who has "experienced" running a business, but doesn't feel particularly skilled at that side of things, I see this as a great opportunity to learn from ya'll more successful entrepreneurs. So my first quest is, what even is entrepreneurship? Second question, what route do you take to get good at it? Is this something you can practice?
what route do you take to get good at it?
I also follow a certain framework for business that I'll outline:
If it makes CENTS it makes sense. This is from my all time favorite book that is a must read: The millionaire fastlane by MJ Demarco. Cheesy title, but changed my life and made JangaFX possible.
Control - Do you have control over your platform? If google changes an algorithm are you screwed? If amazon deletes your store is it over for you? We have full control over our software distribution.
Entry - How hard is it to get into your business? Can someone recode your software in a day or two and ship it? JangaFX has been tremendously difficult to start and the entry barrier is very high on many levels: Preexisting knowledge, physics programming, etc.
Need - Is there a need for your product? Does it solve a very real problem? Waiting 12+ hours for a 2 second simulation is absolutely horrible. There was a massive need for EmberGen.
Time - Can you eventually divorce your time from it? Can you go on vacation for a month and the business still runs itself, or can you sell it for a massive amount of money?
Scale - How many potential customers are there? What's your ceiling? With software you have the ability to sell to the entire world.
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well, I don't mean to promote myself, but yes I think 4/15 is actually a quite good hit rate
are there any particular patterns you can observe across the 4/15 that distinguish them from the other 11/15 (either things that look necessary or things that should be avoided at all costs)?
impressive-tech people are good to have on the team, but not good to have in charge
impressive tech people are a dime a dozen. there's thousands of people who could program something like EmberGen-lite in a couple weeks. that's 1% of the work
I'd say one thing to avoid for sure is a team dominated by people who mainly want to do impressive tech stuff
yeah, if you're involved in both the tech & business side you need to be constantly asking "is this actually going to be helpful for users/customers?" when developing features - it's very easy to just rathole on "interesting problems"
if you think you can do something much better than existing solutions, that's certainly "something that may not work" (because if people knew it would work, they would do it)
Maybe a bit cheesy as a term, and it wasn't mentioned earlier specifically, but my view is there's almost always ways to "innovate" in almost all aspects of business. With the right mindset it should be possible to pick any industry, ask the people working in that industry what they struggle with or what their primary source of friction is, and then innovate and improve on what they tell you. Bonus point if you've got a foot in that industry from the get-go. Maybe this viewport has one foot in each camp, though?
I'd hazard a guess that most "spectacularly successful" businesses have massive scale potential, but that's not to say there's not a lot of room in the middle where there's potential moderate success at moderate scale (as in, not having to work another day in your life if you sell).
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impressive tech people are a dime a dozen. there's thousands of people who could program something like EmberGen-lite in a couple weeks. that's 1% of the work
Vision, execution, marketing, usability, market penetration etc all take it to the next 99%
There's always another 20%
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Unfortunately
yeah, if you're involved in both the tech & business side you need to be constantly asking "is this actually going to be helpful for users/customers?" when developing features - it's very easy to just rathole on "interesting problems"
Every time Nick says "it would be nice to have...." a kitten dies
"It would be nice to have EmberGen" thank me later
you were right once, geez
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My journey of entrepreneurship with 4coder was mostly accidental. Not that I didn't want to do an independent business - I did - but I never thought hard about how to do that. 4coder was a project that came out of my interests as a programmer, and it found enough of an audience that it sort of became a side business. I was also at a point in life where extra income was very helpful (I was attending college and paying rent) so I had some incentive to actually convert my little side project into a business.
I'll throw in a topic segue here too. As someone who has "experienced" running a business, but doesn't feel particularly skilled at that side of things, I see this as a great opportunity to learn from ya'll more successful entrepreneurs. So my first quest is, what even is entrepreneurship? Second question, what route do you take to get good at it? Is this something you can practice?
There are traditional practices that can make you a better entrepreneur, and I can touch on those in a minute. However, we should acknowledge the current environment. The modern pattern is:
(1) Software shop runs out of money, dies.
(2) Software shop gets acquired.
(3) Software shop raises outside funding, owner is no longer under full control.
This is the trend that dominates the tech industry, or am I wrong? In general, it is punishing to be independent and/or bootstrapped, but somehow this is what we want (at least that's true for me.)
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(5) Friction between owners, everything explodes
Trust me, there's a difference
There are traditional practices that can make you a better entrepreneur, and I can touch on those in a minute. However, we should acknowledge the current environment. The modern pattern is:
(1) Software shop runs out of money, dies.
(2) Software shop gets acquired.
(3) Software shop raises outside funding, owner is no longer under full control.
This is the trend that dominates the tech industry, or am I wrong? In general, it is punishing to be independent and/or bootstrapped, but somehow this is what we want (at least that's true for me.)
This sounds like that overlap between the Handmade Ethos and Entreprenuership to me. Is this ideal of being independent, bootstrapped, sustainable, etc. the handmade ethos of entreprenuership?
re: filling out the map of business concepts
we've mentioned 1 or 2, but there are a bunch of conceptual tools/frameworks for startups, many of which I think are from silicon valley... it might be interesting to consider which of these we think are actually useful and which are just fluff
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one thing that I did early on in prep for meeting an advisor was fill out a "Lean Business Model Canvas". This definitely helped give me a better overview of the different components of the business
This is counterintuitive for me, isnt technical prowess the majority of the value proposition? As in the case of Embergen, their iteration speed is a technical achievement that bests their competitors. I dont see how this can be 1% of the work as a whole. Being 1% of the work assumes it should only take 1% of your focus, or am I misinterpreting the statement?
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This is counterintuitive for me, isnt technical prowess the majority of the value proposition? As in the case of Embergen, their iteration speed is a technical achievement that bests their competitors. I dont see how this can be 1% of the work as a whole. Being 1% of the work assumes it should only take 1% of your focus, or am I misinterpreting the statement?
I think maybe the idea is that you apply handmade programming as an ethos as a part of the effort to produce the user experience. It's the same in a game -- the handmade programming is not the value-add per se, it's that it was an extremely effective way to effect that value
This is counterintuitive for me, isnt technical prowess the majority of the value proposition? As in the case of Embergen, their iteration speed is a technical achievement that bests their competitors. I dont see how this can be 1% of the work as a whole. Being 1% of the work assumes it should only take 1% of your focus, or am I misinterpreting the statement?
In the case of EmberGen, it's only a matter of time before others eventually reach our level technically, so we have to out-chess them in otherways.
The technical prowess is definitely part of the core value proposition, and we wouldn't really be successful without it, but it's impact eventually drowns in proportional to "everything else" that turns out to be important to develop, market and maintain a tool
I would clarify here, even though I realize it seems pedantic, that no customer pays you for your prowess. They only pay you for things they value. Your prowess matters to you because, used properly, it can let you provide things they value.
Most programmers, myself included, have spent months or years building out an interesting codebase without directing it towards a product, and didn't develop that skill -- even just on the technical level!
Directing it towards a product implies you have users to communicate with, and an audience that wants that product. You need to carve out a space for learning to build an audience. Send some emails, make some tweets, try some videos, write some blog posts. Send them to Discords, Hacker News, etc.
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Programmers fear the social ridicule from failed attempts at marketing, but learning to live with that fear is key to succeeding as an entrepreneur.
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The technical prowess is definitely part of the core value proposition, and we wouldn't really be successful without it, but it's impact eventually drowns in proportional to "everything else" that turns out to be important to develop, market and maintain a tool
I am hearing that good tech is a necessary - but not sufficient ingredient to an independent bootstrapped business. So what is this "everything else"?
I am hearing that good tech is a necessary - but not sufficient ingredient to an independent bootstrapped business. So what is this "everything else"?
UI, UX, marketing, scaling, and a bunch more xD
I am hearing that good tech is a necessary - but not sufficient ingredient to an independent bootstrapped business. So what is this "everything else"?
Above all, the never ending push and desire to get it done. JangaFX has been unbelievably difficult for me to continually exectue on. Many, many mistakes. Much stress. etc
In the case of EmberGen, it's only a matter of time before others eventually reach our level technically, so we have to out-chess them in otherways.
What strategies in particular were you able to use to out-chess the competition? What innovation was employed on the marketing/execution side? I'd love to know a small example if you can divulge such info. An example of a key mistake would be interesting too.
I am hearing that good tech is a necessary - but not sufficient ingredient to an independent bootstrapped business. So what is this "everything else"?
It sounds fluffy and copout-y, but when you have the time and the motivation to focus purely on the business (which is sometimes a privilege!) then you sort of just start analyzing everything that you need to Get Done, and I think it's going to vary a lot per business when we're talking smaller individual-level scale. You have a limited bandwidth anyway, so you start entering the "optimization mode" like with code where you find the 80% easy-wins and optimize them down to marginal, rinse and repeat
What needs to get done depends to some degree on what stage your business/product is at.
The Startup Owners Manual splits the key initial processes into Customer Discovery and Customer Validation (photos show pipelines for each)
bloating is also involved somehow, even though conceptually it doesn't seem required
I'm of the opinion that bloat is almost always inevitable, in terms of bloat tech debt, feature creep, or worse, and it's incredibly hard to fight the urge to scale in complexity
What strategies in particular were you able to use to out-chess the competition? What innovation was employed on the marketing/execution side? I'd love to know a small example if you can divulge such info. An example of a key mistake would be interesting too.
I think a key mistake was us prioritizing XYZ feature when we knew it would incur significant technical debt. We also had the general idea of what our tool should be but not having it super concrete has caused us to re-write it. But with this being our first successful commercial product, we have the freedom and flexibility to undo our mistakes
Programmers fear the social ridicule from failed attempts at marketing, but learning to live with that fear is key to succeeding as an entrepreneur.
How am I surviving with Handmade Seattle when I don't have any company sponsors? When I don't have a YouTube channel? First I acknowledge the power of the Handmade brand, but that's never enough to pay rent long-term. The answer is lots of pings and emails after following these steps:
(1) Subscribe to feeds that talk about anything related to your product. You're already a programmer, so build up your own custom feed. Imagine receiving email notifications from special keywords from Twitter and Hacker News.
(2) Manually hunt for blog posts and social media in addition to the automatic feed from #1.
(3) Start connecting with people. "Oh hey, I understand exactly what you're going through. That's why I'm building X, Y, and Z. Wanna check it out sometime?"
With #3 you start building professional relationships (gasp all on your own! )
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Loris Cro recently gave me the revelation that the purpose of Twitter is literally just for companies to track their brand's performance!
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I know you might immediately feel "icky" because of so many SEO experts and small CEOs out there doing the same thing. Like cold-calling or cold-emailing people.
Unlike me, who hangs up if it's an unknown number (or ignores it if I know who it is, more often than not). There's a reason Nick is the CEO xD
very true... and along with potential social stigma, the results of marketing are far less concrete, repeatable or immediate than with the types of problems programmers are used to dealing with
That's right. I think this is a good time for @demetrispanos's poker analogy when it comes to social skills.
Over the years this builds into a loose but powerful network that cares about you.
Unfortunately my network is pretty loose these days
Someone make a rolodex software with notes and grabs convos from every platform out there
Big money idea, who's going to take it?
most of my business has come, one way or another, downstream of some kind of networking
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this is an article from a friend of mine who, amusingly, wrote this as a consequence of me meeting him randomly through a HN post https://www.codusoperandi.com/posts/increasing-your-luck-surface-area
Seems to follow my philosophy that the more quarters you put into the golden gumball machine, the more golden gumballs you have a chance to accrue
I don't want to give exact numbers, but it was the best month in terms of sudden revenue in Handmade Seattle history. Ticket sales and donations poured in in a way that I never expected. For anyone lost, I did a ban on language talks for this year, expecting I would piss off a lot of people and lose customers: https://vimeo.com/737044714
@philliptrudeau And I also learned that some people were getting tired of systems programming conferences oriented around a single language. cppcon, pycon, RustConf, cppnorth, etc.
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oh I meant more of a percentage, not exact values, but understandable if you dont want to divulge that.
That's an interesting question. @Nick Seavert - JangaFX how comfortable are we supposed to be, as entrepreneurs, with sharing financials?
actually the entire "Autodesk Book" is useful reading for aspiring entrepreneurs
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actually the entire "Autodesk Book" is useful reading for aspiring entrepreneurs
I try to live by this one in particular
One thing that gets emphasized is having a "minimal viable product" early to get feedback from potential users.
We've had discussions around MVPs on the servers before, and it seems like people here prefer the similar concept of a "vertical slice".
Either way, it's something that demonstrates what you think are the key selling points of your product...
This is easier with some things than others - if you have a high latency web tool like Airbnb, the MVP's 'processing' can be faked with the founders manually finding matches.
If you're making something that requires technical excellence to demonstrate its value, you don't really have this option, so an MVP has to involve a dramatic (temporary) cutting off scope.
I'm curious what the initial JangaFX demos looked like and what @mv and @Nick Seavert - JangaFX focused on for them
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One thing that gets emphasized is having a "minimal viable product" early to get feedback from potential users.
We've had discussions around MVPs on the servers before, and it seems like people here prefer the similar concept of a "vertical slice".
Either way, it's something that demonstrates what you think are the key selling points of your product...
This is easier with some things than others - if you have a high latency web tool like Airbnb, the MVP's 'processing' can be faked with the founders manually finding matches.
If you're making something that requires technical excellence to demonstrate its value, you don't really have this option, so an MVP has to involve a dramatic (temporary) cutting off scope.
I'm curious what the initial JangaFX demos looked like and what @mv and @Nick Seavert - JangaFX focused on for them
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vs
Nah, beta actually had nodes
how long into development was this and what features did you exclude in the process of getting there?
I can't really say we excluded anything at that point. We shortly touched on the unknowns and lack of initial direction before, and we didn't really know what the final product would need/have
@Nick Seavert - JangaFX sorry about your experience, the few people I do know in entrepreneurial endeavors all have some story of how a friendship was compromised due to their pursuit. Not for this to be a morbid tangent.
For practical advice that might help tiny teams that are starting out: It's helpful to set out explicit ground rules about decisionmaking/onboarding/etc., and a clear separation of responsibilities. (Also, get stuff like contracts written out early if you can -- I know talking on Slack/Discord can be pretty chill, but one of your team members is eventually gonna be in a difficult situation, and you want everyone to be on the same page by then!)
How do you ensure they feel like you won't sue them, and how do you ensure you feel your trade secrets are safe?
as a first approximation, there is nothing you can do that is economically rational
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Started out as "hey i'm doing this thing, would you want it to be a jangafx project?
Lets not forget this person has a small stake in the company and has financial incentives in including it in our portfolio. Taking an arbitrary employee's idea and running with isn't as easy without proper compensation
I thought it died years ago, but turns out it died yesterday lol
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We cover our ass via contracts
Which contract templates do you recommend, if any? Did you hire a lawyer to figure that out? Say I want @Zeanith to contribute to my terminal emulator codebase. What's a useful way to ensure that my codebase is still owned by me? And then Zeanith also wants to reuse specific implementations that he developed on the job. I should probably be okay with that, but this feels like it's getting hairy.
Be safe, dont hire @Zeanith
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Which contract templates do you recommend, if any? Did you hire a lawyer to figure that out? Say I want @Zeanith to contribute to my terminal emulator codebase. What's a useful way to ensure that my codebase is still owned by me? And then Zeanith also wants to reuse specific implementations that he developed on the job. I should probably be okay with that, but this feels like it's getting hairy.
one of you will own the code in question, but they can give the other person an infinite license to do what they want with it
For our game I used https://docontract.com/ just to have a dead simple agreement in writing. The contractor is the one who retains the rights to their work, but they grant the company perpetual license to redistribute the work (i.e., sell the game content on all platforms) as Andrew just said.
For our game I used https://docontract.com/ just to have a dead simple agreement in writing. The contractor is the one who retains the rights to their work, but they grant the company perpetual license to redistribute the work (i.e., sell the game content on all platforms) as Andrew just said.
this is IMO too friendly to the contractor
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if I'm paying for you to build it, I own it, end of story
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if I'm paying for you to build it, I own it, end of story
This has given me a lot of clarity. Thank you
Still is to this day
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It's kind of like the time we wrote a letter to the IRS telling them that we were sorry and they let us off the hook
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In August they closed my business account and revoked my license 
Took a lot of stress off of me
My final advice on legal stuff is this: I knew a lawyer representing a very large international company and they told me "We're all just guessing, so pick which guess you want"
This is not legal advice, i'm not going to get sued by you, etc etcâĒïļ
(when I was writing the post we were still talking about IP and not taxes 
)
)
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I think this can segue into something very near and dear to my heart. Let's say there are projects you want to do, that at a technical level will clearly be a benefit to a lot of people, but there's very little obvious way to commoditize them?
For example, say you're building something in the core tool chain like a programming language, object file format, debug file format, linker, etc. Producing documentation for existing formats, utility libraries to make better analysis of these kinds of data, etc. etc. When I look at these sorts of projects the biggest problem is that they cost money to build but I see no way to make money from them without killing the entire benefit of the project, which is making it more likely that all the software out there dealing with this core tool chain works well.
What is a handmade programmer to do?
I was just about to ask about segueing into funding. Casey used to have a Handmade Fund that he unfortunately wound down, due to this reason.
I think this can segue into something very near and dear to my heart. Let's say there are projects you want to do, that at a technical level will clearly be a benefit to a lot of people, but there's very little obvious way to commoditize them?
For example, say you're building something in the core tool chain like a programming language, object file format, debug file format, linker, etc. Producing documentation for existing formats, utility libraries to make better analysis of these kinds of data, etc. etc. When I look at these sorts of projects the biggest problem is that they cost money to build but I see no way to make money from them without killing the entire benefit of the project, which is making it more likely that all the software out there dealing with this core tool chain works well.
What is a handmade programmer to do?
the Zig lot seem to be doing a pretty good job with this
Also, if you want to be the tech guy, hire a CEO
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I think this can segue into something very near and dear to my heart. Let's say there are projects you want to do, that at a technical level will clearly be a benefit to a lot of people, but there's very little obvious way to commoditize them?
For example, say you're building something in the core tool chain like a programming language, object file format, debug file format, linker, etc. Producing documentation for existing formats, utility libraries to make better analysis of these kinds of data, etc. etc. When I look at these sorts of projects the biggest problem is that they cost money to build but I see no way to make money from them without killing the entire benefit of the project, which is making it more likely that all the software out there dealing with this core tool chain works well.
What is a handmade programmer to do?
in the worst-case revenue scenarios (like indie games), i think peopleâs strategy is to just spin up their full-time funding grind. reaching out to interested parties, government grants, publishers, etc. and going through their song and dance to get the next bit of funding. It is a challenge to maintain the handmade ethos along the way, though, as more investors ask more of your product.
I don't regret learning Vulkan, but it prevented me from iterating on interesting features for too long
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I don't regret learning Vulkan, but it prevented me from iterating on interesting features for too long
Is this the double-edged sword @mv alluded to? Basically iteration speed over deep reengineering for technical prowess? I guess a handmade dev should be aware that this is a tradeoff, although we seem to generally skew heavily towards technical prowess.
Is this the double-edged sword @mv alluded to? Basically iteration speed over deep reengineering for technical prowess? I guess a handmade dev should be aware that this is a tradeoff, although we seem to generally skew heavily towards technical prowess.
not too sure tbh. rather, the double edged sword is often a predisposition for doing 80% solutions, as you don't know what the other 80% is, and you just can't know what will eventually be needed. If you keep going for too long without mending past mistakes (with hindsight) you basically get tech debt galore
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I love this, except "from scraps" sounds pretty bad from a marketing perspective!
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from hand
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So you don't build everything from scratch with WhiteBox? Only parts you consider to be core to the main selling point?
ha, well... just having a look at our list of submodules:
- a bunch of internal things that got pulled out
- Dear Imgui - very useful for bootstrapping UI, although we may end up doing our own at some point
- @herose's command-line argument parser
- sheredom/json.h - we only use small quantities of JSON, this is a good simple library and it's not worth my time to make a custom one
- mattiasgustavsson's thread library (good bootstrap, may change)
- stb (enough said)
- tinyfiledialogs - a useful OS-agnostic bootstrap, may change
- SQLite - Dan Luu's article on file writing freaked me out a bit and I wanted to make sure we had something that worked reliably
- LLVM & Clang - core to the tool, but writing a better full C++ compiler is not really feasible for me... and even if it was we'd have to replicate Clang's functionality
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Wanna buy a license to our UI?
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ha, well... just having a look at our list of submodules:
- a bunch of internal things that got pulled out
- Dear Imgui - very useful for bootstrapping UI, although we may end up doing our own at some point
- @herose's command-line argument parser
- sheredom/json.h - we only use small quantities of JSON, this is a good simple library and it's not worth my time to make a custom one
- mattiasgustavsson's thread library (good bootstrap, may change)
- stb (enough said)
- tinyfiledialogs - a useful OS-agnostic bootstrap, may change
- SQLite - Dan Luu's article on file writing freaked me out a bit and I wanted to make sure we had something that worked reliably
- LLVM & Clang - core to the tool, but writing a better full C++ compiler is not really feasible for me... and even if it was we'd have to replicate Clang's functionality
Here's mine for Terminal Click:
- @rxi's microui - Heavily extended.
- microui_sokol.h - My sokol gfx renderer for microui. This is what lets me compile down to Metal, DirectX, etc.
- Sokol (obviously)
- stb (enough said)
- @Allen4th's OS platform layer. I extended it to support terminal operations.
- zig build - Used as a drop-in C/ C++ compiler
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Thank god we hired RXI
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Thank god we hired RXI
on the assumption that people here err towards doing things themselves... I think it's worth paying attention to which components of your product are core to its main selling point and strongly considering using pre-existing components for everything else
I think this is the primary tension between handmade and doing business (at least in the for-profit way). If I have a product that I want to ship and I'm willing to go with "good enough" here and "good enough" there to get it done, I have a better chance of ending up with a successful product on time. But if I want to chase down every opportunity to make better components, I could be making it possible for better products to exist in the future, but have a much harder time making that a traditional for-profit business. What does everyone think about this?
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I don't think there's anything wrong with making money! I just wish I could make money chasing down the things that I think would be most beneficial, which I often don't see in alignment with making money. (and I know saying that makes me a bad capitalist)
the problem is that if other people don't see the things as valuable, it can't be a business :)
I think this is the primary tension between handmade and doing business (at least in the for-profit way). If I have a product that I want to ship and I'm willing to go with "good enough" here and "good enough" there to get it done, I have a better chance of ending up with a successful product on time. But if I want to chase down every opportunity to make better components, I could be making it possible for better products to exist in the future, but have a much harder time making that a traditional for-profit business. What does everyone think about this?
This is a really important question. Working on Happenlance, we thought Box2D would be âgood enoughâ, but once we built out rollback netcode, box2d fell apart in multiple ways, and took huge engineering effort to fit to our needs. And thatâs actually to do with product success directly, let alone the higher ideals! How do we set up components that help the businessâs success long-term?
Yes I understand that's the problem! The question is if the motivation is to do the project, rather than to be a business, how do I move forward? How do I use entrepreneurship as a means rather than as the end?
then you sell your brand
I really wonder if it's reasonable to expect the technical things like you're working on to ever be a serious business model on their own
I do too. That's why I'm asking. Applying handmade as a way to make a better business seems to work (JangaFX case in point). What I'm trying to pivot to is can I use the skills of an entrepreneur in any way to make better handmade passion projects?
then you sell your brand
what might a "brand" look like in this context? I don't really follow
what might a "brand" look like in this context? I don't really follow
Establish itself as a person whom others value. Content creator/niche microcelebrity/etc. Itâs a big responsibility
what might a "brand" look like in this context? I don't really follow
a practical definition of a brand is all the expectations and values people associate with you, so e.g. with Allen perhaps good programming and working on tools
people who value allen's brand may be willing to give allen money to be allen
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I think part of JangaFX' success is that its tied a bit to me as its face/brand leader thing
you changed your handle for this event didn't you xD
what happened to separate business from personal stuff
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This is business
Being a content creator is almost a full-time job. I interviewed Randy recently (Professor Rework) and he burned out even though he amassed ~300k YouTube subscribers and could make videos that pulled in 1.1M views
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So this is a legitimate concern. Not trying to say @Allen4th shouldn't try being a content creator celebrity, but clearly there's a danger to be aware of here
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people who value allen's brand may be willing to give allen money to be allen
at what scale though. there's not really enough of an infrastructure and "userbase" to support something like that to a meaningful degree is there? unless you're doing Renderdoc or dear imgui or something - already bankrolled by big companies to some extent
I do to. That's why I'm asking. Applying handmade as a way to make a better business seems to work (JengaFX case in point). What I'm trying to pivot to is can I use the skills of an entrepreneur in any way to make better handmade passion projects?
I believe this is what @Nick Seavert - JangaFX mentioned about the "other half" of the problem. One needs to market, promote, have an ego if you will about your passion project publicly. Clearly state the value proposition and demonstrate it. I'm curious how JangaFX went from zero to one. It was basically a passion project with the beginning $300. Who was the first customer and how did you attract them?
First customer was a guy who randomly saw my youtube video of a crappy vector field editor i'd made myself
there we go
Building our email list was so, so integral to our success
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Building our email list was so, so integral to our success
may I suggest (hat tip to my friend @simp) zukowski's series on how to market a game, which is actually generally applicable
We followed this model closely for Happenlance starting out.
Building our email list was so, so integral to our success
Can you elaborate on what this means? I hear people say it a lot. What's an email list, how do you build it, and what does it do for you?
working out what you can make easy for yourself do to promote yourself/your product regularly is important
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Yes, once again, you can use your programming skills for this.
dangerous
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obligatory XKCD 'Automating' comes from the roots 'auto-' meaning 'self-', and 'mating', meaning 'screwing'.
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I believe this is what @Nick Seavert - JangaFX mentioned about the "other half" of the problem. One needs to market, promote, have an ego if you will about your passion project publicly. Clearly state the value proposition and demonstrate it. I'm curious how JangaFX went from zero to one. It was basically a passion project with the beginning $300. Who was the first customer and how did you attract them?
Also its important to charge what you're worth. We were selling VectorayGen back in the day for \$199 to studios. When we raised the price to like \$700 we immediately started getting sales from large studios as they then figured it was a valuable product
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There's a story behind it. Met a guy in whole foods bread isle. We talked and i went to his office. I toured his software company office and he said he wanted to see my website. He saw my pricing, told me to open my wallet. I did, no money in it. He said you see your pricing? You see your wallet? Now you know why you're broke.
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Also its important to charge what you're worth. We were selling VectorayGen back in the day for \$199 to studios. When we raised the price to like \$700 we immediately started getting sales from large studios as they then figured it was a valuable product
yeah pricing is something we haven't gone into much, and it's something of a dark art
I find all this interesting. The "brand" approach is the only real idea I've had for achieving what I'm looking to achieve. I sort of expected ya'll would say there was a much better route, and instead it sounds like you're thinking the same thing.
well its not necessarily the only way. @demetrispanos mentioned angel investing in people he knew, although to do that I'm assuming you have to formalize the business proposition a lot more than just having a passion project. I believe everyone is advising the safer route.
Can you elaborate on what this means? I hear people say it a lot. What's an email list, how do you build it, and what does it do for you?
We hyped the shit out of EmberGen. "Wow look at this REAL TIME fluid simulation! This is going to blow your minds. Learn more at our website. People go to website and see a form to sign up to get an early access invite when its ready". 6,000+ people signed up over 5 or 6 months.
yeah pricing is something we haven't gone into much, and it's something of a dark art
I asked a question about pricing to the creators of Basecamp and Hey Mail! They answer it here (you can Ctrl+F for Abner): https://www.rework.fm/sell-your-by-products-season-2/
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One of the answers I liked: "Iâd say one heuristic we used in the early days, in particular, was this, would I pay for it? Would I pull out my credit card if someone else was offering this product?"
ïļ You'd be surprised how far this gets you.
ïļ You'd be surprised how far this gets you.
"you spend \$100 on this, but my product costs \$50 and solves the problem better, so I'm really just handing you free money and making your life better"
that's like 1 hour saved
well its not necessarily the only way. @demetrispanos mentioned angel investing in people he knew, although to do that I'm assuming you have to formalize the business proposition a lot more than just having a passion project. I believe everyone is advising the safer route.
I was trying to ask "what do you do when you don't see how to generate income?" expecting advice on how to monetize things that don't seem easy to monetize. Instead everyone said, "if you must do such a project, you'll need a brand." Suggesting to me that my intuition that these things can't be income generators was right after all.
I was trying to ask "what do you do when you don't see how to generate income?" expecting advice on how to monetize things that don't seem easy to monetize. Instead everyone said, "if you must do such a project, you'll need a brand." Suggesting to me that my intuition that these things can't be income generators was right after all.
I suspect do need some side thing to fund the uncertain / technical things. Heck, tons of foundational technology came out of Bell Labs, as telecommunications research. So maybe a company + research, maybe a brand...
and there are mechanistic ways to become good at selling
any particular pointers, sensei?
maybe a government... 
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I have a long book list, let me dig a few up, but the top recommendation is definitely question based selling
also
- ca$hvertising (yes the name is horrible, deal with it)
- one sentence persuasion course
- NO BS price strategy
- priceless: the myth of fair value
- breakthrough advertising
- to sell is human
- crossing the chasm
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Anyway, that's a wrap for me. I have to head out now. If anyone ever wants to chat just DM me
Thanks for putting this together!
Thanks for putting this together!
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and you need to face that reality
I think phillip is right though that this is a central question for much of the handmade audience
perhaps you can use the no-spare-money-people as a marketing force
see: giving your product away to students for free
see also: "oh no, people are pirating our precious Photoshop 
"
"
definitionally, people with no spare money cannot give you any
Directly. Potentially indirect value
Okay, so one big problem I have observed is that much of the toolchain on both Windows and Unix environments is either poorly documented because the developers dropped the ball (Windows) or highly over documented because of a long history of legacy and over generality (Unix). This makes things like binary analysis, writing assemblers, disassemblers, linkers, etc a huge dark art. Fixing this is a lot of work (costs $) but I'm not sure who would pay for it. The benefit would be that lots of other parts of the tool chain could be built more efficiently, people could learn this stuff from clearer resources and come up with new innovative projects, etc. But who in this system would pay for that work?
in the same way some open source devs have a "crowdpay for an upcoming feature", you could do a "crowdpay for documenting X". The payment acts both as a voting mechanism for what people want, and you can have a threshold for how much you're willing to do the thing for.
if people aren't willing to pay for it then it may not be worthwhile...
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Okay, so one big problem I have observed is that much of the toolchain on both Windows and Unix environments is either poorly documented because the developers dropped the ball (Windows) or highly over documented because of a long history of legacy and over generality (Unix). This makes things like binary analysis, writing assemblers, disassemblers, linkers, etc a huge dark art. Fixing this is a lot of work (costs $) but I'm not sure who would pay for it. The benefit would be that lots of other parts of the tool chain could be built more efficiently, people could learn this stuff from clearer resources and come up with new innovative projects, etc. But who in this system would pay for that work?
this sounds, to me, like something best done within some large organization that can take risks on long time scales
Okay, so one big problem I have observed is that much of the toolchain on both Windows and Unix environments is either poorly documented because the developers dropped the ball (Windows) or highly over documented because of a long history of legacy and over generality (Unix). This makes things like binary analysis, writing assemblers, disassemblers, linkers, etc a huge dark art. Fixing this is a lot of work (costs $) but I'm not sure who would pay for it. The benefit would be that lots of other parts of the tool chain could be built more efficiently, people could learn this stuff from clearer resources and come up with new innovative projects, etc. But who in this system would pay for that work?
to some extent, Jon Blow is trying to establish a non-crappy toolchain via the new programming language for games, but sadly that's sort of an angel-investment on the part of the company! 
But consider the best case for Allen's proposition. You empower an entire generation of developers to be more productive with a not necessarily lower barrier to entry, but a better defined one.
paul graham has a famous essay "where there's muck there's brass", in which he says (among other things) that things like programming languages are natural non-businesses because you have too many people willing to do them for free
The reason I want to find another way, outside of large organizations, is that what we're getting now is the result of leaving it up them. This is that timeline.
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It may not be a problem that can be solved, but it seems to me like one that's worth trying to solve. Hence why I'm asking probably naive questions.
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Dogfooding the better product like Thekla plans to do might be another business strategy, but it necessitates two products at once.
Quick note: AFAICT Jon self-funds so much of his work, to hire help etc. and then raises capital from wealthy friends who trust Jon to do whatever. However, it does sound like @Allen4th is working on a budget and savings so there should be some resources there.
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It may not be a problem that can be solved, but it seems to me like one that's worth trying to solve. Hence why I'm asking probably naive questions.
I think it's very good for people to ask "is it possible to build a flying machine", but those people need to understand gravity and aerodynamics to do so
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It may not be a problem that can be solved, but it seems to me like one that's worth trying to solve. Hence why I'm asking probably naive questions.
I think a real world example of this is Handmade Hero. No way was that worth Casey's time but it spawned this entire community, although that was marketed the traditional way.
"why will someone pay you" and "how will they know they want to pay you" are the "gravity" and "aerodynamics" of making something a business
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the product and the marketing... 
I think, among existing solutions, there are already several balances that a person can strike -- B2B vs B2C, crowdfunder vs. investment vs. bootstrapper, product-builder vs. content-creator -- that give handmade devs a lot of freedom, so it's a very promising space
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Super honoured to be here! Thanks everyone 
Thanks for organizing this @bvisness and thanks everyone for being a part of this discussion. Happy we explored this topic, it lit a fire in me at least
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This felt like an explosion of bottled-up feelings about entrepreneurship and running a business
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Thanks for organizing @bvisness! And for the suggestion to do this @Zeanith
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thanks everyone - lots of interesting things raised... I'm off to get some more books Cheers for organising it @bvisness and for the suggestion @Zeanith
Cheers for organising it @bvisness and for the suggestion @Zeanith
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