A Simple Way To Go Faster Than Light That Does Not Work

I have been chained to my Mac for several days working on cool stuff, as evidenced by recent posts. We're setting up the groundwork for profoundly nifty things, but first we gotta make the revenue model exist, and with both scheduling and forums online there's really nothing else to keep me from diving into it.

The venture group I was so hopeful about wrote to invite us to contact them them again in a couple of months, after our numbers had built up some. That puts two potential big investors into the future, waiting to see if we can walk the walk. As far as I'm concerned, this frees us to stop looking for capital right now and instead concentrate on growth. The revenue sharing system is just a tool for growth, here, one of many.

Growth's been falling off after some nice July spikes due to post-Origins publicity, but between my recent volity.net work and some other ideas I have, we can turn it around this month.

How are all of you doing, you who are working on Volity games? There are still only two published Volity developers, the same number as there's been for the last four months. This fact continues to frustrate and concern me.

This does too, to a lesser extent: We've sold exactly 0 games and 1 piece of merch to total strangers. (Our friends have bought a few of each.) Yes, it's not our main revenue plan, but really I'd have thought the goods would move a little faster.

Continuing to wildly vacillate between letting recent good things put me into a good and optimistic mood, and feeling that I'm burning my life away on an enormous misguided notion and it's high time I apply my creativity into something more immediate. I think it's directly tied to the position of the sun in the sky.

Maybe I should start making Volity Currents...

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After making the forums go live I decided I was going stir-crazy, and so fled. dictator555 and classicaljunkie joined me in walking around west Somerville for an hour or so. We walked all the way up to my first apartment at 15 Highland and nearly got run over by two kids on a bicycle. I saw an enormous stag beetle, and drank a coffee.

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Late last night, after hours and hours of work, I was pushing myself to complete just a few more things when I had the sensation that I was tumbling backwards. Was actually simply sitting down at the time, and my automatic reaction of leaning forwards a split-second later counteracted it. It was scary and unnerving! I wonder what caused it.

VC dood just emailed me a rejection despite his earlier invitation to meet again. To be fair, I believe that he (incorrectly) thought he'd have time to meet again with us before his screening group's Monday meeting. But they did end up meeting first, and drummed us out, so I suppose it's more efficient this way. Blat.

So we're back down to one interested potential post-seed investor, angel #2. This one is unlike the others in that he overtly wants us to succeed, which is very good, but guarantees nothing, and having only one degree of potential is too few for comfort.

I will this week pursue the homework assignment that angel #2 gave me, and which we refined on our Monday staff meeting - I get to write Perl scripts to mull jabber access logs and database tables and generate reports by god and I'm looking forward to it. This will lead to our having a real funding schedule. Right now, this is what it looks like:

[✓] Collect seed funding
[✓] Launch public beta
[ ] Collect all the other funding we'll ever need and then some
[ ] ???
[ ] Exit!

It has been pointed out to us that it starts out nice, and it ends nice, but that bit in the middle could use some refinement. So we're going to take out those middle two steps and replace them with several couplets of this template:

1. Collect $FUNDING to meet $MILESTONE
2. Meet $MILESTONE before $DATE

Where $FUNDING, in every case, is a figure significantly less than the bignum we've been tossing around lately.

The meeting with angel #2 (from same outfit as angel #1, and no relation to VC dood) was interesting. Still no resolution as to our ultimate fate but we picked up some clues and heard some unexpected things about fundraising from the mouth of a potential investor (who has the ear of many more people like him).

Take-aways:
* To paraphrase, "WTF, your spreadsheet has you spending two million dollars in 18 months? You don't need to buy the Internets before you publish to them, you know. Fix this."
* Our expectations for funding delivery does not reflect the world as this angel group understands it to be. Rather than write a check for half a mil and calling it done, they'd rather see a plan where they can drip in a bit at each milestone.

He has bade me to rework some stuff and get back to him. Our ideas and our overall business plan are great and well-defined, but now people are looking at our numbers and our timeline, and seeing that AFATCT they are either wrong or missing. OK, fine. We can fix that.

I am full of energy and it is very strange energy. Up until now the promise of funding has been a psychological fence between where we are now and setting up the revenue-earning stuff. I will take this fence down now; we need to press ahead. Things will get Interesting, after Origins.

I think we can make this work. I have... a lot to do.

Unavoidably this leads again into thoughts of "shit I wish we had another employee". A challenge ahead is selling all this to the Andys, especially the part-timer who I will undoubtedly try to convince to quit his lucrative day job before we have six digits in the bank. There may be no giant bag of money, maybe instead a twilit trail of smaller ones winding through the wood, but either way we really need him. He's the air element of our Invisibles cell.

What's plain-and-simple bad news is that I am nearly out of personal savings. If we don't get some solid funding by next month, but we switch to a more gradual funding scheme, then I'm still going to have to pick up a programming contract or something. If I am careful and wise about it - I have done this before - then will not result in overall slowdowns in Volity. It's too bad I may need to do it this way, though.

Andys and I went to a presentation last night about seeking angel funds. It was at MIT's Kresge Auditorim, and there was a 90-minute networking session scheduled in front of it. This was supposed to be in a big tent set up outside, but heavy rain moved it into the lobby, which therefore ended up packed with hundreds of people for the duration.

Ironically this made it kind of hard to start any conversations. Not counting meeting up with our friend J, I had only three: greeting a fellow I had met at last week's startup clinic, talking to some random friendly guy who was just there because he liked to talk to entrepreneurs, and then again with another guy trying to launch a company around a single board game. Well, you can imagine what my reaction to that was. Gave him a meaty follow-up pitch via email this morning... might follow up some more with a call later if I don't hear back.

Call it a practice run for Origins.

The presentation was pretty good, even a little entertaining. Had some lively moments. No major insights, but a enough take-aways to fill the backs of three of my new business cards (coz I neglected to bring a notebook).

Then the four of us retired to the Cambridge Common for beer and meat and nurdy chatter. Came home and went bed before 1, so exhausted was I.

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At some point before all of this I managed to call slacker guy, and left voice mail. daerr correctly sez I gotta try earlier in the day. I hate it so much though... bleah.

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You may have noticed that in my networking stories so far I have spoken only to men. It's happened to come out that way, even though there are always women at these events (though they always make up significantly less than half the crowd). I was just now thinking about how I felt an odd instant of repulsion every time I saw a lady entrepreneur walk past yesterday, just long enough for me to let her go. Why was this?

My first insight is that I instinctively wanted to avoid feeling like I was hitting on anyone! Even now that I'm thinking it through I have to admit it seems a little skeevy: sidling up, drink in hand, to one of these women, and while looming down with a big grin (for I am most likely gonna be several inches taller) saying "So tell me what you do, over there in, uh," at which point I overtly eye her chest in order to read the name and company off her tag.

I know it's foolish, though its heart be in the right place. I will attend my next networking session with this new bit of self-knowledge, and see what might happen differently. Surely I can find a way to act that creeps out neither party.

(It probably doesn't help that the presentation's panelists, men and women both, really liked to compare the entrepreneur/capital relationship to dating and marriage.)

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Got up around 8am today (a feat I'll have to repeat tomorrow, except moreso) and spent the morning writing various businessy email and the afternoon and evening working on our store. This is the bit that will sell the inventory of partners' games that we have, all the Fluxx decks and such. Collected some good advice from friend and fellow entrepreneur Mr. Jivjiv and set up a merchant account with PayPal because it's very easy to do so. They accept lots of payment types, and their basic service has no setup, cancellation, or recurring fees. The commissions they extract from purchases is moderately high, but I think it's still a great place to start, and we can switch to something better when we find it.

It's not online yet... will be going up alongside all the other new webstuff I've been doodling with over the last couple of weeks as soon as someone else manages some bugfixes. (I've been saying that one a lot, haven't I. I'll press the issue over the weekend and will see what happens.)

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Tomorrow meeting at the office at 8 and moving on to a local VC outfit to meet with VC guy. I'd be asleep now but I'm waiting for daerr to stop putting out other people's fires at his job so he can help me fix the damn projection spreadsheet that I messed up last month argh.

The presentation on Wednesday made me even more skeptical about the utility of this meeting, since I'm fairly positive that we don't want to come near any VC money and all the strings usually attached to it, just as I'm sure that we're asking far too little for any VC to think we're worth their time. But our asking figure was right there in the summary I mailed him. Assuming that he actually read it, maybe he has something else in mind? Well, we'll see very soon. Wish us the best!

Having caught someone's interest within, I submitted a level-two application to one of the angel groups yesterday. If we're just as good as everyone else who got a form to fill in, our chances of being invited to give a presentation are maybe 15 percent. I like to think our pitch is better than everyone else's, but it's a variable completely outside of my control -- maybe the other 14 applicants are all cancer cures -- so the confident speech that aspartaimee and the Andys have been training me to pour into my business writing falters here.

daerr thinks we impressed the fellow with whom we met on Thursday, so assumedly he'll put in a good word for us. We'll see... I'm told that they'll get back to me, and everyone from the group has been very good about communication so far. (I take this as a hopeful sign, since this same group was among those to silently ignore my application last fall.)

D and I had coffee this evening and talked a lot about what to do next with volity.net, now that Gamut is able to respond safely to Web browser links (on Mac and Windows, anyway). I'm energized with ideas and direction but I also feel doomed. It's tough to hack on Volity when our financial fate is so uncertain. I told him that I felt like I was rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic, but that's actually not the best metaphor. It's more like I'm feeding Schrödinger's Cat.

Last November, we figured that June was our drop-dead deadline for having funds. Well, it's June, and we don't have a check in hand yet... but we do have at least a couple of sources sniffing interestedly at us, and it's not like we're flat out of seed yet. I call this schedule slip. We can handle this.

I saw Touch of Evil last night with daerr. I liked it and recommend it, though can't call it a great movie because the whole Janet Leigh subplot is kind of dopey. (LITERALLY HA HA.) Excellent and stylish piece of noir, though. Try to see the less-bastardized cut that was assembled in 1998; this is what the TiVo grabbed from TCM.

The movie is personally notable since I remembered seeing the beginning of it many many years ago at the home of a friend of my mother's, maybe in Florida. I was bored, and she put in the movie for me, thinking that I'd like a story that begins with a car blowing up. I remember _exactly_ the car blow-up scene, and also the fact that the movie was old, black-and-white, and boring outside of the exploding cars, of which there was only the one. I had forgotten the title, so it was funny to see it was that movie, and of course I liked it much more this time.

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It occurred to me that learning Inform 7 by porting 1999's Calliope to it is not a terrible idea. I have started to do this, and am having a great time.

Looking over my old game is interesting. I remember it as being somewhat embarrassing crap, but it's actually a tight and often clever little exercise. The main problem with it is that its basic premise is somewhat inaccessible, and terribly naive. At the time, I truly thought that everyone would love a game about writing games! with another game inside it!! Also I thought that putting "I wrote this to learn Inform" in the intro text would be a smart move, too.

Well, whatever. It's fun.

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Applied to two more angel groups last night. Hm, there's one left that I can think of, and I'll hit them today or tomorrow. There's a kind of futility in this because an unsolicited funding application is a lot like an unsolicited manuscript submitted to a publisher. They're obliged to look at it, but its chances of getting caught in a first-pass filter is very high, no matter how "good" it is.

Actually, it's a little worse than that. Professional tradition dictates that publishers at least send you a rejection slip, which can sometimes hold helpful advice on it if the editor felt moved to provide some. Capital groups are under no such expectation and usually just ignore everyone they're not interested in having a conversation with.

On the other hand, experience suggests that the capital groups remember previous applications, whether or not the acknowledge them. Since I applied to a bunch last year, I'm taking the opportunity to frame my cover letter as "Remember me?", detailing all that we've done as a company since I last darkened their doorstep. (Which is quite a lot, actually.)

The solution is to go to more networking mixers. Prerequisite to this is business cards. We will have these soon. I hope.

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No lack of other stuff to do in the meantime. Still haven't fleshed out the plan outline at all, and I have a real deadline now, since I'd like to be able to bring it to a meeting with a money dude that's coming up on the 7th. This is the only money-dude meeting on the calendar, and the only thing we've got going for us is that I last year impressed someone else at $MONEY_DUDE_PLACE who is no longer there. I feel both hopeful and not hopeful about this.

A good business meeting last night. But with half a month to go, and less than half of our goal met, it's time to bust out my inner jerk. Email poke-n-prod campaign to follow immediately.

I spent most of yesterday bringing our business plan up to date (written in August, it still thought that going wireless was our main goal) and daerr is currently finishing the spreadsheet that details how we're carving up our initial units pool. This will get shuttled off to Ted, our new lawyer, who will do magical and sadly expensive things.

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Also have been using the DS wireless for the first time, and a lot, now that the little flip-top systems are finally starting to appear in the hands of local friends. Got to play both kinds of multiplayer Meteos: "DS Download Play" with a friend who didn't have his own copy of the cartridge, and straight-up Vs. Play with one who did. Download play was quite limited and rather lame, but Vs. was a blast and we played it a lot; I reportedly got this friend to actually like the game, making him feel better about buying it. (Which is good, since I'm the one who recommended it to him.)

And I picked up Mario Kart DS today, letting me try out Nintendo's brand-new Internet service. Have had a bunch of races against unseen folks, and it seems to work great, though it's not like any online game I've played yet.

I know little about how the thing works (yet -- I have a professional interest in reading up on this, actually), and question the apparent fact that it doesn't feature any sort of skill-based matchmaking that I can see. Of course, if it does, I wouldn't know yet, since I'm new to the system and it wouldn't have had a chance to gauge my ability yet. In the last race I played, one person was clearly somewhat better than me -- not so much that I have reason to complain -- while the other two racers just stunk. I have no idea what metric it used, if any, to toss us all together.

I was a little surprised and quite intrigued to see that there's no lobby; to begin racing, your only option is to select which pool of players you'd like your opponents to come from ("Regional" (the default), "Worldwide", "Friends", or "Rivals"), and let the network do the rest. It sticks you in a bin, then (after several seconds) drops in three playmates, and off you go. No obvious way to tell who people are (besides whatever handle they give themselves) or say hello; there is only racing. Again, I've only messed with it a little and haven't read the docs, so I could be missing something.

My friend code is: 326476971938. So apparently if you have a copy of this game yourself, you can punch this in and then you will become my "friend". Maybe I'm not supposed to blog this? I don't know. I assume you can also do this to name someone your "rival". I'm not sure what the semantic difference bewteen "friend" and "rival" is meant to be, in this context. Surely all my friends are my rivals, when I'm playing games with them? Shrug.

A nice touch I really like: the game has a simple paint program with which you can create a unique little icon for yourself. This gets "painted" on your kart, and when you're online everyone who's made an emblem has it permanently displayed next to their name. I made a little Volity icon, of course.

Ohh, I see now. I just read in the docs that your "rivals" are actually people who the system thinks are about as good as you are. But is there something like an ELO score that I see peek at, or is the rating system totally opaque? Meh?

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I have gotten really good at Meteos, by the way. I have unlocked 20 planets (along with the starting set of four) and have eight to go. Woo woo. I have been twiddling with this game for nearly two months, whenever I need to not-think and just twitch-react for a couple of minutes, and I still love it. I have surely gotten a better fun-per-dollar ratio from this cartridge than I have most any other game I've spent money on in recent memory. (Board games, too... a $30 DS cartridge being a sight cheaper than some of the board games I buy.)

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If anyone is curious why I switch between writing numbers as words and as numerals, it's because of my journalism degree. The AP Style Guide compels its followers to write numbers between zero and nine as words and everything else as digits. Or is it one and nine? Well, anyway.

I tend to write out "percent" (rather than use "%") for the same reason.

Got to the meeting and back. Misplacing the card was an $80 mistake, all told. Hoping there isn't a zillion-dollar card replacement fee from Zipcar. Going to perform a proper cleanup and maybe I'll find my card but I'm doubtful. In this morning's ransack I collected a fist-sized chunk of cards that are not my Zipcard.

Meeting was OK. This guy knows games, and it was good to be able to cut to the chase, receive specific (and unexpected) encouragement of where our ideas are cool, and specific criticism of where we're going to have to prove 'em wrong.

Got skewered on one particular question I had no answer to, which completely disarmed one of my arguments. Homework for me. But no checks written today, alas. However, I was instructed to call back when we're beta. This is an order of magnitude better than DCUWCY[1], so: good.

If I was ever less than sure that we should be entirely focused on getting to beta ASAP, funding be damned, I am completely sure now.

[1] I haven't seen this before but I declare it to be useful and that its proper pronunciation is "doo-koo-WIH-kee".

So what's actually going on with me? A lot. Now that I care -- really really care! -- about my job, I'm quite conscious about how much there is for me to do. I have a larger project I'm chipping away at (the Volity game creation tutorial that I know a lot of you have been waiting for, whether you knew it or not), and several discrete "homework assignments" to get done before our next Monday meeting. Not done with all of the latter yet and it's almost the weeekend aaaah. I will finish.

We still haven't struck the funding jackpot. Not that I expected to by now. In the meantime I am doing pretty well at making connections, and can feel the network starting to heat up, though there remains plenty important letters to send (this being part of this week's homework). Also sniffed at my old O'Reilly weblog again today -- it still works, though I haven't posted to it in nearly two years. I have been pondering out loud whether to announce Volity on it, something I've been putting off for years, but which seems more feasible now that we're alpha. That author photograph, though, ugh; summer of 1998, puffy-haired and hirsute. Got to do something about that.

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There is an interesting discussion within the ranks about funding, and whether to pursue opportunities for lesser amounts -- enough to go "yay money" over, not so much to stop looking for more. There is a worry, I think, that attached to any relatively significant sum of money is a sense of security whose magnitude is invariable with that of the sum. Take the money, and you'll relax and let yourself think of other things. Take too little money, and you'll be due for a rude awakening when the money runs out before the relaxation does.

I can't find a purely logical reason why we shouldn't accept a lesser sum, if offered, so long as we agree beforehand not to end the funding search until we meet our initial goal. I recognize we're not purely logical beings, but surely we can look out for each other? It's an interesting problem and I think I understand the feelings behind both sides of it. Tricky stuff.

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Got up early-ish today (before 10am), going to attempt early-ish sleep. I love staying up late, but not only do I work better during and after a dayful of sunlight on my open eyes, I really want to be in synch with the folks I'm working with.