What I Wish I Knew Founding a New Studio in 2024
What I Wish I Knew Founding a New Studio (Again) in 2024… 🤦🏻♀️
Coming from mobile development, my mindset has always been on #testing, #learning, #improving and repeat… Sometimes ‘winning’, sometimes ‘failing’, sometimes pivoting, sometimes discontinuing. That’s the nature of running multiple experiments 👩🏻🔬🤷🏻♀️
I approach building talks like I approach building a product. I test the talk, and get learnings to iterate for future talks/workshops💡
But in this case, it was more than a normal talk I’d give because I was doing a full retrospective of my entrepreneurial journey for DevGAMM #Vilnius and share with no filter my top 5 mistakes as an entrepreneur.
Over the past decade, I built 5 ventures, 2 of which are still ‘alive’. One of them, Rise and Play, is in its 3rd year of growing revenues, allowing me to focus full-time on it. The other one is a stealth startup I am now building out of games, after I decided to discontinue Kylan 2 months ago. Another ‘failed’ startup I rarely talk about dates back to 2014 when I was building a fashion mobile app, Fashionery, I discontinued it after 1.5 years for people reasons more than business reasons.
We highlight a lot in the press and on Linkedin the story of founders who ‘made it’ (i.e., raised a big amount of money, were acquired, or reached top grossing at a certain time), laying out the factors on why they succeeded and falling into the #survivorship bias.
This sends a misleading message of the straightforward path to being a successful founder, while 95% of founder’s ‘failures’ stories never see the light of day but hold tons of relevant learnings. Those are especially actionable and relatable insights to new founders who start with zero to little resources/network/money. Especially relevant in 2024, where it is hard for everyone.
So, taking a contrarian approach, I shared the top mistakes from my experience and 120+ entrepreneurs I interviewed and coached with Rise and Play about founding a company/game studio, to prepare teams for “what they don’t know they don’t know.”
