Storytime!

Since I didn’t have much time yesterday and a lack of inspiration the post was a bit dull but today I’ll make it up to you 😀

This is not the weirdest story yet! Will share more craziness later on.

There were a few inflection points in the Rising Step (my company) history. Lemme tell you about one of them.

In 2014 we launched our game Dual Survivor (still available for Android Download Dual Survivor). I hired a marketing dude that would pick up the whole marketing side and shared some stories of how he made a 100k in “one day”.

Something was off from day one but at that time I didn’t listen to my inner gut feeling and I just went on with it. I had a really nice proposal and if the sales were really good he could even make more money on the game than me. His percentage would rise with ever x thousand sales.

The game is amazing. Especially for that time. I still f-ing love it. A few weeks before launch he told me that he wanted to do a fixed price instead of a percentage. He charged € 10.000 for the whole project. I really didn’t want to do this but since it was so close to the launch date I felt like my hands were tied. I just thought to myself and discussed it with him that I would pay him with the money the game would obviously make.

We created some nice spoken video content, a web version of our app,  extra website, two trailers, banners and so on. Bottomline I had to do a looooot of work in this process. It was probably a good strategy for a lot of niches but not for the indie gaming industry.

When we launched the game we saw that within 24 hours 10.000+ people were playing it. Which to us meant: € 3,00 * 10.000 = € 30.000

It wasn’t enough to cover all the costs we made but it was a great start! A few days later I found out that game was pirated and illegally downloaded 98% of the time and after a month we only made around € 500,00.

We busted our balls for about 6 months and had € 500,00 to show for it. The launch utterly failed in that regard. Lots of people played it so that’s a success 🙂

So I had lots of costs to cover including the marketing dude. He started to act even weirder and became his real version. I always thought he was a bit off and now I know why.

He has this mask he shows to the world and how he want the world to see him but underneath there was a dark version of him lurking. Which if you really pay attention you could already see through the cracks. I was always planning on paying him first because I felt really crappy about it but then he did something that changed my perspective.

We had a good understanding that I would pay him but he probably wanted to get me back somehow. This is what he did:
He sued me on my birthday!

It was my birthday and obviously I was very excited. I saw someone just walking in our garden he came to the door asked me if I was David and BAM! “You got served!” I just couldn’t believe it… I felt like I was struck by lightning and didn’t know what to do.

It was such a f-ed up thing to do. So I decided that he would be on the bottom of my list from then on and right now he still is.

This is a really abridged version of the story btw. 😀

Balance time!

Day 9 balance:

Expected expenses today:
Around € 10 for some groceries

Expenses yesterday:
Personal:
€ 7,50 for indoor football
Business
€ 0,00

Expected income today:
Nothing

Income yesterday:
€ 170,00 (customer project)

Wallet:
€ 2,55

Current balance personal account:
€ 23,47 – € 7,50 (football) – €10,59(insurance) = € 5,38

Current balance business account:
– € 36,22

Total:
€ -30,84

– IRS: € 46.745,16
– Business: € 22.016,58
– Personal: € 8.609,99

Total Debt:
€ 77.371,73

Balance day 9:
– € 77.402,57

€ 5.000,00 + € 170,00 = € 5.170,00

That’s all folks!

Cheers,
David

Currently reading this financial book:

Bob Proctor – You Were Born Rich

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