Chris Benjaminsen · Entrepreneur, Developer, Workaholic.

Hobby Startup KPI Update #9

1 July 2016 #gamedev #indiedev #frvr #devlog #game dev #numbers

Once again, I have been really bad at keeping up with the KPI updates. I honestly think that it’s because it’s not going as well as I would like, and I therefore dislike writing them.

Revenue

Anyway since the last KPI update on November 9th, which is 7 months ago, I still managed to make $142 551 USD broken down as follows:

GO MAHJONG!

That’s $609 USD per day since the last update. Somewhat below my original goal of $822 USD per day and a far cry from my new $4109.60 USD per day goal.

It’s pretty clear that I am a hopeless optimist. Which is great motivation when making companies -- not so much when budgeting.

Plotting the lifetime 10 day running average of revenue we get the following graph:

image

It’s pretty clear that Hex FRVR is still dominating revenue. The large spike around the 1st of April 2016 is Hex going crazy on social media in Taiwan. However seeing as the revenue has dropped again it was sadly just a fad.

It was however the indicator that promoted me to start translating my games.

Total Revenue:  $142 551

Hours worked

Remember I value my work at $200 hour but do not actually pay myself as I would rather keep the capital in the company. The savings from my last job I set aside for traveling the world and building FRVR will run out in about 4 months. Forcing me to start paying myself salary soon.

I worked 394.04 hours, on FRVR, since the last KPI update. 

On average that’s 11 hours and 46 minutes per week on average. Which also helps to explain why FRVR has not moved forward faster. My goal here was 24 hours / week. More than twice what I actually worked.

Hours where used as follows:

image

Development > 241.89 Hours > ~$48 378

Administration >  27.97 Hours > ~$5 595

Marketing > 67.46 Hours > ~$13 492

Mangement > 56.71 Hours > ~$11 343
This is a new category, introduced as I find myself spending an increasing amount of time working with other people as FRVR grows. This covers everything from 99Designs, hired consultants, musician and translators.

Total man hour cost: $78 088

Expenses

While I did not have a huge amount of costs from man hours, I fully make up for this in real world expenses, which has increased explosively as the company grew. All in all, I have had expenses for $68 353 since the last KPI update. 

As something new, I am pulling costs directly from the company bank account to ensure I give a 100% true image of expenses associated with FRVR.

Costs breaks down as follows:

image

Professional Services > $49 383.63 USD
This is clearly the biggest post in the FRVR books, accounting for a whopping 72% of expenses. Even crazier is that no value has been had from this investment yet, as all of it has to do with future projects. Much much more on that over the next few weeks ;)

Sadly I already wrote off $20 000 USD as lost cost. I attempted to hire a 3rd party developer (which shall remain nameless) to clean up the FRVR render engine and improve our mobile export flow. Sadly the developer turned out to be, to put it mildly, less competent than expected and after 5 months -- 3 months over the deadline -- I basically had to throw away everything they created.

I really did have high hopes for the co-operation which would have been a $100k+ for them, if they had worked out.

It’s partially my own fault as I am bad at management and did not do weekly code reviews as I initially planned. 

As for getting my money back, I am confident that I could sue and win the case, but I am convinced that they do not have the money, so it would just cost me more money in lawyers that I would never recoup.

Hard lessons learned: 

  1. Be 100% sure that the people you work with are competent
  2. Pay less up-front 
  3. Do frequent code reviews of 3rd party developers work.

Music & Sounds > $3,412.23 USD

 Administration > $6,270.00

Translations > $1,890.45

 Software & Services > $1,940.59

 99Designs as separate line item > $2,816.64

 Video production > $845.66

Co-Working space rent > $948.46

Hosting + Domains > $686.39

Misc minor testing with advertisement > $159.44 
I am still occasionally testing if I can get cash flow positive acquisition flows to work. So far no such luck, but more on that later.

Total expenses: $68,353.49

Result since last KPI Update

All in all this brings the total result since the last KPI update to:

Revenue: $142 551
Expenses: -$68,352
My salary at $200/h: -$78 088

Result after expenses: $74 109
Result after my salary at $200/h: -$4 610

Effective hourly salary: $188.3

Lifetime numbers for FRVR

Revenue: $179 095
Expenses:  -$78 552
My salary at $200/h: -$242 281

Result after expenses: $95 372
Result after my salary at $200/h: -$146 909

Effective hourly salary: $78.72

Conclusion

In short, I am still $146 909 short for the lifetime of FRVR. However the curve is breaking with only -$4 610 of loss since the last KPI update. Even better the past 7 months has earned me $188.3 per hour of work!