If you're starting your own business or even just thinking about it, and you're even the tiniest bit like me, then chances are good you've spent a whole lot of time agonizing over the vision for your company. Business consultants, investors and pretty much all of the internet has given me the strong impression that product isn't nearly as important as vision. An investor will likely turn you away if all you have is a product but no vision for what your business will be and how it will grow. To be clear, they're not wrong. Having just a product isn't enough. If you're trying to get external funding, then you need to be able to provide some assurance that your company has a future that goes beyond the thing you just made, or are making. As someone who made a product way before ever really thinking about running a business, this presented a problem. I started making a game on my own time after work, and figured I would just toss it into app stores and see what happens later. Then, I got sick, became disabled and gave up my position as full-time game coder and designer because I could no longer see myself as a reliable employee and did not want to burden the studio. I finished my solo game, with ideas for more projects already in mind, so I just started working on the second game. At this point the basic plan was just to make game after game and hope that at least one of them did well. That's great for tinkering in your freetime, but it isn't a business plan.
When writing my own business plans, I was told by various consultants that my plan was worthless so long as I did not define what my company was about. What is my theme? My vision? I made a product, but who cares? Then what? How is the company going to sustain itself in the long term?
I recently binge-watched Silicon Valley, without knowing in advance that the show was actually going to provide some broad parallels and valuable information. In the show, character Richard Hendricks struggles with the same question when pitching to investors about his startup, which is based entirely on a compression algorithm he wrote that promises to revolutionize technology. The problem is, even though his product is potentially worth millions, no investor will take him seriously without a defined vision for his company. Great product, no vision. He spends like three episodes feeling absolutely lost until his friend Elrich Bachman magically pulls a vision out of his ass during a pitch meeting. They skated by on improvised bologne and got their funding, and their company finally had some defitiotion of direction. This got me thinking that having a product and no vision was very common, so I started looking specifically for related search terms, like "company with product but no vision". Finally I was getting hits that helped, and didn't make me feel like I was doomed to fail because I lacked what every other founder seemed to have instinctively. Do you know who had no product-unrelated vision? Steve Jobs. His vision was product-first, and I came to learn that product-first companies were a regular thing. Despite of all the searching and consulting, noone had ever told me this one simple thing: Making great products is a perfectly acceptible vision to have for your company!
That might still be a tad too simple for an investor to risk throwing money at you, and comparing yourself to Steve Jobs during pitch isn't likely to score you bonus points, but if you're bootstrapping, it'll do for now. I had decided to bootstrap for the same reasons that I had quit my dayjob: my illness made me too unreliable and I feared I would struggle or fail to meet some deadlines. Still, I wanted to finetune my vision, because my goal, while solid didn't exactly present any unique selling points. So I did a SWOT analysis.
In case you're unfamiliar, SWOT is a practical business analysis tool invented by management consultant Albert Humphrey in 1966. Among business tools it is one of the most popular. I was excited to also see it used on the TV show Silicon Valley. SWOT is an achronym for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. It is basically a table with four fields, one for each of those categories. You brainstorm with as many involved minds as possible, ranging from stakeholders to consumers and fill those fields.
My SWOT analayis helped me see what I had been taking for granted and allowed me to further flesh out my vision for Brainscar Games. I am disabled with an autoimmune disease and neurological disorder. Statistically, one in fourty adults has some sort of autoimmune disorders nowadays, with all the chemicals we've been ingesting over the years. One in eight childrend is diagnosed with some degree of autism. Disability is on the rise, and the gaming industry has largely ignored the rising demands of a disabled gamer community. This could be in part due to ignorance on the subject, being detached from it, not being versed in accessibility features, or being aware of them but being unable or unwilling to implement them. I'll be honest. Adding accessibility is extra work, and these features need to be in the design of the game from the beginning as they can be quite difficult to tag on as extra features later on in development. Being disabled actually gives me an edge here. So does having an autistic son. Even my colorblindness is an advantage in this instance. I know from firsthand experience what some disabled gamers need to comfortably play games, and I've done plenty of research to bridge the gaps. There are great resources out there with accessibility checklists for game developers if one is only inclined to look. Making my games accessible has always been a priority, I just saw that as a given.
So there is my vision. It was always there, but it took some searching to put a name to. The vision of Brainscar Games is to make fun games that tell great stories, which are accessible to everyone, regardless of disability. Now that it's there, it's kind of a no-brainer. Sometimes you just agonize over something so hard that you can't see what's right in front of you.
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