Apricus' Indie Game Marketing Updates Thread + Personal Progress Stuff

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Continuing the discussion from Learning Marketing - Where to Start?:

Figured I should make this separate thread since I cluttered the “Learning Marketing” thread with some tangential stuff like the indie game marketing/community building stuff, and have also avoided posting some more indie game/personal specific stuff there until I could put it in a thread like this instead. The post I’m replying to had a GDC (Game Developer’s Conference) talk on community building for game studios. Have learnt a bunch since then and will post more details below.

One of my planned projects is to read through Goldratt’s relevant books and write notes trying to tie what I learn from them back to the indie game business in general. However, it looks like the marketing stuff is split up between books and there’s more marketing stuff concentrated in this Satellite Program: Marketing.

ty for sharing this Elliot. $129 is a bit expensive for me but I’m thinking if that’s expensive, then what am I doing working on a business? So I’ll find a way to save up for it and be OK with the expense, and I’ll download/record a bunch of the videos to learn at my own pace after the one month subscription expires. I think I need to learn to be much more aggressive with my self-development budget (it’s basically arbitrary or like $0-20 per month right now) and invest in myself/my learning heavily, like be willing to save up and buy the ToC Course from Elliot or the Eli Goldratt Screencasts (as an example).

Edit: I decided to buy this.

At one point I used to buy and read a lot of business/organizational culture related books, like $100+/month , like 3 years ago, so idk why I’m so averse to that now. Will need to change my mindset around that stuff. At some point I’ll write a more detailed financial breakdown of my situation and discuss my budget to get the CF Community’s advice on how I should allocate resources based on my goals (if that’s an OK thing to do here)

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Watching How To Write Better Proposals (webinar replay) - YouTube

and he mentions at one point the difference between a project and a task. A project is often a drawn out thing, sometimes collaborative, and has a current state and an end state/goal that marks the project’s end when it’s reached. A task is like unclogging a toilet, and sometimes consultants will be asked to just do a task, but all of these Why questions and stuff aren’t necessary to go through for a task. Usually tasks are low profit as well because they don’t have much strategy or planning involved, and J. Stark talks about how the higher upstream you go towards strategy, the better the profits and the less labor is involved and the more your expertise/brains/knowledge is rewarded and valued. (He talks about 3 tiers, maintenance level like a janjtor, implementation level like someone given a design document and told to build an app, and then strategy level where you’re creating stuff/ideas/plans from scratch. That’s where the most creativity is rewarded)

I want to learn to do projects rather than just bumbling through life. Seth Godin also writes about this where he says he didn’t really have jobs, but more like a series of projects throughout his life. What I want to practice is small projects where I describe a problem, set a goal, explain how I’m going to progress the project, and then execute it. I want to do this 3-5 times on relatively low scale stuff (few days to a week) and then start doing more mid-size projects that are a month+ in duration.