Our startup Construct 2, how far we've come and lessons learnt so far

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Our startup Construct 2, how far we've come and lessons learnt so far

We did a "Show HN post" 6 months back of our startup and we're very excited to show everyone how far we've come as well as the lessons we've learnt so far! It's been a roller-coaster so far and we think there's lot more of the same to come! We did apply for Ycombinator funding but got turned down :( But may re-apply soon :) For those that don't know, our startup is called Scirra and we make Construct 2 which is an HTML5 game engine (http://www.scirra.com). Our engine allows anyone to make HTML5 games without knowing any programming. It's only me and my brother working on this and we're based in London. This is our first startup, since we last posted we've: - Fully documented the engine http://www.scirra.com/manual/1/construct-2 - Added a fully documented Javascript SDK to help attract programmers to use our engine http://www.scirra.com/manual/15/sdk - Added particle effects: http://www.scirra.com/labs/particles2/ - Added Box2D physics: http://www.scirra.com/arcade/addicting-example-games/36/html5-physics-rolling-platformer - Added Gamepad support - Export options for Appmobi and Phonegap - Added webfont support - Added publish to Chrome store - Launched a 'Youtube style' HTML5 arcade (complete with game stats which is quite a popular feature!) Project Blaze Zero is the most popular game on there so far: http://www.scirra.com/arcade/addicting-shooter-games/349/project-blaze-zero - Received angel investment - Grown to serving 100k uniques/200k visits/1.1m page views a month compares to 25k uniques/50k visits/340k page views in July (and still increasing fast) - Served nearly 100k downloads of Construct 2 - Got our first print review in .NET magazine (current issue, check it out! Page 26) Lessons we've learnt so far are: - Documentation is predictably boring to write, but incredibly important (like super important) - Working from home can suck, normal sleep patterns are difficult to maintain - It's hard to get on TechCrunch and probably not worth the bother - Blogging is important, and most startups/companies do it wrong. Writing about things people want to read is important (but a lot of startups just seem to use it as a news feed) - Blogging can lead to unexpected and valuable connections - Good web design/development is iterative. You can't nail it on the head in one go (we've gone through about 3 designs, 1: http://web.archive.org/web/20110703070339/http://www.scirra.com/ 2:http://web.archive.org/web/20110716015112/http://www.scirra.com/ and 3:http://www.scirra.com) - Customers love it when you email them back in under 10 minutes - Engaging with people who comment about things you write/your product on social networks is important - It's hard to get Twitter followers (we're still figuring out how to run our Twitter really) - Akismet is amazing - If people dispute you on Paypal you should resign yourself to the fact you can't win - Engaging small audiences most people avoid can be valuable: http://www.hackforums.net/showthread.php?tid=2148782 - Working out custom advertising deals with small websites is the best way to go - Having a supportive community is an amazing motivator - Accounting isn't fun and we'd rather just pay someone else to do it for us - It's super fun and totally worth it :) (generally!) We've got so much planned as well, but just hardly enough time to do it all!