Mar
21
Why I hire people who work from home
Filed Under Dr. De Mars General Life Ramblings, The Julia Group | 3 Comments
More interesting to me than the spate of articles on the decision of Yahoo to eliminate the option of working from home has been the comments on these articles. I should have followed the advice I give my children,
“Never read the bottom half of the internet.”
Too late – and I will never get back the wasted minutes reading comments written by the descendants of Simon Legree
You spoiled entitled slobs are lucky to have a job! Don’t come into work ever again. There are plenty of people in this economy who would be happy to do your job for less money than you are making and show up at 5 a.m. It’s about damn time that someone cracked the whip on you! You’re just lucky your jobs haven’t been outsourced to someone who is a real worker who is willing to work for 42 cents an hour seven days a week, 14 hours a day ….
I just sent out a contract for artwork to someone in Philadelphia. Our Chief Marketing Officer we hired in January lives in Massachusetts.Our animator lives in San Francisco. A programmer who helped us out when we got overbooked last year lives in North Carolina. We’re really hoping to be able to hire him to work with us again this fall. We have two consultants in North Dakota, one of whom is coming to Santa Monica next month. In May, I’ll be in San Francisco, North Dakota and Massachusetts.
There are actually only four of us that work in Santa Monica on a regular basis, and one is the woman that cleans the place. My assistant lives about an hour away and usually comes in once a week, although she is available to come more often if needed. My husband, who has been seen so seldom since he retired from making things in black boxes that we have started calling him The Invisible Developer, has an on office upstairs. I’m pretty relaxed about things but I have put my foot down that before he comes downstairs when either co-workers or clients are here that he WILL shower, shave and put on clothes rather than come downstairs in his bathrobe. He is rebelling against such authoritarianism by staying upstairs for most of his life. Friends refer to him as “your alleged husband” , since they see him about once a decade.
Business is good. We pay taxes in four or five states most years. I had a book published this year – unrelated to business, it’s on matwork in judo and mixed martial arts – and we donated the proceeds to charity.
There are two reasons we hire people who work from home.
One is that it pays off for us.
Here is an example of a poster one of our artists did. It wasn’t part of his contract. He put it together using some of the art he did for the game and I saw it on Facebook, offered him a price for the right to use it as an award for those who backed our game on Kickstarter.
I’m the exact opposite of those commenters on the work-from-home articles. I don’t think the people who work for us are lucky to have a job. I think we are lucky to have them. That’s the exact kind of people I want to work with – people who could get another job in a heartbeat but choose to work for us. If you are extraordinarily good at your job, it’s always a good economy for you. We’re a small company. I can’t outbid Yahoo or General Motors for talent. What I can do is offer other consideration. Would you like to work from home? Do you do your best work from 5 a.m. to 1 pm? Do you need to adjust your hours to accommodate small children? We can do that and if Yahoo or some other company won’t then maybe we can steal you away from them.
The second is that this is the kind of people and kind of company we want to be. I have that old Golden Rule idea. I treat people the way I want to be treated. Many years ago, I was sitting in Union Station with one of my business partners drinking champagne. Our company, Spirit Lake Consulting, Inc. had hit a million dollars in contracts, within less than two years of being founded. He was waiting to go up to a photo shoot with one of the senators from North Dakota and I had a meeting scheduled with agency personnel to discuss our latest project. He turned to me and expressed my feelings exactly,
If you had told me when I was a ten-year-old boy growing up on the reservation that this would be my life, I wouldn’t have believed you.
Well, I didn’t grow up on a reservation, but my point is the same, we have a great life, and rather than try to squeeze every last drop of work out of our employees and make the absolute highest profit, we want the people we work with to have a great life, too. We try to charge as little as possible for our products so that more schools can use our games – Kickstarter funding will allow us to give Spirit Lake: The Game free to twenty schools. Our consulting fees are below average, but that allows us to consult with dental schools, vocational rehabilitation projects and universities. Yes, we’d make more if we were consultants for Coca-Cola , tobacco companies and defendants in anti-trust suits, but so be it.
I work downstairs in my house. It’s very convenient because that’s where all of my stuff is, and besides that, I don’t have to drive two or three hours a day in rush hour traffic in L.A. Also, I hate mornings.
I’m sure those same commenters would tell me that is a terrible attitude for a business that has a responsibility to shareholders. At the moment, the shares are held by me and said CMO in Massachusetts and we are pretty damn happy. We have met with potential investors a few times, and perhaps our “bad attitude” is the reason we haven’t done any deals yet. Oh, no wait, it isn’t. The main reason is that we have not yet reached the point where we need to give up any equity in the company, and we don’t intend to until we absolutely must. Any investors that expect us to treat our employees like they are small children that need to “be kept an eye on” definitely won’t be a good fit.
In February, I had a book published and submitted two federal grants. In March, I’ve done the design for our next computer game, had clients in for three days of training, designed and wrote much of a database to a client specification and rewrote the part of the game that does assessment and testing. I get an amazing amount of shit done and I think it is not at all coincidental that I am very happy with my life AND I’ve made money running one business or another for 28 years straight.
If we end up with investors who buy into that kind of company, that would be great.
On the other hand, my fall back plan is to do what I’m doing now – live by the beach, design computer games and write.
Tell me again, why exactly was it that I needed to drive into the office?
Mar
1
A second look at social media and Kickstarter statistics
Filed Under Dr. De Mars General Life Ramblings, The Julia Group | 1 Comment
When our Kickstarter campaign first started, I questioned the impact of social media. Despite being tweeted out by my darling daughter #3, who had over 170,000 followers on twitter, equal numbers of backers came from direct links (that is, people I had emailed directly) and twitter.
By the end of the campaign, we had 255 backers and had raised over $21,000. If you look at the graph above, you can see that, in the end, compared to how we started out, a higher percentage came from twitter and a much lower percentage from Kickstarter itself. About a third of the “other” category came from radio shows and an ad on an on-line film channel that mentioned our game . The rest of the “other” was a combination of a few MMA sites that had interviewed me recently, and Google (which was the source of only 8 out of 255 backers).
The graph below shows the NUMBER of backers, rather than the percentage, at the beginning and in total.
First of all, twitter turned out to be more important than I had expected in bringing us backers. As the week of Ronda’s fight came, she was on twitter very little, so I assumed her 170,000+ followers would do us little good. Even with a world title fight on her mind, Ronda still tweeted out the link a few times (what a good kid!) Equally important, some early backers became quite interested in the project and re-tweeted links several times.
I thought direct links – me sending email to my friends and family – would be important at the beginning but less so at the end. I was wrong. I have an awesome family. So, although I sent direct links to people I knew and they pledged in the first few days, then THEY sent email to people they knew, who also tended to pledge far more often than people who just happened to see a reference to the project on my blog or some other site. I was a bit surprised by the Facebook results, since I don’t have that many friends on Facebook, but then I realized that some of my younger relatives (and even some of my not-so-younger friends) are on Facebook quite a lot and they shared the link on their pages and their friends did also.
So …. I would say three things were borne out that Kickstarter tells you from the beginning:
- Most crowd-funding is going to come from people you know and people they know. The idea of some viral spreading across the internet where you end up with hundreds of thousands of dollars is probably not going to happen. However, if you get a LOT of support from those close to you, you can be successful.
- It is a LOT of work. My oldest daughter put so much time into it she said, “I would say you owe me your first-born but since that is me, it would just get confusing.”
- The video needs to be short. We put enormous amount of time into making the video. It was a learning experience. I learned that there are not enough drugs in Los Angeles to enable me to tolerate a career in video-editing. Even though we cut our video to 3 and 1/2 minutes, of the 4,153 people who watched it, only 17.3% watched the whole video. (Seriously? You couldn’t watch 3 and 1/2 minutes?) I knew a lot of people didn’t watch it because they would tweet me questions that were answered in the video. Make your video short.
The odds were against us in a number of ways. We wanted to raise $20,000 – the average project raises less than $10,000. According to one published study, a 30-day project of $10,000 has a 35% chance of success. Projects that are featured have an 89% chance of success versus those that are not featured – like us – who have a 30% chance of success. According to the Kickstarter statistics by category, only 33% of game projects get funded. So …. we were not featured, we were above average in the amount we wanted to fund and we were a game. Each of those individually would give us less than a one in three chance of success and the combination, substantially less than that. While Kickstarter features prominently on its page the overall success rate – 44% – if you dig a little deeper, you’ll discover that the success rate may be much lower for your type of project.
Even if you go into it with both eyes open, expecting a lot of work and to just barely make your target – which is exactly what we did expect and exactly what happened – you may still be in for a few surprises. Because we are older than the typical start-up co-founders, more of our friends and family tend to be employed at a fairly good salary. We expected that our average pledge would be higher than typical and it was – $83 versus the average for Kickstarter of $71. Our mode – $50 – was also higher than the mode for the site as a whole – $25. We were a bit surprised that some people who, when we mentioned our project, immediately volunteered that they would back it, some even mentioning large amounts, never backed our project at all.
One thing that helped us greatly in the last week is that we had several larger pledges, but only one came from someone we knew.
Other people pledged far more than we would have asked. We got about what we expected but not really from who we expected it. I thought about this a lot and I finally came to a conclusion. Success in Kickstarter, of course, begins with having a good product. After that, it does not help you to have friends with deep pockets. What helps is to have deep friendships.
Feb
25
So …. then this happened
Filed Under 55 things, Dr. De Mars General Life Ramblings, The Julia Group | 1 Comment
This is number 11 of 55 things I have learned in almost 55 years. You can find number 10 here , ten days ago, and that brings me to number 11.
“Just accept that you can’t always do everything.”
I’m very bad at taking this advice, as anyone who has ever met me can attest. Last night, Darling Daughter #3 had a world title fight in the UFC. That is mixed martial arts, which involves punching people and not actually art, as believed by a confused colleague who asked at what museum my daughter’s work could be viewed. It was viewed at the Honda Center where she won by an arm bar in the first round. I was so nervous that the fight was 24 hours ago and I am STILL nervous even though it’s over and she won, because I had nervous left over.
More people than I can count called or texted me and I did not get back to a few who I really should have gotten back to because they are good people and good friends, but I could only call so many people.
Also during the past 18 days we have had a Kickstarter campaign under way, which will (I am sure) come to a successful closure in less than three days. That has taken up a lot of time and it probably should have taken more but there was a proposal that I was writing that is really significant for our company, plus there was the fight. (I also had a book on matwork for judo and mixed martial arts released last week which I should have spent more time promoting.)
Since I am pretty certain the Kickstarter campaign will be successful, and I also have two proposals under review to complete further work on this game, I should be working on game design and coding. Incredibly, I got a good bit done from Friday through today while stressing about my daughter, it gave me something to take my mind off of her fight. Still, I should get more done.
I have clients. Who pay me. Half of our income comes from consulting and I have had wonderfully forbearing clients over the past few weeks as all of this craziness has happened but I should be doing more to support their needs.
And my beautiful grandchildren are visiting from the east coast, so I should be spending time with them. At Disneyland. With princesses. Or so I have been told approximate 246 times.
Carl Rogers called this “the tyranny of the should”, saying that we make ourselves miserable by constantly feeling bad about the things we SHOULD have done, but didn’t. Often, he says, we didn’t because it wasn’t really what we believe but what we think we are supposed to believe is best for us.
In fact, there is no way on earth I could have done all of those things because there are simply not enough hours in a week. So, I figured out what I COULD do. I could only go to my daughter’s fight on Saturday because they’d sold 15,000 tickets so they weren’t going to reschedule it for my convenience. My grandchildren were only in town a few days. I did the 106 Miles demo in Santa Monica because, again, it was only on Wednesday and no one was moving it for my convenience. Doing the demo forced us to do a quality review on the game with a fine-toothed comb, so we did make some progress there.
The database I have been working on for a client can be modified later for the game, so progress is being made.
Still, I had to face up to that I could not do everything this week. I had to put off some of the database work and put off some of the book promotion. I will have to get together with some people in the weeks to come.
If you can’t always do what everyone wants when they want it, that doesn’t make you a failure. It makes you human.
Speaking of humans, as in young humans, also known as children … click on over to our Kickstarter for Spirit Lake – an awesome adventure game to teach kids math – and please back us. You’ll get a fun game and other prizes. Your children will also get smarter. What more could you ask?
Feb
21
Which meet-ups are worth your time?
Filed Under The Julia Group | 2 Comments
Are meet-ups worth your time? In a word – maybe.
It’s often said that half of the money spent on marketing is wasted but nobody knows which half. I’d say the 106 miles meet-up we attended at General Assembly in Santa Monica was worthwhile for several reasons.
1. We were doing a demo. If you have a chance to do this, jump on it. The most valuable part came before the meet-up. We think in terms of worst case scenarios so we spent days before the meet-up testing our game and found a few minor bugs we fixed. Then, we went back and made a list of changes that would make it better. Some of those we were able to implement before the demo. It’s one thing to play a game in your office or have faceless people download it from your website. It’s another to consider the possibility of it not working while you are telling someone how great it is and how stupid you will look. Big motivator.
2. Other people were doing a demo. My favorite was teachmeo that allows anyone to teach one on one over streaming video. If I wanted to tutor you in statistics or judo, I could offer my services on their site. Check it out.
3. No doubt this had to do with the fact that we did a demo but I met more people at this meet up than others I had attended. I think many developers and other technology people are not the best at small talk, so having specific topics to address was helpful – what is your product, where do you see yourself going?
4. I gained at least one new twitter follower, Jun-Fung, who won the poster for being the first person from the meet-up to follow me.
5. I found out what General Assembly in Santa Monica does (for-profit educational space), and that interested me.
6. I made three new connections on linked in, and the first one of those, Dave Gullo, won the dreamcatcher.
Does this mean you should run out to a meet-up? It depends. This particular one was helpful to me because it included a critical mass of people doing interesting work. One difference from some others I have attended is that the organizers specifically asked me,
“Do you have a working demo?”
I’ve been to other meet-ups where people have an idea for a business or an app but no actual code written. A powerpoint is not a demo. Sorry, but I’m not looking for someone to give me ideas that I can then turn into a product. I have plenty of ideas. What I need is time and money to pay the bills while I work on the ideas our wonderful team has.
My suggestion based on my admittedly small, non-random sample, is to put meet-ups with demos much higher on your priority list than any other kind. Even pitches too often turn out to be someone with an idea and not much else. I’m not denigrating that. Every product started out as an idea, but for us, right now, we’re in the doing work and seeking funding phase. Also, when you go to something where people actually have products they have made, you get a much smaller proportion of people pretending to be experts. The questions they ask and the suggestions they make are more likely to be relevant and helpful.
Our new Chief Marketing Officer was not overwhelmed with the meet-up because we did not see a big spike in pledges to our Kickstarter campaign as a result. I actually did think we might see a little more benefit in that respect than we did. Don’t hold back if you want to prove me wrong! CLICK HERE TO SEE OUR COOL VIDEO AND SOME OF THE GAME DEMO THAT YOU MISSED. I also think she might be a little impatient, because the meet-up was just over 12 hours ago. We’ll find out. One thing we are good at here at The Julia Group is analyzing data. When our campaign is done, we are going to trace as much as possible all of the pledges and see how these relate to media and marketing activities. So far, we have had some very surprising results. Stay tuned.
Feb
19
You should do that: Questions and suggestions from the Interwebz
Filed Under computer games, The Julia Group | Leave a Comment
I wrote a post recently about how social media may be overrated for marketing, but that doesn’t mean, paradoxically, that I think social media is over-rated. I think social media is often under-rated for its value as information.
For example, as part of our Kickstarter campaign, I have received a number of questions and suggestions from people, most of them very reflective and thoughtful. Some made us change our design and some made us decide we need to explain our products, company and project better. Some were just amusing.
1. Wouldn’t 7 Generation Games have a wider appeal (and more potential sales) if you didn’t have such an emphasis on Native Americans?
Probably. However, our games started on the Spirit Lake Nation and half of the people working on the project are from Spirit Lake or Turtle Mountain. Our original intent was to provide an adventure game to teach kids math that would appeal to children on American Indian reservations. It was only after we had developed a prototype with promising results that we started being contacted from parents and teachers off the reservation to find out how they could get the game, too.
2. Is the game installed on your desktop or played over the web?
Both. The game is installed and played on your desktop, which speeds up the graphics much more than streaming video. However, you log in to our server, where your game state and other data – specifically on the math problems you answered and the lessons you took – are stored.
3. Won’t people hate the fact they are paying for a license rather than getting a permanent license? Isn’t requiring internet access a turn off?
Both of these go back to question 1. The schools WANTED a system set up to be as hands off for them as possible so they had minimum work to do. Having an internet connection allows automatic updates. Because multiple students will play the game in the school computer lab, it’s not like your own personal game console where you start the game you left off. A major factor for schools and teachers is having the automated scoring of math problems and the ability to get an average of their class or school, find out if there are problems their students as a group are having. All of this is easier if all of the data go to a central point. It is also backed up automatically. All of the schools have internet, even in very remote reservation schools. There may be some that don’t but we are not working with any of them.
4. How can you have children’s confidential data on your computer? Don’t you need mad security for that?
We don’t have any confidential information. We have a username, a teacher name, age and gender. We send the school a list of usernames and the teacher assigns them. The same with individuals or social service programs. YOU know that Greybear is Samuel Jackson, Jr. but we don’t.
5. Why do you only take payments through Amazon?
That is all Kickstarter is set up to do. We have had people give checks or cash to a friend to back us on Amazon through their account. Yes that isn’t the most convenient way, but there are a lot of other benefits to Kickstarter. They handle the payments, people come specifically to Kickstarter looking for projects to fund.
6. Why is a signed photo with Ronda one of the prizes/ why don’t you offer signed gloves or other prizes?
Kickstarter rewards have to be related to your product. Ronda was involved in helping us design the game and will be further involved modeling some of the poses for fight scenes (not too much fighting, since the game is aimed at children in grades 4-6 right now, and eventually up to grade 8). Read post 3 on our updates page for more information. Since her fight gloves, getting a seminar from Ronda and other UFC-related or MMA-related rewards have nothing to do with the game, under the Kickstarter terms of service, we can’t offer them.
7. Since you are 52% of your target with 8 days left, do you think you will make it?
Yes. According to Kickstarter, 98% of projects that get to 60% end up fully funded. We are almost to that 60%. We have an ad coming out soon on the American Horror channel on FilmOn host Hart Fisher did just out of the goodness of his heart. I just did two radio shows still to be aired plus several interviews with blogs, newspapers. In addition, according to most resources I have read, most campaigns receive a jump in pledges near the end as people who have been meaning to pledge quit putting it off. If you are one of those people, head on over to Kickstarter and pledge now. Get a license for yourself, give one to a school, get a signed photo, a cool poster or even be a character in the game.
8. Now that your game has received more widespread attention are you going to reduce the focus on Native Americans?
No.
Feb
17
We Better Not Screw This Up
Filed Under The Julia Group | 5 Comments
As I write this, our Kickstarter campaign has 119 backers at around $6,700. That’s not the significant part, though.
This week, I am truly humbled. We can see in the Kickstarter dashboard where the contributions come from. Well, our CMO can see, and she will call me and say
Do you know someone named XXX? Because they pledged $250.
Invariably, I DON’T know them. They read this blog, or they follow me on twitter, or they read my other, personal blog, which is half on judo and half on my ranting like a female, Catholic version of Lewis Black. If you go to our Kickstarter page, you actually see fewer $250 and $100 pledges than we have received because most people said not to bother sending them a poster or a license, just give it to another kid on a reservation.
That isn’t what has me the most humbled, though. In some cases, she would say,
“We got several pledges of $5 or $10 or $15. They came from XXX.”
Those are the ones that made me catch my breath because I know some of the places she mentioned. They are on American Indian reservations and reserves in Canada. I even knew some of the people. I knew that $5 probably meant they stayed home this weekend instead of driving anywhere because they just pledged their gas money to support this game. A couple of people who pledged emailed, DM’ed on twitter or posted private messages to me on Facebook apologizing(!) because they had to wait until they got their paycheck, disability check, Pell grant or student loan before they could afford to pledge.
To some of those people, $10 meant a lot.
Some of the people who pledged $500 or $100 aren’t independently wealthy, either.
We are pretty sure we’re going to make our $20,000 goal, but even more than that, we are very conscious of the fact that people who don’t normally support Kickstarter projects kicked in to make this happen. In short, people have faith in us. I talked to everyone on our team this week and we are all pretty sobered by the reaction. As I said this afternoon,
“Guys, people believe in us. We need to promise not to screw this up.”
Feb
16
We started this Kickstarter campaign a little over a week ago. For those of you who are considering it, here are a few things I learned
1.Kickstarter was not nearly as well-known as I expected from my non-random sample of close family and friends. Many people outside that group, when I mentioned it said, “What? What’s that?” From the Kickstarter page …
Kickstarter is a funding platform for creative projects. Everything from films, games, and music to art, design, and technology. Kickstarter is full of ambitious, innovative, and imaginative projects that are brought to life through the direct support of others. How does Kickstarter work?…. Every project creator sets their project’s funding goal and deadline. If people like the project, they can pledge money to make it happen. If the project succeeds in reaching its funding goal, all backers’ credit cards are charged when time expires. If the project falls short, no one is charged. Funding on Kickstarter is all-or-nothing.
2. You have to pay through Amazon. This turned out to be a problem for some people I knew who either were not too computer savvy, did not have credit cards or didn’t want to give their credit card number on line. There were more people than I had expected. I know a few gave cash or checks to a friend who then backed the project.
3. You cannot back your own project. This can be difficult if people want to give you cash or checks because you cannot deposit them and then “back” it on your own account.
4. Video editing takes a LONG time and thank God that the wonderful folks at American Horrors lent us a video editing expert. No, our game doesn’t have anything to do with horror, except the fear some people have of math, they’re just friends of ours.
5. There are a lot of steps in creating a Kickstarter project even after you have created the video. You need to register on Amazon payments which requires your date of birth, last seven addresses, name of your first pet, favorite gang sign, Zodiac sign, animal of birth in the Chinese calendar and four drops of the blood of a purebred guinea pig. (Sorry, Patti)
6. Once you submit EVERYTHING it does not post immediately. It’s more like moderated comments than a blog post, although it can take a few days, particularly, like us, if you submit over the weekend.
7. It’s a lot of work to get the word out. I spoke to a really good friend of mine four days after we launched and he didn’t know about it. I thought I had been putting it on Facebook and twitter so frequently to the point of being annoying, but he said that he owns a business and is not on Facebook that much and not on twitter at all (even though my twitter goes to my Facebook page). So, he noted that if I hadn’t posted it in the couple hours before he logged on, he wouldn’t see it, because he just scrolls down a page or two and then logs off.
8. You cannot have rewards that are not directly produced by the project or its creator. We have a UFC fighter (Ronda Rousey, also known as darling daughter #3) on our design team – involved long before she joined the UFC. We can send a signed photo of her playing the game or in poses we copied for fight scenes in the game. (Don’t worry it’s a game for kids in grades 4 &5, the fight scenes are pretty tame.) We CANNOT send copies of her gloves from her world title fight as a reward, or send out mass copies of photos taken to promote her fights.
Check it out. Pledge. Come visit us at 106 miles demo and cocktails on Wednesday, February 20th in Santa Monica
If you have any advice or lessons learned on Kickstarter yourself, please, dish in the comments below!
Feb
11
We’re Grandparents Doing An Awesome Start-up and Logan’s Run Can Bite Me
Filed Under Dr. De Mars General Life Ramblings, The Julia Group | 6 Comments
Logan can kiss my wrinkled, grey ass. I’m 54 years old. I don’t say I’m 54 years young or you’re only as old as you feel because some days I feel 92. I feel zero impulse to go get a facelift or any other procedure to make me look younger so I can compete with the younger crowd. I’m not competing for Miss America. For those of you, like our CMO, Maria Burns Ortiz who pointed out that Logan’s Run itself is an old person reference -
Logan’s Run was a book (and movie) with the premise that the maximum age in society was 21 years old. At that age, one was to show up and be put to sleep, or suffer the consequences of being tracked down and painfully killed.
On twitter, @techstepper commented that many start-ups make him think of Logan’s Run. He wasn’t the first to make the connection, in fact, Quigley, a venture capitalist, says on his blog
“So, not to be an ageist, but if you’re old, you should probably be looking for career opportunities outside the startup world. By the time you’ve reached an advanced age, you are a prisoner of having the big paycheck, feeding a family and making house payments.”
Okay, Mr. Quigley, after going to USC and getting an MBA from Harvard, you ought to know that saying “not to be ageist but ….” doesn’t NOT make something ageist any more than saying,
“Not to be racist but Latinos aren’t good at statistics.”
wouldn’t make that statement not racist.
The definition of prejudice is to pre-judge someone, that is, make a judgement before knowing the facts. I was ASTOUNDED that no one took him to task for this comment, but maybe no one wanted to piss off a VC. I know budding entrepreneurs are loathe to do that, and I thought about that for about four seconds, and then I thought, “Fuck it.”
I’m 54. The Rocket Scientist is 57. I had my first child at 24 so she is now married and feeding herself. Same with the second child. And the third. We don’t have a house payment. I sold two houses in the 1990s and since then we have lived in a rent-controlled townhouse where my husband moved when he was a graduate student at UCLA. We are not prisoners of having a big pay check.
Quigley goes on to say,
“ If you can’t handle changing your lifestyle, and/or can’t handle working 2-3 years with essentially no money, then don’t work in startups.”
Actually, since The Rocket Scientist is brilliant, he managed to save up enough money and work our expenses in such a way that we could both afford to work for no money full time since we finished our SBIR Phase I award in December. We both worked full time for a lot of months over the past year. I’ve always worked 80 hour weeks so now I work 10 hours or less a week to cover the expenses that our 401k and pension funds don’t cover and then work another 70 hours on the 7 Generations game.
In the past WEEK, I’ve submitted a grant proposal to the Institute of Education Sciences small business innovation research grant competition for educational games, kicked off a Kickstarter campaign and finished the first draft of a SECOND proposal that we’ll submit for SBIR Phase II funding to USDA. While I’ve been doing that, The Rocket Scientist has been revising the beta version of the game that was played by kids in the schools this fall. We are also getting ready for a demo of our game at the 106 Miles Southern Cal edition in less than two weeks. Oh, and by the way, Black Belt magazine released a book I co-authored on winning in judo and mixed martial arts, called Winning on the Ground.
And that is what I did THIS WEEK.
This article by Business Insider cites a lot of the ageist attitudes I have seen -
“Older people have families so can’t do a start-up” – that is hilarious because they are defining 40 as “older” of course, people in their fifties may have raised their children. One unique thing in our situation is we had a child fairly late – The Spoiled One is in ninth grade – but another unique aspect is that she received a scholarship to a wonderful college prep boarding school where she is all week and some weekends (because, “I have plans, mom. With my friends, mom.”)
“When you’re young, you think anything is possible. You don’t realize how hard it is to start a business.” – Or, maybe as in my case, you know it is possible because you have DONE it. Three times now. 7 Generation Games will be our fourth venture. I’ve made a profit since 1985.
It reminds me of a conversation I had with a client about a program they wanted written. I said,
It will take two weeks. I’ll send you over a contract.
They protested,
We’ve been working on this for over a month and haven’t been able to solve it. How do you know you can do it in two weeks?
I answered,
Because I’ve done it before, so I know how to solve it. Writing the program the first time took me two months. Revising it for you, around my commitments to other clients, will take two weeks.
So, yeah, Logan’s Run can bite me. Oh, and I’m Latina and I’m REALLY good at statistics.
If you just want to rant about ageism in the comments, go right ahead.
Feb
10
Is social media over-rated?
Filed Under computer games, Dr. De Mars General Life Ramblings, statistics, The Julia Group | 2 Comments
@xek tweeted that “Almost everyone who does twitter stats is a fucking moron”.
I was going to say that no one really knows what the hell is going on when it comes to social media, but I believe his estimate adds a greater level of precision.
For example, the tweet reach tool tells me that I reached 17,999 accounts with my tweets from my annmariastat account in the last five days. In contrast, my judo/ personal account reached 30,336 accounts. Does that mean that 18,000 or 30,000 people READ those tweets? I’m pretty certain not.
Ronda’s “reach” is 137,947 even though her number of followers is around 173,000. So I am interpreting this as the number of people you reached OUTSIDE of your followers.
This article says that there are 465 million twitter accounts and that 30% of twitter users have an income over $100,000. Wait, what? Because I know the average income in the US and it is far from $100,000. Maybe richer people have several twitter accounts. I know I have 2. Maybe Bill Gates has 10,000 – but wouldn’t he still just count as one twitter user?
Readwrite.com did have a little more data I could sink my teeth into. They said that 29% of tweets produce a reaction – a reply or retweet. This really surprised me because I had assumed it was far fewer.
I got interested in this because we have a Kickstarter campaign that just started to support our game to teach math. (Go here to watch the video and pledge. It’s awesome. And I know you have an internet connection because you are reading this.)
Here are how the first 33 pledges broke down, which is the first 10% of our funding – $2,000.
Between my two accounts, I have about 3,400 followers. My daughter, Ronda, has 173,000. We both tweeted about this a couple of times. Ignoring the tweet reach Total = 176,400 Number of pledges from twitter = 10 = 0.0006%
I write two blogs. This one averages about 3,100 visits a day and my judo blog is around 1,000. Total in one day I had the widget link up (look at right)
Number of pledges from blog = 3 = 0.073%
Both of us have our twitter accounts post to Facebook. She has 5,000 friends and I, defining friend loosely as someone I have met at least once, have more like 400 friends. Total = 5,400
Number of pledges from Facebook = 5 = 0.093%
Lastly, I emailed a few dozen or so people in my address book, as did my sister, total = 50.
Number of direct link pledges = 10 = 20%
That’s all for what I did. There were an extra five pledges from the Kickstarter site itself, people who looked for games or just clicked on the new projects link.
What can you conclude from this? Well, there is the obvious fact that the more people actually know you, the more likely they are to pledge. If you’re in my address book, we are probably friends or colleagues. Also, at my age, my friends and colleagues are likely to have a job, their kids are grown and they have extra money to pledge. (More about that in my Logan’s Run post later!)
Does that mean social media is useless? Yes and no. It means that your odds of getting funded just using social media probably aren’t that good unless you have a whole lot of friends and followers. Certainly having someone in my corner with 173,000 followers was helpful – as many of them pledged as my friends did – so twitter followers were far less likely to pledge percentage-wise, but there were far more of them.
I do think that social media effects may be over-estimated. When I said I was doing this Kickstarter campaign some of my younger relatives were sure it would be over in a day, they said,
” Just have Ronda tweet it out once, she has over 170,000 followers. If every one of them gives $1 you’ll have made it several times over in a day.”
Ah, the naivete of youth! Now, our campaign just started two days ago, and I know that not as many people read my blog on the weekends (I do keep stats on that). There is also the fact that people on the east coast are buried in snow and have far more to worry about than a Kickstarter campaign of mine.
On the other hand, Ronda has a title fight in two weeks and a TV show on her aired a couple of times this week, so, as far as random events, there has been plenty of random in both directions.
What to make of this? Well, after seeing the numbers, I ran Faker, an application I found on this interesting article on fake twitter followers of athletes. It between Ronda and I we have 72,000 active accounts following us, not fake and actively tweeting. Still, only 10 of them pledged.
According to Blogher, only about half of the visitors to my blogs come to the site long enough for the ads to load, so some of those “visits” are spambots or just not very interested. That still only brings the percent of pledges to .14% .
On seeing the numbers, I am coming to think this way – you need both. And you need them over a period of time. I never did think one tweet was going to make our Kickstarter campaign. However, a couple of dozen tweets over a couple of dozen days, just might.
Feb
8
Who is too old for a start-up? or A week in the life of a statistician
Filed Under computer games, Dr. De Mars General Life Ramblings, statistics, The Julia Group | Leave a Comment
Since it’s the international year of statistics, I felt a little guilty that I have not done that much in the way of statistics lately. However, I think that is true whether you are an engineer, statistician, biologist or whatever, within a few years after your Ph.D. (at most!) you find lots of your time not being in the area you expected. Let’s look at this week, starting today
Thursday: Kickstarter campaign kicked off. We have been working for a year developing a computer game to teach kids math. (SERIOUSLY CHECK OUT OUR VIDEO HERE & PLEDGE, IT’S AWESOME!) There are statistics in the fifth game in the series – teaching distribution and variability. There was a lot of statistics involved in analyzing the data to back it up – computing item difficulty statistics, internal consistency reliability for the measures, repeated measures ANOVA to test whether the students who played the game progressed in math faster than those who didn’t. (Short answer: Yes.)
However, the biggest part of my day today was spent on Facebook, twitter and phone calls about the Kickstarter campaign, setting up filming for a commercial to be aired next week that a wonderful sponsor offered to do for free.
Wednesday: We’re submitting a grant proposal to USDA to create a series of video games. It will involve a good bit of text mining and data mining to create propensity scores to identify the best match of instructional videos, web pages or games for students based on their mathematics achievement level and characteristics of the instructional resources. Before we get to the statistics, though, there is a lot of writing – literature review, how it relates to Joe Bob Briggs (2011) study of similar stuff, logic models, etc. etc. Wrote blog post on documentation.
Tuesday: Grant-writing. Wishing I was doing mixed model analysis of some interesting data. Grant-writing. Wishing I was doing PHP program for client. Grant-writing. Wishing I was doing text-mining. Wrote blog post on idiots who annoy me. Internet said that was Wednesday but since I hadn’t gone to bed yet, it was Tuesday to me.
Monday: See Tuesday.
Sunday: 7 hours of video editing using Garageband and iMovie with the assistance from a wonderful video editor the folks from the American Horror channel on FilmOn sent out as part of their service to the community. (Thank you guys!) As much as the help was greatly appreciated I must say that anyone who does film editing for a living must put the hyphen in anal-retentive. By the end, I wanted to shoot myself. Then, I did more grantwriting.
Saturday: Heard darling daughter #3 downstairs talking to The Spoiled One. Came down wearing nothing but The Rocket Scientist’s shirt to be met by a photographer from a national magazine who asked,
“Do you mind if I take your picture?”
I replied,
“I’m not wearing pants, but, whatever.”
Random fact: Darling daughter #3 has a world title fight in the UFC coming up this month so photographers, film crews and journalists have been all over our house like white on rice.
Second random fact: I also had a book published this week, Winning on the Ground – which is about matwork in judo and martial arts.
So, where the hell is the statistics in here? Well, sadly, not nearly in as many places as I would like. In the grant research design sections, there are lots of statistics mentioned. Come February 28th when the Kickstarter campaign is over and the grant proposals are done, I can get back to doing statistics 50% or more of the time. My points though, are;
1. A good bit of being a statistician at the senior level is writing – writing research papers, writing reports, writing proposals.
2. Another good bit of being a statistician is working collaboratively, whether it is with video editors, like this week, or other researchers writing proposals, like last week.
3. You are NOT too old to do a start-up and anyone who thinks you are washed up by 30 can kiss my ass. If you agree, please go to our Kickstarter site and pledge.
Now, I have to get off the computer and go watch this program on TV on darling daughter #3.