This app replaced my 9-5 ($155K/year)

频道: Starter Story
视频: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=axH1e2cZSrw
原文语言: en
统计: 共 25 轮 · Ken 11 · Gus 10

[0:00] Ken

My revenue jumped from roughly 1,000 a month to 10,000 a month almost overnight from that one single post.

就因为那一篇帖子，我的收入几乎一夜之间从每月 1,000 美元左右涨到了每月 1 万美元。

[0:05] Gus

This is Ken. He spent most of his career working at some of the biggest tech companies in the world. He was successful, making good money until he walked away from all of it to build a game. But here's the thing, he had never built a game before in his life, and he honestly had no idea if it would work.

这位是 Ken。他职业生涯的大部分时间，都在全球数一数二的科技公司工作。他混得不错，收入可观，直到有一天，他把这一切都放下，跑去做一款游戏。但问题是：他这辈子从没做过游戏，说实话，他也完全不知道这能不能行得通。

[0:22]

At that point, I hadn't written a single line of code in over 4 years. But just a couple years later, this little game is already making him over $10,000 a month. So, I wanted to have Ken on the channel to break it all down for us. And in this [music] episode, we're going to dive into why he left his dream tech job to build a tiny mobile game by himself, how he grew it to over $10,000 a month without spending a dollar on [music] marketing, and the massive opportunity in games that almost nobody is talking about. All right, I'm excited for this one. Let's dive in. I'm Gus, and this is Starter Story. Hey, real quick before we hop in. I'm Gus, producer of the Starter Story YouTube channel. You've probably seen me near the back half of the interviews. I'm filling in for Pat this week because he's out traveling the world. But don't worry, he'll be back. In the meantime, enjoy this interview. I think it's going to be really fun. This is one of the first interviews I'm hosting by myself. So, enjoy. Ken, welcome to the channel. Excited to have you and talk about games today. Can you tell us who you are, what you built, and what's your story?

Ken： 那时候，我已经四年多没写过一行代码了。

Gus： 可短短几年之后，这款小游戏每月已经能给他带来超过 1 万美元的收入。所以我特地请 Ken 来到频道，给我们把整件事拆开讲清楚。这一期我们会深入聊聊：他为什么离开梦寐以求的科技大厂工作，独自去做一款小小的手游；他怎么在营销上一分钱没花，就把它做到月入 1 万美元以上；以及游戏领域里一个几乎没人在谈的巨大机会。好，这期我非常期待，我们开始吧。我是 Gus，这里是 Starter Story。嘿，正式开始之前先快速说两句。我是 Gus，Starter Story YouTube 频道的制片人，你们可能在访谈的后半段见过我。这周我替 Pat 代班，因为他出门环游世界去了。不过别担心，他会回来的。在那之前，请好好享受这期访谈，我觉得会非常有意思。这是我最早几次独立主持的访谈之一，希望大家喜欢。Ken，欢迎来到我们频道！很高兴请到你，今天来聊聊游戏。能先跟我们说说你是谁、做了什么，还有你的故事吗？

[1:17] Ken

Yeah. Hey, my name is Ken and I've been building a mobile game called Harpia for the past couple years. I officially launched the game a little over a year and a half ago while still working a full-time job. Growth was slow because I didn't do any marketing. After a single Reddit post, my revenue grew from about a thousand a month to over 10,000 a month. I had no audience, no publisher, and I had no budget for marketing. I'm excited to share how building a game for a small audience can be enough to build a profitable business.

好的。大家好，我叫 Ken，过去几年我一直在做一款叫 Harpagia 的手游。一年半多以前，我在还有一份全职工作的情况下正式上线了这款游戏。因为完全没做营销，增长一直很慢。后来只发了一篇 Reddit 帖子，我的收入就从每月 1,000 美元左右涨到了每月 1 万美元以上。我没有受众，没有发行商，也没有任何营销预算。很高兴能来分享：为一小群玩家做一款游戏，怎么就足以撑起一门赚钱的生意。

[1:42] Gus

Yeah, I'm excited to get into quitting your job, building a game. But before we get into that, let's talk about Harpagia [music] itself, your game. So, can you pull up your website or landing page and just tell us what your game is, who it's for, give us a little overview of that.

好，我很期待聊聊你辞职、做游戏这段经历。不过在那之前，先说说 Harpagia 本身，也就是你的这款游戏。你能把网站或者落地页调出来，跟我们讲讲这是一款什么游戏、做给谁玩的，简单介绍一下吗？

[1:58] Ken

Yeah, absolutely. Harpagia is a textbased idol RPG. Players level up skills, battle monsters, collect loot, and upgrade their character over time. The game is mainly played by fans of incremental games like Runescape. And in this type of game, you're not actively playing most of the time. The main point is to make meaningful progress while you're away, come back to collect rewards, and then decide what to do next.

当然可以。Harpagia 是一款以文字为主的放置类 RPG（text-based idle RPG）。玩家可以练技能、打怪、收集战利品，随着时间推移不断强化自己的角色。玩这款游戏的主要是 RuneScape 这类增量类游戏（incremental game）的爱好者。在这类游戏里，你大部分时间并不需要一直手动操作。它的核心在于：你不在线的时候，进度照样在实实在在地推进；你回来领取奖励，再决定下一步做什么。

[2:17] Gus

Awesome. That sounds cool. I'm not a big gamer myself. The closest I ever got to gaming was like Pokemon on my Game Boy, but I think it's really cool that you built this. Can you pull up your revenue screenshots or dashboards to kind of show off your revenue, show us that this thing is legit?

太棒了，听起来很酷。我自己不怎么玩游戏，跟游戏沾边最多的一次，大概就是用 Game Boy 玩 Pokémon 了。不过我觉得你能把这个做出来真的很酷。你能调出收入截图或者数据后台，给我们展示一下收入，证明这事儿是真的吗？

[2:31] Ken

Okay. Harpagia is a free-to-play mobile game on iOS and Android. The game generates revenue through optional inapp purchases that unlock premium features or speed up progression. A lot of the pricing ranges anywhere from the $2 to $10 range. What I've learned through a lot of monetization experimentation is anything around $4.99 to $9.99, players will generally be okay to spend. Anything that's above $9.99, it's a little bit harder to convert. Over the past year, the game averaged over $3 in revenue per active user. The average monthly revenue has been around 13,000 a month, which totaled over 150,000 in the past year. The monthly active users ranges anywhere from 3500 to 4,000 with daily active users around 5 to 600. The game has reached over 50,000 downloads combined with both iOS and Android with roughly a 6% conversion rate, which I would consider pretty decent considering the typical conversion rate for games is anywhere from 2 to 5%. My ongoing operating expenses such as purchasing assets, freelancing art, subscriptions, and so on is roughly 500 a month. And I did not spend anything on ads, so my ad spend was zero.

好的。Harpagia 是一款免费游玩（free-to-play）的手游，上架了 iOS 和 Android。游戏靠可选的应用内购买（in-app purchase）赚钱，玩家付费可以解锁高级功能或者加快进度。定价大多在 2 到 10 美元之间。做了大量变现实验之后，我的体会是：4.99 到 9.99 美元左右的价位，玩家一般都愿意掏钱；一旦超过 9.99 美元，转化就会难一些。过去一年，这款游戏平均每个活跃用户贡献了 3 美元以上的收入。月均收入在 1.3 万美元左右，过去一年累计超过 15 万美元。MAU（月活）在 3,500 到 4,000 之间，DAU（日活）在 500 到 600 左右。iOS 和 Android 两端加起来，游戏下载量已经超过 5 万次，付费转化率大约 6%——游戏行业典型的付费转化率一般在 2% 到 5% 之间，这么一比，我觉得这个成绩相当不错了。我的日常运营开支，比如购买素材、外包美术、各类订阅等等，每月大约 500 美元。而且我在广告上一分钱都没花，广告支出为零。

[3:32] Gus

Awesome, Ken. That is really cool to see. And I'm really excited to get into your background, how you even got to this place, how you grew this game. What were you doing before you were building Harpagia?

太棒了，Ken，看到这些真的很酷。我也非常期待聊聊你的背景：你是怎么走到今天这一步的，又是怎么把这款游戏做起来的。在做 Harpagia 之前，你是做什么的？

[3:41]

Yeah, so starting off growing up, I took the traditional path. I went to college, studied computer science at UCSD, and started working in tech right after I graduated. I spent about 12 years in big tech, most recently as an engineering manager at Meta. Before that, I was a software engineer at Amazon. During the beginning of 2024, AI tools started gaining traction. At that point, I hadn't written a single line of code in over 4 years, and I wanted to see if I could build an app with AI assistance. I built my first app, which was a simple card game called Big Too Wild in about six weeks. I made this game because this was a really popular card game that my friends and I had played back in high school. I also wanted to make sure that the scope was small enough for me to complete in a short amount of time to gain experience of actually shipping something. Building that game taught me a lot about AI assisted development, building a product end to end, handling app store approvals, and what it actually takes to launch a product to the world. I took those lessons and applied them to my next project, which became Harpia. I love everything that Ken is breaking down right now. He built and grew this game entirely [music] by himself. He was just a guy who quit his job in tech to build this tiny game by himself that's now making over $10,000 a month. We [music] really love stories like this at Starter Story because it shows that sometimes there's something more than having a big comfortable tech job. [music] Sometimes what really matters is going out on your own and building your own thing. So, that's exactly why we work with [music] the team at HubSpot, put together a free database of over a thousand solo developers who are making over $10,000 a month from their [music] projects.

Ken： 好的，从成长经历说起吧，我走的是很传统的路：上大学，在 UCSD 读计算机科学，一毕业就进了科技行业。我在大厂待了大约 12 年，最近一份工作是 Meta 的工程经理，在那之前是 Amazon 的软件工程师。2024 年初，AI 工具开始流行起来。那时候我已经四年多没写过一行代码了，就想看看自己能不能借助 AI 做出一个 app。我的第一个 app 是一款简单的纸牌游戏，叫 Big 2 Wild（玩法基于纸牌游戏「大老二」），大概花了六周做完。之所以做它，是因为这是我和朋友们高中时特别爱玩的一款纸牌游戏。我也想确保项目范围足够小，能在短时间内做完，好积累一次真正把东西发布上线的经验。做那款游戏让我学到了很多：AI 辅助开发、端到端地做出一个产品、搞定应用商店审核，以及把一个产品推向全世界到底需要付出什么。我把这些经验用在了下一个项目上，也就是后来的 Harpagia。

Gus： Ken 现在讲的这些，我全都特别喜欢。这款游戏从开发到做大，完全是他一个人完成的。他就是一个普通人，辞掉了科技行业的工作，独自做了这么一款小游戏，如今每月收入超过 1 万美元。在 Starter Story，我们特别爱这类故事，因为它说明：有时候，人生不只有一份安稳舒适的大厂工作；有时候，真正重要的是自己出去闯、做属于自己的东西。正因如此，我们和 HubSpot 团队合作，整理了一个免费数据库，收录了一千多位靠自己的项目月入 1 万美元以上的独立开发者。

[5:06]

Inside that database, we have real revenue numbers, real strategies, all from stuff who are building projects [music] by themselves, just like Ken. So, if you're looking for a proven idea and are ready to build, just head to [music] the first link in the description and grab this database 100% for free. All right, let's get back to Ken. Okay, that's awesome. Uh we often say here at Starter Story is one of the best ways to come up with any business idea is to build [music] something you know you would want to use. But I want to go back just a little click. You mentioned that you worked at these [music] big tech companies Meta and Amazon assuming you were making decent money and yet you still decided that you didn't want to maybe continue pursuing that traditional path and you wanted to [music] build this game. Tell us a little bit of the story around quitting tech to build this little mobile game. Yeah, so working at Meta was really stressful but rewarding. During the first half of my career there, I learned an incredible amount. I had great mentors and the company was also really supportive of its employees. However, things shifted over time. Once the layoff started happening in 2022, my perception of job stability had changed.

Gus： 数据库里有真实的收入数字、真实的打法，全都来自像 Ken 这样独自做项目的人。所以，如果你正在找一个经过验证的点子，也准备好动手了，就点开视频简介里的第一个链接，100% 免费领取这个数据库。好，我们回到 Ken 这边。好的，太棒了。我们在 Starter Story 常说，想出任何商业点子的最好办法之一，就是去做一个你知道自己会想用的东西。不过我想稍微往回倒一点。你提到自己在 Meta、Amazon 这些科技大厂工作过，我猜收入应该挺不错，可你还是决定不再沿着那条传统的路走下去，而是要来做这款游戏。跟我们讲讲你离开科技行业、去做这款小手游的来龙去脉吧。

Ken： 好的。在 Meta 工作压力非常大，但也很有收获。在那儿的前半段职业生涯里，我学到了非常多东西，遇到了很好的导师，公司对员工也非常支持。但情况慢慢变了。2022 年裁员开始之后，我对工作稳定性的看法就变了。

[6:06] Ken

I realized that job security is never guaranteed no matter how hard you work. I wanted to take control of my own future. I started experimenting with AI tools and chose to build a game because gaming was something I felt that I knew very well. After I launched, a small group of players found the game and gave me feedback. I made my first sale a few days into launch, which was incredibly validating. It proved to me that even though my game was in an incredibly early alpha version, someone enjoyed it enough to spend $10 for something that I had built. By the end of my first month, I made about $150 in sales. By the end of my second month, I made about 1,500 in total sales. It was at this point that I started to see that this could potentially be more than just a small hobby project. I decided that if my game could reach 10,000 a month organically, I'd leave my job and go all in. The game continued to grow slowly and six months after launch, I made my first Reddit post about the game. The response was actually overwhelmingly critical, but the post gained significant traction and put Harpia in front of thousands of players. My revenue jumped from roughly 1,000 a month to 10,000 a month almost overnight from that one single post and I hit my goal. I left Meta that same month. the salary at Meta is way above that. But once again, I just really wanted to do something for myself for the first time ever. That's why I thought that if the financial aspect wasn't enough to cover my expenses, I'm just going to do it because if I'm not going to do it now, when am I going to do it?

我意识到，不管你多努力，工作保障永远都不是板上钉钉的。我想把自己的未来掌握在自己手里。于是我开始摸索 AI 工具，之所以选择做游戏，是因为我觉得游戏是自己非常熟悉的东西。上线之后，一小群玩家发现了这款游戏，还给了我反馈。上线没几天，我就卖出了第一单，这让我特别受鼓舞。它向我证明：哪怕我的游戏还处在极早期的 alpha 版本，也有人喜欢到愿意为我做的东西花 10 美元。第一个月结束时，我的销售额大约 150 美元；到第二个月结束，累计销售额大约 1,500 美元。就是在那时，我开始意识到，这件事也许不只是一个小小的业余项目。我给自己定了个规矩：如果游戏能靠自然增长做到每月 1 万美元，我就辞职全力投入。游戏一直在缓慢增长，上线六个月后，我第一次在 Reddit 上发帖介绍这款游戏。其实反馈绝大多数都是批评，但这篇帖子获得了大量关注，让成千上万的玩家看到了 Harpagia。就因为那一篇帖子，我的收入几乎一夜之间从每月 1,000 美元左右涨到了每月 1 万美元，目标达成。我当月就从 Meta 离职了。Meta 的薪水比这高多了。但还是那句话，我真的很想有生以来第一次为自己做点什么。所以我当时想，就算钱不够覆盖我的开销，我也要去做，因为如果现在不做，那要等到什么时候？

[7:24] Gus

Yeah, I like that mindset of like if I'm not going to do it now, when am I going to do it? You know, I think if you want to do this, like you can sort of set parameters to make it happen and once you make those parameters work, you can actually go [music] for it. And it kind of sounds like a little bit of what you did. That's cool. Okay, let's get into the growth. I'm really excited to talk a little bit more about this. So, you mentioned in your first year you spent $0 on marketing [music] and you also mentioned something about how Reddit has been a useful marketing tool for you. So, let's get into it. What were some of the like main marketing distribution strategies you use to help you go from zero to $10,000 a month?

嗯，我喜欢这种心态——「现在不做，更待何时？」我觉得如果你想做这件事，可以先给自己设定一些条件，让它有实现的可能；一旦这些条件都达成了，你就可以真的放手去干。听起来你做的差不多就是这样，很酷。好，我们来聊增长，这部分我特别想多聊聊。你提到第一年在营销上花了 0 美元，也提到 Reddit 对你来说是一个很好用的营销工具。那我们就展开说说：从零做到月入 1 万美元，你主要用了哪些营销和分发策略？

[7:58] Ken

Yeah. So, my main marketing strategy after the first year was posting on Reddit. Almost every single time that I posted on there, I'd receive a significant jump in new players. While the results weren't consistent, Reddit has been my number one marketing tactic. I think one challenge though for Reddit is that many subreddits don't allow developers to promote their product more than once a month. Because of that, I generally only shared major updates once every few months. One thing that I found interesting was that the posts generating the most discussion often performed the best, especially the ones that received the most criticism. The very first post that I made just showed some screenshots of the game and kind of just explaining a little bit about what the game is and a few metrics about, you know, how to free to play it is because a lot of people, especially in the gaming community, want to try out a game before they want to pay for the game. At the time, it was really rough around the edges when I first advertised the game, but that honestly didn't matter because it brought in so much conversation and criticism from the Reddit users that it actually helped boost my game so much.

对。第一年之后，我主要的营销策略就是在 Reddit 上发帖。几乎每次在上面发帖，新玩家都会明显涨一大截。虽然效果时好时坏，但 Reddit 一直是我排第一的营销手段。不过我觉得 Reddit 有个难处：很多 subreddit 不允许开发者一个月推广自家产品超过一次。所以我一般隔几个月才分享一次重大更新。我发现一件挺有意思的事：引发讨论最多的帖子往往效果最好，尤其是挨批最多的那些。我发的第一个帖子，就是贴了几张游戏截图，简单介绍了一下这是个什么游戏，再放上几个数据，说明它对免费玩家有多友好——因为很多人，尤其是游戏圈的人，都想先试玩，再决定要不要为游戏掏钱。我第一次推这款游戏的时候，它还非常粗糙，但说实话这根本不要紧，因为它在 Reddit 用户里引来了大量讨论和批评，反而把我的游戏大大带火了。

[8:57] Ken

And every single one of those posts, I get a huge jump in new users. Again, over time, revenue grew from around 10,000 a month to a peak of roughly 18,000 a month just posting on Reddit.

而且那几篇帖子，每发一篇，新用户都会大涨一波。总的来说，一段时间下来，光靠在 Reddit 上发帖，收入就从每月 1 万美元左右涨到了峰值时的每月约 1.8 万美元。

[9:05] Gus

Yeah, I think Reddit is something we've seen over and over again on Starter Story as a place where people start to get that initial traction. And obviously for you, it took you a lot of these posts helped you get from that 0 to $10,000 a month. The main lesson I'm getting from this brief section is like all publicity is good publicity and it gave you users, it gave you traction and probably I'm assuming it gave you [music] some feedback that you ended up taking and applying to the game. So, let's switch gears a little bit. Like I was mentioning earlier, talking about games is not something we always uh feature on starter story, but I was really curious to bring you on because you know like your background of working in big tech and dropping that to build this kind of tiny game. Let's talk about the opportunity in games. Can you just give us or educate us on a little bit of like how big this gaming opportunity is? Is there room for people watching who, you know, maybe do a little bit of gaming on the side to start building their own games?

对，我们在 Starter Story 上一次又一次地看到，Reddit 是很多人拿到第一波起量的地方。对你来说显然也是这样，正是靠着这一篇篇帖子，你从 0 做到了月入 1 万美元。从这一小段里，我得到的主要启发就是：凡是曝光都是好曝光。它给你带来了用户、带来了起量，而且我猜，还给了你一些反馈，你后来也采纳了、用到了游戏里。好，我们稍微换个话题。就像我前面提到的，游戏这类话题在 Starter Story 上并不常聊，但我特别想请你来，因为你的经历很特别——在大厂干过，然后放下这一切，去做这么一款小游戏。我们来聊聊游戏领域的机会吧。你能不能给我们讲讲、科普一下，游戏这块的机会到底有多大？对于正在看视频、平时业余也玩点游戏的观众来说，他们还有没有空间开始做自己的游戏？

[9:55] Ken

The gaming industry is a hundred billion dollar industry. And I think one misconception is that you need to have hundreds of thousands or millions of players to have a sustainable business. What I learned over the past couple years is that you can make a meaningful amount of money with a small audience if you're building something people genuinely enjoy. When I first started building Harpagasia, I never would have believed that only a few hundred active users could generate over 100,000 in revenue each year. That completely changed how I think about niche businesses and small audiences. The opportunity isn't necessarily building the next big hit like Flappy Bird or Clash of Clans. The opportunity is being able to build something that you generally care about and find other people who care about it, too.

游戏行业是个千亿美元规模的产业。我觉得有个常见的误解是：你得有几十万甚至上百万玩家，才能撑起一门可持续的生意。过去这几年我学到的是，只要你做的东西是大家真心喜欢的，哪怕受众很小，也能赚到相当可观的钱。刚开始做 Harpagia 的时候，我怎么也不会相信，区区几百个活跃用户，一年就能带来超过 10 万美元的收入。这彻底改变了我对小众生意和小受众的看法。机会不一定是做出下一个 Flappy Bird 或 Clash of Clans 那样的爆款；机会在于，做一个你自己真心在乎的东西，再找到同样在乎它的那群人。

[10:35] Gus

Yeah, that's cool. Yeah, I like what you said about kind of building as a way to kind of express your creative vision or kind of bring something thinking about to life in a game. Okay, let's switch gears and maybe just show us a little demo of your game, how it works. I would love to see it.

嗯，挺酷的。我喜欢你说的这一点：把做游戏当成一种表达自己创意构想的方式，或者说，把你心里想的东西在游戏里变成现实。好，我们换个环节，给我们简单演示一下你的游戏吧，看看它是怎么玩的。我很想看看。

[10:50] Ken

So, at its core, there are 16 different skills in Arpasia. Some skills are pretty simple. You simply hit the start mining and then you can get tons of resources which you can use to upgrade your items. There are other more interactive skills like archaeology where you tap on various tiles and upgrade things to get various different bonuses in the game. You can also upgrade your items to get stronger weapons uh which you can then use to go battle enemies. Here is what the combat looks like. This is what an idol RPG is. Basically, you don't need to do anything and the game just automatically fights the enemies for you. There's tons of different gears and abilities that you can equip. So there's a lot of different variety and a lot of builds that you can do which makes the game have quite a bit of variety.

从核心玩法上说，Harpagia 里一共有 16 种不同的技能。有些技能很简单，你只要点一下「开始采矿」，就能拿到一大堆资源，用来升级你的物品。还有一些互动性更强的技能，比如考古：你要点击各个格子、升级各种东西，来拿到游戏里各种不同的加成。你还可以升级物品，换来更强的武器，然后拿去跟敌人战斗。这就是战斗的样子。所谓放置类 RPG（idle RPG）就是这样：基本上你什么都不用做，游戏会自动替你打怪。游戏里有大量不同的装备和能力可以配置，所以变化非常多，能搭出很多种 build（配装流派），这让游戏玩法相当多样。

[11:32] Gus

Cool. That's awesome. And you built all this just with AI too. I can see why people might like it, right? They're kind of collecting things. They're growing things. Let's switch topics here. Let's talk about how you built this. What's the tech? What are the tools you use to build this game and build your business?

酷，太棒了。而且这一切你都是靠 AI 做出来的。我能理解大家为什么会喜欢它，对吧？就是那种收集东西、养成东西的乐趣。我们换个话题，聊聊你是怎么把它做出来的。用的什么技术？你做这款游戏、经营这门生意，都用了哪些工具？

[11:46] Ken

Our pages tech stack is very lightweight. You don't need a vast amount of tools to build a profitable product. For my code editor, I use cursor. I use chat GPT for brainstorming and doing various icon touch-ups. I use React Native for my front end. I use Firebase for my backend O and analytics. I use Discord Nitro for community management. I use Versell for web hosting. And the following are not necessarily tools but are very useful in the gaming niche. For purchasing assets, I use the Unity asset store or gamedev market which have a lot of prepackaged assets that you can purchase and save a lot of time on making art. I also use Fiverr and Upwork to hire freelancers to create screenshots, icons, videos, so I can just focus on building.

Harpagia 的技术栈非常轻量。要做出一个赚钱的产品，并不需要一大堆工具。代码编辑器我用 Cursor。头脑风暴、给各种图标做些小修饰，我用 ChatGPT。前端用 React Native。后端、鉴权（auth）和数据分析用 Firebase。社区管理用 Discord Nitro。网站托管用 Vercel。下面这些不一定算工具，但在游戏这个细分领域非常有用。买素材我用 Unity Asset Store 或者 GameDev Market，上面有大量打包好的素材可以直接买，能省下很多做美术的时间。我还会在 Fiverr 和 Upwork 上雇自由职业者来做截图、图标、视频，这样我就能专心做开发。

[12:26] Gus

All right, let's wrap up here and just talk about a question we always ask to everyone that comes on the channel. If you [music] were standing on your shoulders 2 years ago, 5 years ago, what advice would you give to yourself? [music]

好，我们差不多该收尾了，最后聊一个每位来上节目的嘉宾我们都会问的问题：如果你能回到两年前、五年前，站在当时的自己身旁，你会给自己什么建议？

[12:37]

Build something that you understand well and get real feedback as early as possible. Not from friends and family, but from your potential customers. One of the best decisions I made was forcing myself to launch the game after 6 months, no matter what. At the time, I had a much bigger vision for the game. But looking back, there's no way the game would have improved the way it did without getting it into the hands of real players. If you're not embarrassed by your V1, V2, or maybe even your V5, you're probably not shipping early enough. Your early users or play testers will give you incredible feedback and help shape your game. I also didn't worry much about monetization in the beginning. My focus was retention first and building a game that people wanted to keep playing. Awesome. That's great advice, Ken. Thank you for coming on to the channel. Excited to see where this game goes and maybe we'll have you back on when you're making 50K a month or 100K a month.

Ken： 做你真正懂行的东西，并且尽早拿到真实的反馈——不是来自亲朋好友，而是来自你的潜在客户。我做过最好的决定之一，就是逼自己无论如何都要在 6 个月后把游戏上线。当时我对这款游戏的构想要宏大得多，但回头看，如果不把游戏交到真实玩家手里，它绝不可能像后来那样一路进步。如果你的 V1、V2，甚至 V5 都没让你觉得难为情，那你大概发布得还不够早。早期用户或试玩玩家会给你极其宝贵的反馈，帮你把游戏塑造成形。一开始我也没太操心变现，我的重心是先抓留存，做一款大家愿意一直玩下去的游戏。

Gus： 太棒了，Ken，这个建议很好。谢谢你来上我们的频道。很期待看到这款游戏接下来的发展，也许等你月入 5 万或 10 万美元的时候，我们再请你回来。

[13:23] Ken

Thanks for having me, Gus. Appreciate it.

谢谢邀请，Gus，很感谢。

[13:25] Gus

I just wrapped up with Ken. That was a really fun interview. One of the first that I've done by myself on this channel. So, thank you. Leave me some feedback in the comments. Let me know what I could do better next time or what questions I maybe should have asked. My takeaway from this is I liked what he said about building stuff that you know that you're genuinely interested in. It's kind of generic advice to some degree, but I think it's important advice to reiterate because when you know the niche or know the industry, you're going to be one more excited to do it, two be more of the target user and kind of understand the mind of your potential customers, uh, and three just I think that passion or that interest will carry you through more than like building some random generator or some random app just because it's popular or making money. The most important thing is that you go out and [music] actually start building. And if you're interested and looking for ideas that you can build by yourself, we've put a free resource [music] in the description. Over a thousand solar developers who have built their own $10,000 per month projects all by [music] themselves. Just click the link in the description and download that for free. All right, hope you enjoyed this one. Thank you for watching. We'll see you in the [music] next one. Peace.

刚和 Ken 聊完，这场访谈真的很好玩，也是我在这个频道最早独立主持的几场访谈之一。所以，谢谢大家。欢迎在评论区给我留点反馈，告诉我下次哪里可以做得更好，或者有哪些问题我本该问却没问。我这期的收获是，我很喜欢他说的那一点：去做你了解、而且真心感兴趣的东西。某种程度上这算是老生常谈，但我觉得值得反复强调，因为当你了解这个细分领域或这个行业时：第一，你做起来会更有劲头；第二，你自己就更接近目标用户，更能理解潜在客户的心思；第三，我觉得这份热情或兴趣能支撑你走得更远，远胜过只因为某样东西火、能赚钱，就随便做个什么生成器、随便做个 App。最重要的是，你得真正走出去、动手开始做。如果你感兴趣，正在找可以一个人做的点子，我们在视频简介里放了一份免费资源：一千多位独立开发者，全都是单枪匹马做出了月入 1 万美元的项目。点简介里的链接，就能免费下载。好了，希望你喜欢这一期。感谢观看，我们下期见。回见！