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[Macguffin]

Hey all,

I'm curious - for those of you who a) created business plans and b) have started to incur expenses and/or revenue, what's your experience been?  Have you found them useful, have you kept them up to date, and what were you way off base regarding?

I'm a firm believer in having a business plan - the rigor of creating it really makes you assess your assumptions.  What I'm wondering, as I work on mine, is what people have been surprised by or found valuable in theirs.

[Michaël Samyn]

I have wwritten a single business plan in my life. And I personally didn't find it very useful (apart from the fact that it helped in finding investment money). I felt very uncomfortable making estimates about game sales based on what I felt to be not much solid data. But I guess that's how it goes in business?
What I did find useful was to write out a long-term marketing plan. And to make simple calculations like comparing the 1% average conversion rate with the number of visitors of our webiste- and being shocked by how little copies we would sell...

[Macguffin]

Thanks, Johny.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

I have wwritten a single business plan in my life. And I personally didn't find it very useful (apart from the fact that it helped in finding investment money). I felt very uncomfortable making estimates about game sales based on what I felt to be not much solid data. But I guess that's how it goes in business?
What I did find useful was to write out a long-term marketing plan. And to make simple calculations like comparing the 1% average conversion rate with the number of visitors of our webiste- and being shocked by how little copies we would sell...

Actually that estimate technique might be a bad idea because not everyone who visits the site even downloads the game, typically the rule of thumb is that only about 30%-40% of new visitors download a game, most just there to look at the screenshots to satisfy their curiosity and then go away.

But on the plus side, the more games you release the more your traffic could go up due to more reviews and so on linking to you; your traffic now could double or more after you release a second game. But then again maybe not; my site's traffic (except for occasional increases during new releases) has been stable at about 150-200 visits per day for three years.

As for the original question, I too have created a single business plan and didn't find it too useful.

I think it's a good idea to have a flexible plan and a general direction for your business in mind, and to make lists of ways you want to market and things you need to do next business-wise, but a business plan is not a good vessel to hold that for me.

[Alec]

It seems like business plans work best when they're written for products for which the amount of success can be somewhat reliably predicted.

With indie games, in a number of cases, a feeling or a desire is the leading drive for making a game - rather than technology or business - which makes it hard to predict how large the final audience/sales will be.

[AdamAtomic]

I'm working on a business plan for the first time in the 2 or so years I've been running my company, which is probably a bad sign.  BUT...it is not a plan for how to sell games.  It is a plan for how to get enough non-game work (that pays much, much better) to offset some real, dedicated indie dev time on a regular basis.

So I guess my plan is how to subsidize my indie game development aspirations, not an actual business plan for how to, uh, monetize them.  That gets into deep, deep waters that I am not prepared to swim in yet!

[Michaël Samyn]

Actually that estimate technique might be a bad idea because not everyone who visits the site even downloads the game, typically the rule of thumb is that only about 30%-40% of new visitors download a game, most just there to look at the screenshots to satisfy their curiosity and then go away.

FYI, we made our estimates based on the number of people who downloaded the client for our free mmo in comparison to the number of people who visit the website. Of that small group we assumed the 1% conversion rate and then calculated how much web visitors we would need to make a return on investment. That number was staggering!
But it did motivate us to work on that aspect of things a bit and try and get some traffic our way. And it did work. I'm happy to say to we have 1000 or more unique visitors per day on our tale-of-tales.com domain nowadays. That's not nearly enough to run our business on, though.