Alternatively the OP could look for a publisher to partner with, but you'd still need a business guy on your side to make sure your not getting screwed.
oh, another good question:
How much money have you sunk in this so far?
Do you have a way of supporting yourself and your family if this never takes off, or takes too long, or whatever reason fails or doesn't achieve the Hight of success your looking for?
In Game dev the analogy is much like your building a house, and you have to do everything.
But you've taken it a step further, and built an engine, which is like crafting your own tools and, cutting down your own trees to make furniture, instead of going to Ikea and home depot for those things.
I commend your effort,, but at the end of the day, most people buy tools and furniture., now your responsible for literally everything. If the tools break, you can't call someone for a warranty, or buy replacement parts you'd have to recrate the tool.
And although all of this speaks to a sense of independence and determination, it could also be a sign of anti social tendencies and the inability to work well with others.
It's also a judgement call thing, sounds like you spent 20 years working alone doing everything. Is there a reason why you never asked for help on this and other issues before? It's also a time management issue.
Put it another way,
Your a single dad, raising a kid for 20 years, all by yourself.
Now that it's essentially a young adult, you go out into the dating market, telling people you are looking for a wife to help parent your kid, and take him to the next level, and fund his college tuition.
What's our motivation to consider you and your son?
Why would we spend our money on his college?
We have no investment emotionally or intellectually, in your 20 year old son, even if he was the greatest son there ever was, and he was kind, empathetic, driven to succeed, smart, beautiful, etc. et. [Insert desirable quality here,] he is still your son. And we would be setting him up for success.
As you well know, if we had gotten in on the ground floor. And helped you raise and shape him, then we would be significantly more motivated and invested. But you chose not to do that, and it was a conscious choice for 20 years.
What's changed?
Why have you not been looking for someone earlier?
It may sound like I'm trying to rehash the past, but your motivations and reasons to do this are paramount, and any prospective candidate would need to know.
esenthel said:
Anything that will help in achieving the goals/tasks that I wrote in my first post. Someone good with business/marketing/with people, a people's person, a magic man, a salesman, being able to sell a refrigerator to penguins is a good start ? That's just joking of course. I don't want to comment on skills, because specifying skills are not important, what's important to me are results, good attitude, and being fair, no lying/cheating or stuff like that. Someone that can make things happen.
Your basically saying to us that you have no idea of what your looking for, but you know what results you want. That's speaking like a true executive. No idea how to get it done, but you just want it done.
I'd highly recommend you do more research on what business people and managers do, so that you have a base level of understanding.
Even if you were able to find a trustworthy skilled results driven person that matched all your requirements, how would you know they are taking your product in the right direction? How would you know what decisions are good for him to make alone, vs. running everything by you.?
If your trying to build a company, around your engine, maybe you should recruit from your own community? Maybe you should look for more junior programmers to help you with the engine, so you have time to do other things?
Instead of finding one person that can do all the amorphous business stuff that you don't understand, perhaps split it up into multiple roles that work for you, with a smaller equity in the company?
So if I was in your situation, I would write up a standard document, that lists out a lot of what your looking for, and that answers a majority of our questions, kinda like a FAQ. Continue to add to that, and share the doc, with people who meet your minimum qualifications. As of now, you don't have any minimum qualifications. Your essentially just saying “Whoever can get the job done”.
This is to standardize and systematize the process you have for looking for this individual. Across all your platforms, so that way you know what your saying, where your saying it, and an entire approach.
It's been said that business partners are like marriages. You need to be sure, and trust them on multiple levels. And be compatible on similar levels.
Look, I've been working with my current business partner since 2014, and I have 2 prospective BPs that I've been working with for 10 years nd 6 years respectively. Expecting to find someone compatible will take time. I'm kinda confused as to why you didn't spend the past 20 years looking, but it was likely because you were too focused on the building of the product.
Not to mention time zone, that can be a huge thing to consider.
Sorry but it's not a good sign that your just asking now, what were you doing for the past 20 years that prevented you from looking for a BP? It speaks to poor planning and questionable judgement , and an ego that believes they can do everything themselves.
One of the core issues that I see, is the person has to be somewhat technical to understand what they are getting into. But through your actions or inactions, it's clear that they would be stepping on your toes if they had an opinion about the product.
Honestly another way to go about this, is to just recruit people for your game. And see how that goes. That would give you a stepping stone to find the kind of person you need.
Like it or not, we live in a world of specialists, part of the issue that you sound oblivious to, is that sales, marketing, public relations, human resources fund raising management, are all different domains of expertise, most people pick one and go down it there entire life. Finding one person that can do it all, and “take care of all the business stuff” that you ignored for 20 years is going to be really hard.
The main issue, that I can tell you from experience is that these business roles are usually not fun. They have to do a lot of leg work and paperwork They have to have difficult conversations with people, they have to be able to motivate people to perform under a variety of circumstances, they have to worry about hiring and firing people, they have to worry about budgets, legal, accounting and cashflow concerns. It's all stressful, and the trade off must be appealing. it's your responsibility to make it as appealing as possible. As a potential co-founder and business partner, you need to be able to motivate me, and draw a clear line from me around the risks, and to the rewards. You need to walk us down the logic path, and lead me to water. I
esenthel said:
while your doing all the technical stuff, I'd be the one selling your product and getting people to adopt it, what's my motivation to do that? How about building a great product, help game developers, and a chance to turn it into a job and get paid for it? But I can't tell you what your motivation can be, that's for you and you only ? I'm not trying to brainwash anyone, I'd like everyone to have their own opinion/motivation.
As said, Your recruiting us, it's your responsibility to sell yourself and the product to us, you'll need to be able to motivate this person, and hopefully eventually a team and company. I'd highly recommend you do some research into psychology and motivation. It's one thing to motivate yourself, it's another to motivate others.
But how do we know your product is great? How do we know your working on something that has potential? It's not enough that your telling us, we need to hear it from unbiased sources and existing users. Maybe make and push out a satisfaction survey for all your currant users? Something that could be like a testimonial? Do you have a feedback section on your forum?
There is always the possibility of making money, Are we talking a Full time job? or a part time job? What are your projections of how long it will take to generate a return on investment? How stable is this possible job?
I can probably say a lot more, but I think that is enough for now to chew on.
(keep in mind, you don't need to answer everything here publicly now, but you need to think and later answer these to yourself and your future applicants.)
