I bootstrapped a niche game to $10k ARR as a solo founder - AMA!
Hey all!
I'm Allison, the founder of Fantasy Congress - a fantasy sports style game based on American politics.
At the beginning of this month, Fantasy Congress celebrated reaching $10k ARR! I first started on the project in 2018, and after a big pivot, re-launched in February of last year. In that time, Fantasy Congress has generated +$17,000 in revenue and I'm currently on track to double what I made last year!
Since the beginning I've been running this project solo. That means everything from development, to design, to creating the rules of the game has been handled by me. Wearing so many different hats can be crazy sometimes, but so far I really enjoy being a solo founder.
I still have a ways to go before reaching ramen profitability (currently sitting at $910 MRR). I've made pretty much every mistake in the book and somehow recovered. 😅 Proof that at first if you don't succeed, try try again.
You can check out my monthly retrospectives on my blog if you'd like to know more of the story of Fantasy Congress. This was the first one I wrote for my re-launch last February.
I've been indie hacking for roughly 4 years and currently co-host the IH meet up in Chicago. Love to share the things I've learned from my journey here with you all. 😊 Ask me anything!
Congrats! I've always been interested in game design/development since I was a kid. Is actually doing it as fun as one might imagine it to be? Compared to, say, building a web app? Also, any good books/resources you've come across?
It's fun! But, it's also stressful at times because I'm constantly wondering if other people will think what I've created is fun too. Working on a normal web app, it's a lot easier to figure out how to satisfy your customers because you're fixing a problem for them. With a game, you're really putting your ego on the line. It's a very vulnerable experience.
Like a normal SaaS, the way I've gotten around this is by asking for lots of feedback and keeping in contact with my users. It helps too, that I'm a member of my target audience, so I have a good idea of what they're looking for from the game.
Learning about gamification has helped me some. I don't have a specific resource for that, but there are lots of great articles out there if you search.
It's AMAZING, congratulations!
Have you ever considered keeping the exact system of your game but adding NFT's ?
What I mean is that recently a company called Sorare made headlines with their fantasy soccer game. It's like what you'r doing but with Soccer but they added NFT's attached to players to take the game to a next level.
In general, here's my main question:
Haven't thought of adding NFTs. Don't think my user base would really be in to that to be honest!
Most of my users are people who follow the news and politics a lot. Another big part of my audience is educators, who are using this to teach American government in the classroom.
Very clear, thank you for your answer
Congratulations! Nothing beats people saying what you do is valuable by actually paying for it! As me being someone previously dabbing into game-related projects, my questions are related to some of the things I personally found challenging/interesting.
Thanks! Yes, it's seriously the best feeling! Answers to your questions:
Thank you for the answers.
With regard to support - is it at a volume where you feel it takes too much time/interrupts too much? Do you have a strategy to reduce it - like turning every incoming question into a self-help alternative? Have you found a balance between dealing with support and e.g. being away over holidays?
Personally, in a previous project, I found it a bit of a struggle - with people even finding my phone number and calling me expecting support during evenings. (building a forum/community for self-help and community help did help out a lot to reduce this - as well as aggressively changing the product to address any issues that popped up as support cases).
These days Fantasy Congress requires minimal support. But that might be the nature of the platform it is built on. Fantasy Congress is set up like a basic web app with Django, and users play in the browser. I imagine with a video game that someone installs onto their computer, there are a lot more ways for things to go wrong.
While running the first iteration of fantasy congress, I tried to do some fancy stuff and built really buggy software that had lots of problems. Support was overwhelming at times, to the point where I turned off signups for a couple of days to be able to catch up with everything.
The thing I learned from that experience is that prevention is key when it comes to support. For the next iteration I made the infrastructure of the game much simpler, and I took extra time during the development phase to run an "alpha" test with 100 users to catch bugs before I released it. I've also released new features as "beta" features that users could opt into, before rolling them out to everyone.
This has cost me time, which sucks. But it's made the end product a lot more stable and imo, more sustainable. I'll say also, that paid users are much more understanding when stuff goes wrong than free users. Seems weird, but it's true!
Super cool - thanks for sharing!!
Great story !
Do you plan to make it your main living income? how did you made user to pay on none
steam game ?
what is your main living income?
More game developers stories please!
I would love to make my main living from Fantasy Congress, but we'll see if that's feasible. It keeps growing so that's a good sign, but I've started to look at it as one out of several projects that will eventually support me. This way I'm not putting all my eggs in one basket.
Fantasy Congress is sort of one of a kind, and it really resonates with it's audience. People who are passionate about politics and follow it closely are willing to pay a small fee to enjoy the game. It's all about getting your game in front of the people who will have the strongest reaction to it!
My main income currently comes from contract work.
That's a great milestone, congrats! Reading your last blog post, it sounds like you're in a great mental space with the game.
I'm currently working off and on a web prototype of my game MMA Simulator that I've maintained for years and feel a lot of similarities with Fantasy Congress. That being said, it's kicking my ass because it's a monumental project to 'port' to web.
I don't have any serious questions, but in the spirit of an AMA - if you could have any game feature implemented instantly, what would it be?
Wow MMA Simulator is intense for an indie project! Very cool!
If I could have any feature implemented right now with the snap of my fingers, it would be a live draft. The kind where everyone logs on and you see each other's picks in real time, you can chat with each other, and if you hop off it just autodrafts for you. People keep asking for it, but it's a big undertaking and other stuff keeps taking priority.
Yeah, it was my first real project and I definitely underestimated the size of it :)
That sounds cool! I've had requests for multiplayer features and while it's doable, definitely a challenge like you said.
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So pumped to read this. I remember your early posts on IH. Persistence pays! Congratulations and I hope year 5 is a zinger.
Aw thank you so much Chris!
Have you heard about Arnold Kling's experiment with doing fantasy scoring for public speech? It seems relevant to your space at least. Super interesting ideas. Below is a podcast episode if you're curious.
I'd love to hear more about scoring and how you built that side of it.
https://www.econtalk.org/arnold-kling-on-reforming-government-and-expertise/#audio-highlights
Interesting, I have not heard of this.
In order to come up with the scoring system, I asked myself "what data do I have easy access to that is also easy to measure?" And then I chose the stuff that I felt reflected how well a congressman is doing their job. I run a bunch of daily jobs to collect data from government apis, and then I award each congressman points if they preformed a certain "action" that I'm tracking. The different things they can do to get points is listed on the website under the "how to play" section.
Do your users/customers know that you're a solo dev? Are you working on this project full time or is it a side hustle for now?
I've always been into game development.. put together a few demos tinkering with Unity and the like. But it seems like a really hard audience (gamers) to work with. They can be so picky!
Yep, my customers know I'm solo. I mention it on the public website as well. My customers have always been very understanding. I've gone back and forth working on the project full time in between contract jobs. Currently I'm splitting my time between it and part-time contract job.
This is a beautiful story!
Congrats
Aw thank you!
Nice, congratulations!!
Thanks! 😸