"@Nate North All in all, I realize you're facing some pretty steep obstacles, mainly being location and family obligation. The latter makes you in my opinion a good person, because I know 1 person who would quickly leave his parents in the lurch if he were you. I'm thankful that I can say that I ONLY know ONE like that (quality over quantity applies to friendship, too)."
I don't think you can win by being a s@#t person. I mean, obviously you can win, but then you're just a POS standing there with a trophy. That in my mind does not constitute a win. I could have easily manufactured fame and fortune if I abandoned ethics, but to me that's a pyrrhic victory. I try to always remember what the original goal was, and for me, stepping on other people to get to the top was never part of that vision. I lived in Mountain View for about a decade, and there were good people and bad, but the worst ones had no idea that they were bad, they were just happy and exited at their own genius every time they cooked up another extended warranty or shop at home jewelry channel to cheat faceless throngs of consumers out of their limited resources.
Logistically, the world favors the sociopathic personality. You can make it much farther telling people what they want to hear and cashing checks than you can being truthful. As I said before though, selling integrity for money is a bad trade. I think it's a much better trade for people who never had any integrity to begin with. That ratio works out.
If I were YOU however, I would double down on reaching out to people, with my first priority being to find a strong pitch person. Because in my experience, a successful creative company has the "art" people as well as the "money" people. Art people are terrible money people in my experience, because usually the better they are the less they care about money. Money people on the other hand are s**t as creative people. Even worse when they're in power (ie: creative control). You can see evidence of this by the fact that most successful AAA video games look exactly like each other. Because money people chase the bottom line, graphs, figures, pie charts, key demographics and so on.
I agree with all of that, and I do search, but like so many segments of this overall campaign, I'm the only one dedicated enough to do the work, especially sans salary. Sweat equity is normal, but in 2021, people won't even show up for a job they want, such as game designer or filmmaker. A large combination of factors that I won't get into here have created a situation where rewards are dubious for about 99% of the people, and about 1% can fail upward. Capitalism has probably seen better days. I feel we are trending strongly towards establishing an American caste system, and I suspect it will come wrapped in a flag, and labeled as the height of patriotism. I don't see some huge conspiracy, just a systemic snowballing Pareto distribution. It's all pretty logical, the more resources you have, the more efficient you can become. The more wealth you have, the easier it is to diversify investment, making that wealth more stable. The larger and more stable that resource base, the higher likelihood that activity X is never going to eat into the principle.
That said, anyone interested in taking on that role is welcome to talk to me about it. I agree with you about how art and business people work. I just wish I met smarter business people. Sure, using your analytics correctly takes some wit, but they can show a staggering lack of imagination at times, as you mentioned. Is it so hard to factor originality into the equation Ubisoft? Yes open world shooters sold well, but how new was the idea when you gathered those statistics? I could get into the peter principle, and other aspects, but explaining why I meet so many incompetent middle management types is a whole other conversation. A perceptual disagreement that I have with money people is that having money is in and of itself a "skill" People here in the Midwest tell me trump is a great businessman, better than anyone. I try to explain it to them. If you give me 20 dollars and I double it, I'm a good businessman. If you give another guy 4000 dollars and he looses 90% of it, he is a terrible businessman. But he has 400 dollars. They think that he is 10x the businessman I am, because he has 10x the money. I would say I am 20x the businessman he is, because he turned 100% into 10% and I took 100% and turned it into 200% which is 20x 10%. There was a kid in Chicago that started a hot dog stand on 100 bucks and ended up with 70k in 2 years. That 10 year old is a far better businessman that a guy who got promoted to leader of the free world based on his "business success" It was one of the first things they told me when I arrived in silicon valley to set up shop. "Don't be intimidated when you meet a millionaire, that's just a guy that was handed 2 million dollars and lost half of it."
Second thing I would do is find others with good skill, reach out to them and make personal visits. Your parents, well I would set it up to where I could take a weekend to travel. Do your parents have friends? Maybe swallow your disgust of being surrounded by your "inferiors" and use them as a weekend lifeline for your parents while you travel on business, perhaps?
I know this is intended as helpful, but it's not very practical for me. I do appreciate the attempt anyway. One issue is that the cross-index of specialized skills combined with free time, enthusiasm, and certain personality traits lends itself to a global approach, rather than a US only approach. When I was building that first AI, I learned a great deal about large scale filtering operations. Let's say I have a million people that wanted to help me. and 1% of those had the free time to help. that's 10k people. Now what if I cross index that with base level talent, and find out only 5% have that. Now I'm down to 500 people. Now it's time to find out how many of them can get along, use an advanced CGI workflow, etc. You end up with an incredibly small number of people. Take a look at this forum. It's the no 1 indie film forum on the internet. It's worldwide. Sometimes I show up here, or one of my crew, and we find we are the only person on the entire site.
About me and my aloof perceptions of the people around me. It's not as universal as some have made it out to be. In the Silicon Valley, I found a lot of peers and I didn't say these things that make me sound like a condescending #$%#$ now. Here in BFE I'm a multiplatform researcher and developer in the midst of what looks like the cast of He Haw. You can judge me if you like, but this place is not filled with great minds. I've now managed to gather up a decent little team of international creatives, composers, programmers, finance specialists, artists, etc. I like and respect each one of them, and have nothing negative to say about them. I intend to mentor them, but just as often they end up teaching me things. So seeing people as inferior is "context driven" if you take my meaning. I added a new collaborator recently (from this forum) who writes me letters so intelligent I really have to break a sweat to keep up with him. On the practical level, I can't let a bunch of drunk hillbillies watch my Alzheimer's effected mother and make sure she doesn't leave the stove on and die in a fire. It's a real concern. Things like that take constant vigilance.
P.s.: I've taken some time to check out your project, the art stands out to me. I've yet to take the software on a run but I will get to that.
I'm sure you've done your homework so you probably already know what I'm about to say already, money makes things efficient, but it doesn't guarantee success. For example, let's say I have a couple of billion dollars in the bank. With that money I'm sure I can at the very least get a sit down with the "people representing" the rock, John Cena, Robert Downey Jr and Henry Cavill. But seeing as I'm only MarQii BenJii, the head of a 5 person production company (on it's best day), I could still get a polite no due to my name strength, despite having the theoretical billions
The point of that? Build your name and product up and the connections will chase you
Thanks for taking the time to check out our project, It's still early in development, but coming along pretty well in some areas. I agree with most of what you are saying there, and understood this from day one. I complain about money not because I think it's the solution to everything, but because I actually don't need nearly as much to succeed as others. This thing is 95% intelligent design, and 5% spending. But we can't get that 5%, because a guy that throws a football NEEDS 30 million dollars a year to accomplish that. I'm running a team of a half dozen active members, maybe 20 total extended staff, on $9 a day. That's not a misprint. Nobody can buy a video card, because that pathetic sum goes to overhead like web domain, software services, stock assets, etc. We could do more with 200k a year than I've seen people do with 10 million, but not a dime of support, ever. I watched a redneck buy a 55k dollar truck the other day. That's more money than every person on my team has been paid in a year. combined, including the side jobs they work on to free up enough time to put in 20 hours a week or so on Save Point. Conversely, and in seeming disagreement with what I just said, I could make this a success with brute force, but only because I'm quite efficient at leveraging it. Our first recruiting ad was terrible, I had a 25 dollar ad budget. I got 3 interns. It I had the kind of money a hillbilly spends on a 3rd redundant pickup truck he saw in a country music video, I'd have and army of developers by now. Honestly I'm thinking of selling everything I own and just self funding this to a small degree, because by ratio, it's always been a very successful idea, it's just so badly underfunded that I'm an ant carrying a leaf, and a leaf isn't worth much. I go to kickstarter, and find that you can't raise money without already having it. I go to get free workers, and can't pay to connect with them efficiently. I go to patreon, and I need a finished product before I can raise money. Build up my name? I'm an expert digital marketer, with no budget. I can get massive results on the cheap, and I can't afford the cheap.
And before anyone starts in on the expert marketer thing, I don't mean I'm a great presenter of ideas, I just mean I can use a digital advertising budget very effectively. Virtually every campaign I've ever worked on has yielded better than average results. Even that terrible first ad I made for Save Point returned almost 4x the national average in clickthrough. I had a 25 dollar ad budget. I had finally saved up enough money to run one ad campaign for 500 dollars, and days before launch, a problem materialized out of nowhere that costs 500 dollars to solve. That just gets me back to square one, after months of work.
