How The Huang Brothers Bootstrapped Guitar Hero To A Billion Dollar Business
Published in 2012, this chronicle by @aaronbrethorst details the mechanics of building a profitable, self-funded business without venture backing.
Core Principles for Independent Builders:
Charging customers from day one acts as the ultimate filter for building software that solves genuine, high-urgency problems.
Keeping fixed overhead low and leveraging lean infrastructure allows founders to stay alive until market tailwinds kick in.
Small, repetitive improvements in customer retention and conversion rates yield massive returns over multi-year horizons.
Community Debate Themes:
The community focused on B2B customer acquisition channels, cold email vs SEO distribution, and balancing full-time employment with side-project development.
CATEGORY Bootstrapping & MRR →
HISTORICAL ERA Web 2.0 Genesis (2007–2013)
COMMUNITY SCORE 83 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 11 comments
I was one of the primary developers on Guitar Hero. It is hard to explain just how weird it was that that game became a massive hit. We had already made a couple of music games that only sold modestly, and expecting people to buy this toy plastic guitar on top of that was borderline ludicrous. I lobbied unsuccessfully to cut multiplayer mode, because what were the chances two people with these guitars were ever going to end up in the same house? We heard stories that retailers loved it when we showed it off to them, but I already worked on multiple games with big buzz and lukewarm sales, so that didn't mean much to me. I was already pleasantly surprised when it became a modest success, much less the monster hit it eventually became.
For an alternate look at this from the perspective of Harmonix, the developer of the first couple Guitar Hero games (and currently the developer of Rock Band and Dance Central):
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/131210/book_excerpt_inside_game_design_.php ↗
http://money.cnn.com/2009/09/03/smallbusiness/harmonix_rock_band_startup_story/index.htm ↗
Think about this when people ask the question: "What will people do when robots can make all our needs without needing human labor?" All that does is enable people to work on things like games, art, science, archeology, movies, etc.
None of those endeavors would be possible without labor saving machines enabling production surpluses freeing up labor for such non-essentials.