A better CEO probably could have put that money to use rather than let it sit. Though I also didn't pause the game very much to squeeze out productivity from every second.
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Even though every employee was kept busy, the final output was dependent on the bottleneck. The bottleneck is VERY difficult to track. It moves all over the place from team to team, department to department, especially as things change.
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The managers in the game r stupid. I could only give them production targets instead of more high level goals like "Make stuff for feature A". I'd have to comb through production plans to track down the bottleneck and often find one time making hundreds of unnecessary stuff.
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Marketing is very slow relative to the world population. E.g. something like 20k users a day is huge from a absolute sense but slow at the millions/billions of users level.
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Marketing is like watching a plant grow. The user base grows over years and years. This was actually surprising to me. I had a mental model in my mind where getting front page on reddit or something would max you out on all potential users.
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Between marketing (actual users), development (potential users), and sysadmins (hosting) I felt like I was managing "streams of growth". Marketing always had to have room to grow so development had to keep pace. Hosting had to keep pace with usage.
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You have to manage all 3 and make sure that each is not bottlenecked by the other. Locking one of them down would make management MUCH easier but affects the maximum growth rate.
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E.g. I had 80M users with 26 years of work. That's really bad compared to say facebook/instagram/tiktok.
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A good marketer is really amazing. Most of the time my marketer was just making components for marketing campaigns. In the game, once you create a campaign you just add/subtract money from it so the marketer doesn't have to do much.
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I had 2 marketers at the end. I could probably have done with 1. They come in really handy for new websites since I had enough money to throw at expensive campaigns. I'd just use them once to create a high level campaign module like TV or podcast (vs lower level ones like ads)
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My largest 40M users site was ranked 8 out of 11. I acquired 2 competitors. Valuations was half a billion dollars. The #1 was Friendbook with 2B users and an 18B valuation.
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Still room to grow but it gets really repetitive and grindy. I simply didn't want to deal with the complexity.
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I wonder if all companies at a high level are just resource management games. CEOs for e.g. feel like variations of Business Man. When I added additional sites like an e-commerce store and video streaming site the only change was more complex developer/designer management.
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The bulk of the work, maximizing growth, scale, profits, etc... via marketing/sales/data-centers/outsourcing-for-critical-bottlenecks/etc... took up most of my attention.
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Anyway... revenue snapshot right before I bought out all the investors, transferred 100M to my bank and left the company w/ a 10M warchest.pic.twitter.com/MI4pVO6zI1
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