kaape - personal website

Migrating netzkaempfer.com

2017-09-04T00:00:00+00:00

Together with some colleagues we started the endeavor “netzkaempfer.com” to build a browsergame called “Socal War” in 2012 and 2013. The game never left pre-production, but we managed to gain some insights at professional game development by participating at “Browser Games Forum 2011” (now “Berlin Games Forum”), visiting Travian Games in Munich and pitching our game idea at “Gründerzeit Baden-Württemberg 2012”.

About

This is the original “about” text for the blog:

You fight the entire time with the question: Who are the “Netzkämpfer”?

The “Netzkämpfer” core team consists of Konny, Björn and Andre, three experienced Technical & Business Consultants. We fight for a better world in the web, with the overall target to create attractive web-contents. The embodiment of this target knows no bounds. We design everything and hence have a wide range of genres in our portfolio. Tailor-made, individual e-commerce solutions or innovative browsergame concepts; you name it!

With this internet appearance and our web applications we try to undertake the necessary next steps for our business formation. We want to build a development studio, that fights for excellent applications for the web.

Social War Logo

More than one billion people in the world use social networks. They share messages, pictures and videos with other people, distribute or consume them. Rivalries from real life are thereby transfered in the virtual world. Who has the most friends? Who gets more messages? Who has the biggest influence on a discussion? Social War gives the user a platform to find the final answer to these questions.

Concept

Inspired by the huge growth of the online-gaming market we developed the concept for the browsergame “Social War”. It combines the dynamics of social networks with proven concepts of roleplaying and strategy games and leads to an unique gaming experience. The interactions in social media in terms of messages, pictures and videos are collected and supplied as resources for the gamer. The gamer can use these resources to develop his game-character, learn new abilities and compete against his friends. Over the course of the game he can integrate additional social media and expand them to increase his resource earnings. For special virtual goods or premium goods and services the gamer needs “Social Dollar”, that can be bought with real currency.

Migrating netzkaempfer.com was originally published by Kornelius A. Prell at kaape - personal website on September 04, 2017.

Migrating kaapedev.wordpress.com

2017-09-03T00:00:00+00:00

Between 2010 and 2012 I’ve developed games for the Xbox Live Indie Games platform and published posts about my development progress on the blog kaapedev.wordpress.com. The old blog is no longer actively maintained, but I’ve migrated all posts with their original publish dates into this blog.

About kaapedev.wordpress.com

This is the original “about” text for the blog:

I am in my early twenties, proud owner of a Bachelors degree in Applied Computer Science. Currently I am working for a big IT company and studying part-time for my Master of Science in Business & Process Management.

I live together with my girlfriend in Stuttgart, Germany.

In my spare time I try to develop casual games, currently with C# and the XNA framework, addressing gamers on the Xbox 360.

I started game development back in school with C++ and SDL. During the time I tried various other languages and technologies like Delphi, Java, C#, Python, Haaf’s Game Engine, Allegro, wxWidgets, OpenGL etc.

Until now I never really published anything, so the Xbox Live Indie Games are a great way to start. This blog should help to take this next step.

Payout

Meanwhile Microsoft has paid out the small revenue that my games made on XBLIG. The necessary W8-BEN form needed to be filled out properly. I’ve managed to clear this hurdle with the help of “noowanda” from the Xbox Live Creators Club thread How long before my W8-BEN form is processed? (XBOX).

Outlook on netzkaempfer.com migration

Another dormant blog of mine is netzkaempfer.com. In the next few days the domain will be shutdown, but beforehand I’ll migrate all posts into this blog as well.

Migrating kaapedev.wordpress.com was originally published by Kornelius A. Prell at kaape - personal website on September 03, 2017.

Successful performance for AppCreator at Elevator Pitch BW 2016 in Böblingen

2016-02-20T00:00:00+00:00

Update on Mai 1st 2016: The original project team has disbanded. Some former team members asked for anonymity in my posts. I’ve changed the original project name to “AppCreator”, removed some links and personal information.

In my last post I asked for your support by voting for our idea “AppCreator”, so we can pitch at the Elevator Pitch BW 2016 in Böblingen. With 36 votes we were allowed to participate as one of ten contestants. We presented our idea within a three minute timeframe and afterwards the jury questioned us for three minutes. A short description about the event from the organizer can be found at the Elevator Pitch BW blog.

We pitched our idea successfully and were rewared with the third price and were chosen as the audience favorite as well. That gives us a small chance to participate at the federal state finale in June. The pitch has been published on YouTube, so you may judge our performance for yourself:

Successful performance for AppCreator at Elevator Pitch BW 2016 in Böblingen was originally published by Kornelius A. Prell at kaape - personal website on February 20, 2016.

AppCreator tries to participate at Elevator Pitch BW 2016 in Böblingen

2016-01-21T00:00:00+00:00

We’d like to take the next step with “AppCreator” by pitching the idea at the Elevator Pitch BW 2016 in Böblingen.

There’s just a small catch. We need your online vote to participate at the event. Only the first ten ideas with the most votes may pitch their idea. Please register your e-mail or give us a like via Facebook at the elevator pitch voting site for AppCreator.

You may read up on our idea for AppCreator at my review of Startup Weekend Stuttgart 2015.

We get a three minute timeframe to pitch our idea for AppCreator and afterwards the jury can question us for three minutes. According to the FAQ the jury rates the pitches with the following criteria, each weighted 50%:

presentation: use of rhetoric, pitcher’s personality, contentwise structure and optimal use of the given timeframe
business model: Concept and development stage of the business model, the customer value, market relevance and the scalability of the business model

The last time I participated at such a regional pitch event it was a great experience. It was called “Gründerzeit Baden-Württemberg” and we participated with a game idea called “Social War” in 2012 in Stuttgart.

Why Böblingen?

The event takes place in different cities in Baden-Württemberg. We’ve chosen to participate in Böblingen for various reasons:

Böblingen is a great location for an IT-related business. Big companies like Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Daimler are just a puddle jump away and various small high-tech businesses are located there, e.g. at the Softwarezentrum Böblingen. In a study from 2013 Böblingen has been ranked at fifth place for most promising business location and growth in germany.
It is the first event that takes place in 2016 and we are impatient :-)
There is not much competition yet. Currently there are only four registered ideas.

Swear that you'll help us :-)

Please support us!

Just to remind you again: We need your support! If you like the idea of AppCreator please vote for us with your e-mail registration or Facebook like at the elevator pitch voting site for AppCreator.

AppCreator tries to participate at Elevator Pitch BW 2016 in Böblingen was originally published by Kornelius A. Prell at kaape - personal website on January 21, 2016.

Same procedure as last year: my experience with Startup Weekend Stuttgart 2015

2016-01-07T00:00:00+00:00

In 2015 I once again joined forces with fellow wantrepreneurs at the Startup Weekend Stuttgart and once again I’d like to share my experience from that event with you. If you have no clue what kind of event a Startup Weekend is, I’d suggest you read up on it in my blog post from last year, in which I’ve reflected my experience at Startup Weekend Stuttgart 2014.

The team "AppCreator" posing for the media

During 27th to 29th of November 2015 the Startup Weekend Stuttgart 2015 took place at the Hochschule der Medien. In this post I’ll describe the good and bad parts about the event from my point of view. At the end of the article you’ll find a short description of the project and prototype “AppCreator”, that I’ve helped to build.

To get you in the right mood, here’s a link to a synopsis of the organisators and a nice video that summarizes the event:

The good stuff

With my experience from last your, I adjusted my expectations for the event. With the realigned viewpoint, here’s what I liked about the event this time:

The people partaking were a heterogeneous group with varying skill, but always with high motivation and interesting backgrounds. It is easy to network and find potential co-founders for the future.
The organisation of the event was again extraordinary. Great food and drinks combined with great staff let the event really shine.
If you’re feeling down from all the workload in your “normal” workplace, you’ll leave the event on sunday evening with a boost of motivation. In 2015 I haven’t participated in a lot of startup events, hence this was a great way to disrupt my daily work schedule and fuel the entrepreneurial spirit.
Execution is king. You’re constantly reminded of that fact during the event. The organisators and mentors help you gain hands-on experience in idea and market validation. In alignment with the Lean Startup methodology the overall target of the weekend is to build your “Minimal Viable Product”.
Our team with four members was small compared to other ones with nearly ten members. As you need to build a functioning team within a short period of time, a small team size is vital. This is certainly different if parts or all of your team have already worked together before.
We were able to build our private workspace by using some movable walls. In my experience it is essential to have a private area to work efficiently and not constantly be distracted by shenanigans of other participants.
Our team “AppCreator” won the “special law price” :-)

The bad stuff

Unfortunately some of the unpleasent experience from last year has been reconfirmed. This could be in part explained due to my wrong expectations, but nonetheless some of the experience still leaves me unsatisfied. Here are the things that I disliked:

Last year I’ve nagged about the quality and quantity of ideas. Unfortunately I have to repeat myself this year. The best ideas spawn from problems that you’ve experienced yourself. Although most of the pitched ideas tried to address a problem, I could not identify myself with these problems as I’ve never experienced them. That is not bad in general, but made it hard for me to pick an idea that I could motivate myself for. It didn’t help that most of the ideas could not be solved by technology and would be hard to grow beyond a small business. I’ve changed my expectation that Startup Weekends should focus on tech-oriented ideas, although the event suggests it, as you need to squeeze yourself into the role of designer, tech or non-tech during registration.
Although the members of the jury changed, the emphasis in the valuation was still questionable. The award for “most innovative” project was given to a team that failed to explain how their technology works, could not show a prototype and didn’t even try to validate their business model with the relevant customer segment. One jury member justified the decision with something along the lines of “Screw it! Even if you could not proof the feasibility, the idea sounds great.”. The event format explicitly emphasises on EXECUTION, not building cloud-castles. Anybody can claim something bold like “I’ll provide space travel for $100 a ticket”.
The final presentations last year were on a superb niveau. This year I was a little disappointed by the overall quality of the final presentations.
Once again it was difficult to find people with the right skills during team building. Developers were in short supply and some teams were too large to work.

Our project AppCreator

The idea for our project “AppCreator” was pitched by anonymized former team members. Georg Schessler and myself joined to support them. The initial vision was to create an app generator with which users can easily build their personal mobile app by extracting content from various websites. You can imagine it like your personal dashboard of all the relevant web content you want to follow. As the name suggests we transform arbitrary web content into a suitable form for display in a mobile app.

After various iterations of brainstorming about possible use cases and business models, we pivoted the idea to help small business owners with an existing website. We wanted to support them by easily generating an app for mobile devices based on their existing website content. A smartphone app would enable them to interact with their customers and e.g increase customer loyalty by push notifications and location-based discounts.

As a weekend is quite short to build a working business model, we wanted to at least validate this customer segment and build a prototype that shows how our product works for a reference customer.

The landing page draft for "AppCreator" with an example app for the restaurant "Wirtshaus Drive" in Vaihingen

We developed a prototype with JavaScript, Python, Django and a cross-platform app generation framework. A user could select content from a website with the help of a simple DOM explorer and preview it. An existing framework was used to easily generate cross-platform apps. The server that synchronizes the selected content, design and description of the generated app with the mobile phone was written in Python with Django as the web framework. With this toolset we were able to build a prototype that showed how the app might be used in the future and that the technology to realise the business model is viable.

Next to the development, a big part of our work was to validate the idea with relevant customers. Therefore we interviewed more than 20 small business owners if their business would benefit from our solution and if they would buy it for our intended price. The results looked very promising, especially for customers in the food service industry as they tend to have simple websites and have the need to increase customer retention.

In the short timeframe of the weekend we managed to validate parts of the idea with a small sample size of customers, build a working prototype and prepare a presentation for the jury. Our hard work earned us the “special law price”. As we all think that the idea has potential, we’ll follow it up in 2016.

Will I do it again?

When I ask myself, if the event was worth the time and energy investment, there is an unambiguous answer. I had fun and it was rewarding. There are certainly worse ways to spend your weekends than working on solutions for common problems with a highly motivated team, in a supporting environment with great food and drinks.

If possible, I’m going to participate next year as well… perhaps this time at last with an idea of my own.

Same procedure as last year: my experience with Startup Weekend Stuttgart 2015 was originally published by Kornelius A. Prell at kaape - personal website on January 07, 2016.

A year of freelancing

2015-04-01T00:00:00+00:00

Do you think about working as a freelancer? As I pointed out in my article about taking personal risks, I previously worked as a technical consultant. Becoming a freelancer was an easy decision for me, because it is already an established work model in the domain of software engineering. Will it fit for you as well? Let’s find out!

What is my mission as a freelancer?

I like the primary meaning of a freelancer:

A mercenary knight with no allegiance, who instead offers his services in exchange for money.

That means, that I, as a mercenary knight in the role of a web developer, am paid for the time I work for my client. I write every hour on an activity confirmation, let my client sign the confirmation and create my invoice based on it. There is not much loyalty for my current client, as the allegiance to him goes only as far as he pays me for the time I work.

Although I like the mercenary knight analogy, it might not be the most ideal to act on. Instead I’d like to follow a value-based approach. It is important that I provide a solution to a certain problem that my client faces for which there is a lack of time, resources or skills. With this approach the budget is a little more flexible as the overall problem is divided in work packages that may be organized to fit the given cost and time.

By using this approach it is easier to enforce value-based pricing in which I am paid according to the value I’ve delivered. This might be a percentage of the decrease in costs or increase of revenue my solution has provided. Over time I’ll always try to become a trusted advisor. I see myself as more than a contract developer or just a simple resource that can be used for scaling a development team. Hence my mission as a freelancing consultant is to help my client reach the right decision and take the necessary actions that follow this decision.

As a mercenary knight you always need to be ready for the fight

My first big freelance project

Regarding my experience in starting out as a freelancer last year, I was very very lucky. I maintained a good relationship with my last employer that helped me make the transition. They committed to task me with some development work to fill the first months. After that we were able to deliver a proof-of-concept for a client in which I provided a custom implemented solution that took roughly ten months. Everything went flawless. We delivered on time, the solution works fine and the client is happy.

These first steps took me by surprise. I didn’t expect the transition to self-employment to be that smooth. I value this first project as a “lucky shot” as I am sure the next project won’t be as easy to acquire and deliver. Luckily all went extremly well hence I’m able to use the last year revenue as a risk buffer.

Comparing freelancing to being an employee

After working for nearly a year in self-employment I’ve noticed some advantages and disadvantages compared to being an employee. A lot of the following considerations may vary heavily depending on your personal feeling. I’ll start with the disavantages:

Self-organization and self-motivation: Nobody is going to tell you what you need to do or how to spend your time. This might be seen as an advantage but it also means you have no outside motivator like “I might lose my job if I don’t finish the work at the given deadline”. I’m currently in a position to sustain my lifestyle for at least 12 months. There is no extrinsic motivator that tells me to generate revenue by all means or “you’ll starve”. I’ve learned that I need a clear goal that I ideally can achieve with the support of different colleagues or a small team. If I don’t have this goal and someone to share it with I’m struggling to keep my motivation high. This is a feeling that I would never have expected to experience. Short-term motivation comes from meetups and events like the Startup Weekend, but I still haven’t found the right leverage to a long-term and sustainable motivation.
Less socializing: As I work from home 90% of the time I don’t have someone for small talk, feedback or to talk nonsense with. Although I wouldn’t see myself as someone who needs much of socializing there is still a level of companionship that I need. Currently I see two solutions for this problem. I might work from a co-working space or rent an office near other IT companies, perhaps after hiring my first employee. Both of these solutions are cost drivers.
Date of payment: The bigger your client, the longer the period of payment. If you’re used to getting your paycheck at the end of the month you need to establish a financial buffer. In my case I need to wait 45 days after handing over the invoice until the money reaches the bank account of my company. As I knew about the long period of payment I only started to pay myself a salary after six months, although I was prepared for 12 months without a salary.

Despite these disadvantages I don’t regret my decision as the advantages outweigh them in my opinion:

Improved time management: One of the luxuries of working from home is the lack of the daily commute (or at least is is greatly reduced). To be fair, this isn’t an advantage of freelancing if your employer provides you with home office possibilites. For me it allows to save roughly an hour every workday. In regards to your time management for work itself you’re free to work anytime you want. My work schedule shifted more towards the evening and night time of the day. Although you may decide when to work, you’re usually expected to deliver according to deadlines. In the end I’m still working an 8 to 6 cycle that’s just slightly shifted in the timeframe of the day or split into smaller work periods.
Full control: You’re in the drivers seat of your business venture. Nobody is going to tell you which projects to accept and which to decline. There should be a correlation between your performance and the resulting income. I like it that way as I value the financial leverage that may result from it higher than the risk associated with it.
Lean processes: If you’re used to working in big companies you might have experienced “process hell”. You need approvals for every little thing and need to strictly follow the processes which involves a lot of time and involved parties. As a lone wolf I just do my travel expense accounting once at the end of the month. If I need hardware or accessories I simply order them. Although I have to prepare my invoices and expenses for accounting I use less time for administrative activites compared to my time as an employee. This will certainly change with the first hire and business growth.
Commence operations: I’ve started my company in germany as a corporation with a legal form that ensures limited liabilities. There are various rights and duties associated with this legal form. After several months I was exposed to most of them and learned them on the way. I see this as a great learning experience to slowly getting used to the legal aspects of running a company.
Small scale entrepreneurship: If you see yourself as a product that you need to sell, freelancing is a great way to learn the ropes of entrepreneurship. I need to sell myself, deliver what was promised, run the back-office and essentially do all the parts that a business consists of. Hopefully this will ease the transition to operate a growing business.

Reduce your risks

A lot of people associate self-employment with high risks. From my point of view there isn’t that much risk associated with it. In germany I’m still eligible for social benefits if I fail and I’m still able to cover any costs caused by health issues due to a proper health insurance. The biggest costs that might occur from self-employment are the opportunity costs that manifest if I would have worked a better paying job. This is a tradeoff I am willing to take. Although self-employment isn’t going to kill anybody there are still a few things you can do to reduce the risk of failing:

Education: Luckily I did my studies in computer science and trained myself early in software engineering. Despite this formal education I need to constantly educate myself about new technologies, tools and programming languages. If I hadn’t started to work with JavaScript, especially Backbone.js and RESTful web services, I couldn’t have delivered my last big project. Keep an eye on the market demand and adjust your skills accordingly.
Professional help: As I’ve chosen the legal form of an incorporated company there was no way around a professional accountant and tax advisor. Without this help I would’ve put myself in a position of high risk for personal liability. Depending on your legal form you’ll need to minimize the risk for this personal liability.
Third party experience: Beside educating myself about technology I’ll try to read a lot about experiences and failures of others following the same path. You’ll get in similiar situations and the more you know beforehand the more likely you’ll manage these situations with a positive outcome. To give you an example: I learned a lot from the book “IT-Freelancer: Ein Handbuch nicht nur für Einsteiger” (german language) in regards to freelancing.
Location: Choose your business location wisely to minimize costs and travel time. I’m located in Stuttgart with a lot of small, midsized and large companies around, which operate in different industries like IT, automotive and engineering. With a 2 hour drive I can reach the cities Karlsruhe, Frankfurt and Munich. There are different meetups and communities for IT and startup related topics. It’s easy to grow your network in such an environment and find well-paid work as a freelancer in web development.
Minimal fixed costs: Luckily I am not a big spender. My monthly personal fixed costs are low and I’ve even managed to lower them since self-employment. This applies also to my business in which I try to keep the fixed costs as low as possible. The higher your fixed costs the higher the risk of failure due to low free cash flow. Even if I run in a dry period I won’t accumulate a lot of debt that way.
You are the product: What are your features? What is your unique selling proposition? In what way are you better than your competition? If you regard yourself as a product that you need to sell you’re forced to define and emphasize your special traits. The more detailed the “product description” of yourself is, the easier it will be to find the projects and clients that you benefit the most. This might also involve a competitor analysis in your region and a pivot of your skills to a smaller niche or more specialized industry or technology.

Hard decisions: from freelancer to entrepreneur

Until now I’m not used to making hard decisions that may result in losing business. My overall target is to scale the business and let it grow itself. For this to happen I need to adjust the way I think about delivering value. As a long term goal I need to step back from software development to get free time for business development by delegation. This isn’t easy to achieve and my biggest challenge for the future. There are other decisions ahead on my way to entrepreneurship:

Loyalty: As an employee you’re used to being loyal to the brand and identity of your employer (or at least you should be). As a freelancer nobody can expect this loyalty from you, but is it always reasonable to act like the mercenary knight and seek the biggest contract? If you are part of the supply chain for a company that bids in a public invitation to tender, you’re only utilized if the company wins the bidding. Alternatively you can reach out to the winner of the bid and try to work for them. So far I’ve had success with being loyal to big clients, but this might change in the future if there isn’t enough work for me to do for them. At this point my loyalty will be questioned.
Sales: I haven’t done any cold calls or written cold e-mails in my whole life. I’ve never tried to sell a software on my own. I’ve never closed on a deal, negotiated the price or written a big contract. In 2015 my target is to sell at least one software license.

Which way is the "right" way?

For the future I see two different paths ahead of me:

Freelancing: Professionalize my freelancing, build a bigger network, find clients, specialize more and build a project funnel. Grow the business by winning bigger and bigger projects, hiring other contractors or employees. Find reliable software and project partners, gather experience and build own methods. The starting point for this would be to update my profile on various freelancing platforms and reach out to my existing network as well as participate in the local development communities.
Product development: Find a specific pain in an industry, design a solution, find customers to fund the development, build it and sell licenses. The necessary insights can be gained by freelancing for different industries and also to use some freelancing revenues as investments for product development. The short-term revenues of freelancing are tempting, but in the long-term the business scales better with a business model partially consisting of software licensing. To achieve this long-term goal there might be longer dry periods with investments that won’t transform in revenues immediately.

Realistically there will be a combination of both ways. I’ll work as a contractor if someone requests my support. In the meantime the development of my own products will be continued. As a risk buffer I’ll try to always keep six to twelve monthly costs in funds available and maintain the fixed costs on a minimum level. The outcome should be a business that generates half of the yearly revenues by consulting services and the other half by selling licenses for own software products.

Although there is a lot to do in the future I’m confident that I am on the right path. I’m writing this post from a cafe near my apartment at early afternoon. I like to think that I already achieved a lot of freedom in a short time, with the exception that I still need to work to make ends meet.

A year of freelancing was originally published by Kornelius A. Prell at kaape - personal website on April 01, 2015.

How I quit my job to become an entrepreneur

2015-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

Imagine a world where you can do whatever you want. You’re not forced to drive to work every day, slave away in your tiny cubicle for ten hours and drive back home, only to get stuck in traffic for another hour. When you finally have some free time, you think about how you’re going to stay mentally sane with such an outlook on your life for the next 30 to 40 years. There must be a way to get into your visionary world, where you only work if the topic matches your interest. Read on, to get an insight in my experiences trying to find the hidden path.

Everything I describe in this post is from my own experience, so take everything with a grain of salt. Luckily I happened to start my way to entrepreneurship under extremly positive circumstances, hence remember the survivorship bias.

Taking risks

Without risk there is no reward, especially if you’re seeking autonomy in your work life. My first steps on my way to get near this promised land was to quit my job as a software engineer / technical consultant in 2014. I quit a well-paying job with high job security to become an entrepreneur. I left behind a lot of social benefits and a moderate potential to climb the career ladder. This didn’t sit too well with my family surroundings that mostly consists of people that have been life-long employees, sometimes never changed job role or employer for 40 years. Although I’ve wanted to start my own company since college, the final piece of the puzzle for me has been the book “The Millionaire Fastlane” by MJ DeMarco. I read a lot about startups and the lean startup methodology, but the book from MJ finally convinced me, that I need to try it on my own rather sooner than later.

The concept of uncontrollable limited leverage vs. controllable unlimited leverage, that is presented in the book, is easy to understand and one of the major advantages I see in entrepreneurship:

employment = uncontrollable limited leverage: Your finacial leverage is restricted to your yearly salary as an employee. Any raise you might get won’t help you to retire 10 or 20 years earlier (probably). Upper management will decide over your fate in the workforce. You cannot control it on your own and cannot pursue the most promising opportunities with your time. Basically you’re told what to do.
entrepreneurship = controllable unlimited leverage: You decide yourself how to spend your time and are in full control. In the best case scenario the return on your investment is unlimited. You might develop a business model that scales well and you’re not bound to trade your time for money.

I’m aware that in reality it’s not that simple for most people. For me it boils down to these options, so I’m trying to take the more promising path.

It's time to make the leap

Preparation for the jump

Next to my full-time job I started to work on products to support the government with enterprise content management. As an employee I’ve seen various products in that segment and saw a market opportunity. Even Y Combinator noticed the inefficiencies in government software in their “requests for startups”. That’s what I’ve experienced as well during my time as a consultant. Together with two friends we prepared a business plan and tried to get funding. We tried to partake in a programme called “EXIST-Gründerstipendium” here in germany (You may read a german article about it on the ditemis blog). The valuation for the concept was mediocre, mostly because of a perceived lack of innovation. Nevertheless I believed in the potential to accompany the public administration on its way to technological and digital change.

After having working prototypes I went ahead and spoke openly about my ambitions, ideas and the development progress with my team lead. The ideas were received well and there was shown commitment to support my intentions. I quit the day after that meeting and started working as a freelancer for my old employer. The important thing to note here is that I had an extremly open and trusting relationship with my colleagues. I assume that there are a lot of employers who wouldn’t think twice about burning all bridges after presenting such intentions. I am extremly thankful that my former colleagues saw a business opportunity instead of getting tangled up in emotional quarrel.

Comments & Critique

We asked various experienced founders, startup communities and organisations for help to gain a realistic view on our business plan. Their review helped us identify the gaps and dangerous assumptions in our concept. If you’re thinking about starting a company, get to know your local startup community. There are a lot of organisations offering support for free during your first steps. Every one of the people we contacted for coaching, mentoring or reviewing was glad to help.

Nearly a year later

After ten month of operating as a freelancer I’m quite happy with the current situation. Strong revenues from 2014 support me through 2015. Finally I’m having some free time to dedicate myself to product development. 2015 is the year to work the hardest and tackle the real challenges to scale the business.

How I quit my job to become an entrepreneur was originally published by Kornelius A. Prell at kaape - personal website on March 15, 2015.

Looking back on and reappraising Startup Weekend Stuttgart 2014

2014-12-10T00:00:00+00:00

From 21st to 23rd of November I’ve joined forces with fellow wantrepreneurs and participated in the Startup Weekend Stuttgart 2014. In this post I’d like to share my experiences from that event with you. There has been some good stuff and there has been some bad stuff. I’ll talk about both sides. At the end of the article you’ll find a short description of the project and prototype “Metapherus”, that I’ve helped to build.

The team "Metapherus" hard at work

An ambitious timeline

The timeline on a Startup Weekend is ambitious to say the least. On friday evening the event started, ideas were pitched and teams were formed. On saturday morning the work began, mentors and coaches helped to refine the idea, a lecture about lean startup methodology and Minimal Viable Product (MVP) were held, the ideas were validated in customer interviews and if possible the development of a prototype was started. On sunday the prototype development continued, a presentation was prepared. On sunday evening each team presented their results, a jury evaluated them and winners in different categories were announced.

It was pretty intense and overall I’ve spent roughly 39 hours at the event, beginning on friday 5pm and ending on sunday 11pm. With the words of Johannes Ellenberg, one of the organisers, “these hours will be the most productive of your life”. See for yourself in the following recap video.

Almost every team proved that two days are enough to accomplish something presentable. Each final presentation was really well done, even for ideas that had major flaws. For such results to happen, you need a team that is able to get work done and find comfortable roles for each member quickly. From my experience that was the most crucial part and made all the difference in being productive or not.

The good stuff

I’ve participated for the first time in a Startup Weekend. Here’s what I liked about the event:

There were a lot of clever, highly motivated and interesting people at the event. It is great for networking and finding like-minded people in your area. It is known as a great place to find a future co-founder.
The organisation was marvelous. There was plenty of great food, snacks and drinks. Everybody was helpful and in high spirits.
On sunday evening you’re leaving the event with a boost of motivation. I’ve always liked such events for that effect, as they tend to disrupt your daily work schedule and spark the entrepreneurial enthusiasm again if you’ve lost it over time.
The final presentations were on a superb niveau. Each team did a great job on the final presentation, some even found the time to make short videos. For me that was the most impressive thing about the event.
The event focuses on execution and hands-on experience instead of endlessly searching for brilliant ideas and gaining knowledge through books or lectures
Our team “Metapherus” won the “most innovative” award :-)

The bad stuff

I’ve had some expectations for the event format and the pitched ideas. Some of theses expectations were not met. Here are the things that I disliked:

A LOT of ideas were pitched. Some had already been done, some were pitched twice or more, some had major flaws and some weren’t worthwile to execute in my opinion. I wanted to get inspired by the problems that other people found. I cannot really describe why, but I had the feeling that most pitched ideas weren’t “good”.
Only few of the ideas were themed around high-tech products. My impression was, that Startup Weekends should focus on tech-oriented ideas.
It is difficult to find people with the right skills during team building. Some teams had more than ten members, some had the perfect combination of designers, developers and non-technical persons. A pro tip if you really want to work on an idea: Bring at least one buddy with you that works in a complementary role. That should increase your chances for a well-functioning team.
The event took place at the Hochschule der Medien in Stuttgart. The work space was mostly open and sometimes difficult to work in due to volume (in return you could see what the other teams were doing and discussing).
In the end the jury rated a “Minimal Viable Product”. There was a strong emphasis on the Lean Startup methodology. I wouldn’t go as far to say that this is a cult, but there are certainly different schools of thought and there is criticism with that methodology. For the event it helped to focus on execution and I have no better solution to rate the results. I’d just like to point out that this methodology doesn’t necessarily fit if you’re tackling big problems.
In terms of business model scalability most ideas failed and didn’t fulfill the “classic” startup definition. Although these ideas could work very well as a small business and in a likewise small market, they wouldn’t arouse the interest of investors. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it didn’t match my expectation.
An award was given for a project that would never work on a large scale and therefore wasn’t marketable. Nearly everybody in the audience realized that flaw, which was caused by a strong dependency on the underlying communications infrastructure. The jury seemed to ignore that major flaw.

Our project Metapherus

The idea generator for our project Metapherus was Cornelius Putzler, who has worked on a problem during his studies of computer linguistics. In the past he tried to find a way to transform texts that are difficult to understand into easier versions. He pitched this idea and found a team of supporters, including me.

The frontend draft for "Metapherus"

Although a weekend isn’t enough to develop a complete solution for such a broad problem scenario, we tried to find a niche and do a market validation. We basically split the team into a development and a marketing part.

The development team made a prototype with Python that replaced synonyms of words to showcase how the solution might work in the future. A small web frontend was built with Material Design for Bootstrap.

The marketing team conducted an online survey adressing students and pupils that had struggled with text comprehension in the past. It validated the need for such a solution and gave us an idea on how to price it. Another customer segment, bloggers and journalists, weren’t that interested, so we focused on students for the market entry.

We managed to get a lot of information in a short period of time, validated parts of the idea and got the “most innovative” award. The idea is promising and even captured the interest of an investor. In the long run the value of the solution is defined by the quality of the algorithm. That’s why we, as a team, won’t follow up on it. Cornelius Putzler will definitely keep on working on his idea.

Will I do it again?

To summarize the most important part: I had fun. In the end it is only a starting point for ideas and their execution. One shouldn’t expect that the results of the weekend will get you far ahead, but perhaps you get to know somebody who will support you on your way.

I’m not sure if I’ll participate next year, but if I do, I’ll pitch an idea of my own as this should be even more rewarding.

Looking back on and reappraising Startup Weekend Stuttgart 2014 was originally published by Kornelius A. Prell at kaape - personal website on December 10, 2014.

A spark of motivation

2014-12-06T00:00:00+00:00

My last “personal” blog post has been on the 17th of October in 2012 on my game development blog. It is about the release of my last game Airrise for the XBox Live Indie Games. Since then a lot happened. I’ve finished my studies, worked for a while at a big IT company, finally quit and founded my first company ditemis in May 2014 (at ditemis we develop individual software solution and provide technical consulting). With all this happening I’ve felt the need to start a personal blog.

My take on entrepreneurship

I’m walking my first steps on the journey from employee to entrepreneur and I’d like you to participate as a reader and learn from my mistakes. Currently I’m working as a freelancer and try to develop various products as side projects. As the content on the ditemis blog is addressing german customers in the public sector, I found it more appropriate to talk about my experiences as an entrepreneur on this personal blog. In a few years I’d like to look back at this blog and reread about my transformation into an (hopefully successful) entrepreneur.

Future content expectations

In the future you’ll find a mix of content on this blog. My experiences with growing ideas into business models, used idea validation and marketing methods, used tools, book reviews, personal learnings from startup events like Startup Weekend and perhaps even revenue reports. With a background in software engineering my projects will mainly focus on Apps, Software-as-a-Service and web-based applications in general.

Stay connected

If you have any remarks on the content, would like to get in contact (especially if you’re in the area of Stuttgart, Germany) or perhaps even need my consultation as a software engineer, don’t hesitate to comment or write me an e-mail.

Send me an e-mail

A spark of motivation was originally published by Kornelius A. Prell at kaape - personal website on December 06, 2014.

Document your RESTful API with Swagger

2013-03-17T00:00:00+00:00

This post was originally published on netzkaempfer.com. The old blog and domain is no longer active, but I’d still like to keep my old articles about web-based game development.

As a recent task it was necessary to create a RESTful webservice based on parts of an existing web application. The search for a tool to documentate the design and discuss it resulted in Swagger. We gave it a try and the first results are promising.

You can create and manipulate your API configuration in a JSON format manually or generate it automatically from your implementation. There exists modules for various RESTful frameworks like node.js, Java JAX-RS, etc. The generated documentation needs to be hosted on a web server. Each method can be tested by filling the specfied parameters in proper input forms.

Altogether Swagger seems to be a nice tool to generate API documentation with a nice layout fast, keep it up to date on code changes and quickly test any given method.

Document your RESTful API with Swagger was originally published by Kornelius A. Prell at kaape - personal website on March 17, 2013.

Rise of distribution channels for Indie Games

2013-02-11T00:00:00+00:00

This post was originally published on netzkaempfer.com. The old blog and domain is no longer active, but I’d still like to keep my old articles about web-based game development.

During the last years there has been a rise of various new distribution sites for Indie Games and virtual goods in general. In contrast to that the big developer and publisher THQ filed for bankruptcy. While this may not be correlated, it shows that there is a big drive from the gamers community to support sole developers or indie teams. Within this market environment there are clearly opportunities for new business models.

HumbleBundle

The most famous example for a successful new distribution model is the HumbleBundle. Due to their full revenue transparency it can easily be calculated how profitable their “pay-what-you-want” business model is. Sure, they have the most prestigious indie games in their bundles, but in general they have found the solution to a big problem for customers and developers. While the products lifecycle may be on a decline, the HumbleBundle is able to generate a sales peak, which should be pure profit, when the developers hit the break-even on their games. They furthermore expand the developers audience without cost-intense marketing. The customers get entertaining, high-quality games for an unbeatable price, a price that they can choose themselves. The charity support puts the cherry on the cake.

There are quite a few other examples that tried to break in the market by winning developers over:

Because We May: A two-week sale driven by indie developers.
Indie Games Uprising: A site created by game developers to advertise their Xbox Live Indie Games.
Indie Royale: Similar to the HumbleBundle with a slightly different “pay-what-you-want” method.
IndieGameStand: Focusing on individual games instead of bundles, but also supporting the “pay-what-you-want” method.

Even investors seem to recognize the opportunities in these markets. The HitFox Group focuses on building game companies.

A minimal viable product for a game distribution channel should be an easy task. Reaching the right audience, building a community and winning developers over are hard ones.

Rise of distribution channels for Indie Games was originally published by Kornelius A. Prell at kaape - personal website on February 11, 2013.

Airrise: Release

2012-10-17T00:00:00+00:00

As one of the most elite pilots you’ve been invited to test a technologically advanced jet prototype with self-healing capabilities. Try to kill as many enemy drones as possible in this fast-paced air fight simulation. Show them what you’ve got!

You can buy Airrise here: Airrise on the Marketplace

It provides the following features:

7 different enemies
Increasing difficulty

Airrise: Release was originally published by Kornelius A. Prell at kaape - personal website on October 17, 2012.

Airrise: Gameplay Video

2012-10-03T00:00:00+00:00

It starts right in the action and you see the standard fighter, boats, flying boats and the carrier enemy types.

Airrise: Gameplay Video was originally published by Kornelius A. Prell at kaape - personal website on October 03, 2012.

Airrise: First Playtest

2012-09-30T00:00:00+00:00

This post was originally published on kaapedev.wordpress.com. The old blog is no longer actively maintained, but I’d still like to keep my old articles about game development with Xbox Live Indie Games.

During the writing process for my masterthesis I’ve taken up the development of “Airrise” as a balance. As I’ve forgotten to cancel my Creators Club subscription (duh!), I thought that I might as well submit the game to MS Indie Games.

Hopefully the playtest period that just started will reveal any major problems. Currently I’m quite happy with the game, as I’m having great fun while playing. Here’s a screenshot of the action:

The effects look more beautiful in realtime and the flight speed isn’t really shown in the screenshot. I’ll post a gameplay video soon.

Airrise: First Playtest was originally published by Kornelius A. Prell at kaape - personal website on September 30, 2012.

Chat with Node.js

2012-04-20T00:00:00+00:00

This post was originally published on netzkaempfer.com. The old blog and domain is no longer active, but I’d still like to keep my old articles about web-based game development.

Although we choose JQuery and PHP after intense prototyping as a foundation for our game, the technology isn’t capable of some functions we need.

If you want to send content from a webserver actively to the connected HTTP Clients, you have to go with constant polling. The Websockets protocol provides relief and permits bidirectional connections between web clients and servers.

Chat feature

A first usage of this feature can be seen in the chat function for Social War. It allows players to chat with their friends, their alliance or all online gamers. For this feature we use Node.js with socket.io, that falls back on Long-Polling or uses Websockets, depending on the abilities of the client.

A simple introduction provides michael mukhin.

The integration in the PHP and JQuery stack is simple and as Node.js is a separate webserver the module can be developed and maintained independently. I look forward to implement a fight system, that behaves in “realtime” with Node.js.

Chat with Node.js was originally published by Kornelius A. Prell at kaape - personal website on April 20, 2012.

Character traits in Social War

2012-04-13T00:00:00+00:00

This post was originally published on netzkaempfer.com. The old blog and domain is no longer active, but I’d still like to keep my old articles about web-based game development.

We want to transfer the elements of classical roleplaying in the world of social networks with our browsergame Social War. Currently we are in the concept phase / preproduction. Today we want to present the various character traits to give you an insight in the game. Experienced roleplaying gamers will see the patterns behind them.

Onlinetime

Labor, homework, intake of food… how should one find the time for the important things in life with all these tasks? The more time you have for your travel in the social network, the more you will achieve. The “onlinetime” is one of the most important traits in Social War. It represents the health points of your character in fights. If you waste the onlinetime of your enemy with funny pictures, confusing discussions or exciting videos, you will win the fight.

Beyond fights the onlinetime has the purpose of action points and thereby defines how many actions your character can do. We’re still trying to figure out if this will work. Maybe we split the onlinetime and action points to prevent confusion and enable a better balancing.

Quickwittedness

Meme-Creator or follower? In the eye of the shitstorm or at the back of beyond? Which role you take in the social world depends on your skill to react on new trends or events. The character trait “quickwittedness” describes how fast you can adapt to the latest trend. Characters with a high value of quickwittedness can attack first in fights. A group with characters high on quickwittedness may defeat an enemy group before they even get the chance to attack.

Charisma

Who wants to fight himself if others may do the dirty work? You will meet not only human players in the game. Every theme and every group is populated by non-player-characters (NPC) that are controlled by the computer. If a fight about the leadership of the group starts, the neutral NPCs will join you or your enemy. Whether you troop up with NPCs or are forever alone is defined by the charisma value of you character.

Creativity

The seventh cat video? The fifth meme with Age of Empires? Your enemies will only show a worn-out smile. You cannot occupy them long with that. Only if you’re creative and create new, funny, fascinating and absolutely crazy content you can obtain their attention and waste their onlinetime. The character trait “creativity” defines how good the value of your messages, pictures or videos is. They represent the damage value of your attacks. The more creative the content is the longer an enemy will fiddle with the content and hence have a bigger impact on his onlinetime.

Repartee

In the modern form of communication with social networks one has to be as snappy as in a real conversation. Only the one who counterattacks with ironic, sarcastic or argumentative comments can maintain his social status. The character trait “repartee” defines how well a character can react to the content of messages, pictures or videos. The repartee value represents the armor level in a fight. The more repartee a character has got the weaker the attacks of an enemy hit him. The player can counterattack the attacks of the enemy with good comments and thereby reduce the impact on his own onlinetime.

Empathy

With the absence of gestures and facial expressions an empathetic understanding is important in digital communication. The frame of mind of a person can only be judged by his shared content, which makes empathetic characters in the social web a rarity. The character trait “empathy” defines how well a player understands his friends and how well he knows their personal strengths and weaknesses. Empathy supports the player in a defensive manner in a fight. With empathetic traits the attacks of the enemy are weakened and friends are supported, e.g. with healing.

Humor

Humor is a central element to improve one’s own content and entertain friends. Nowadays everybody tries to lighten up his dull daily routine with good entertainment. Humoristic characters are in demand. The character trait humor defines how well a player can entertain his friends and thereby bond them. Humor supports the party in an aggressive manner in fights. With humoristic skills the own attacks are strengthened, making it hard for enemies to counterattack and stealing more onlinetime.

Character traits in Social War was originally published by Kornelius A. Prell at kaape - personal website on April 13, 2012.

Technology & Tool choice: GWT vs. jQuery+PHP

2012-03-27T00:00:00+00:00

This post was originally published on netzkaempfer.com. The old blog and domain is no longer active, but I’d still like to keep my old articles about web-based game development.

After various validations we must proceed to the implementation (at least prototypical) of SocialWar. Therefore we’ve started to choose the proper tools and sharpen them. Until now we trust in the common setup of Wiki, Trac, Subversion, Jenkins and Eclipse. This combination is a good foundation for the method of working and quality management in our small team.

The choice of technologies for the implementation is harder. I could experience personally the advantages and disadvantages of the Google Web Toolkit and created a first prototype:

GWT SocialWar Alpha

In combination with hibernate a fast prototyping is guaranteed. Weaknesses in the dynamic and visualisation on clientside/frontend (that the screenshot clearly depicts) showed early and thereby the GWT disqualified itself for the usage in our browsergame. With the JSNI one can include native JavaScript, but the separation of code and design is even with the UiBinder cumbersome. It is hard to imagine, how the result of the UiBinder and the View implementation looks. The necessary application server for the GWT RPCs is an additional disadvantage for our small prototype. There must be something easier than that…

As an advocate of rich client applications I’m at daggers drawn (without a specific reason) with programming languages like PHP or JavaScript. The experiences of the last weeks have taught me better. Today I proudly claim to be a novice of web development/programming. For an easy entrance in the web development world we have chosen the Kohana PHP Framework after a few evaluations. We haven’t regretted the decision yet. The documentation for version 3.2 is a bit weak, but the intuitive usage has convinced me. It simply works – without tinkering or cryptic error messages of the GWT compiler. In combination with jQuery new functionality can rapidly be developed and tested. With the PHP integration for Jenkins a clean toolchain is guaranteed, that of course contains unit testing and documentation.

The outcome looks a lot more promising, as any of my efforts with the GWT:

SocialWar Alpha 27.03.12

On the foundation of Kohana, jQuery and CSS we hope to rapidly prototype various gameply elements. The first experiences show potential; we can react on HTML5 and CSS3 and learn a lot about the current state of the art of web technology. What more could a developer want?

On to preproduction!

Technology & Tool choice: GWT vs. jQuery+PHP was originally published by Kornelius A. Prell at kaape - personal website on March 27, 2012.

“Netzkämpfer” are born!

2012-03-27T00:00:00+00:00

This post was originally published on kaapedev.wordpress.com. The old blog is no longer actively maintained, but I’d still like to keep my old articles about game development with Xbox Live Indie Games.

Together with some colleagues I founded the organisation “Netzkämpfer” (eng.: net warriors / net fighters) that is intended for a german audience.

Our mission is to fight for excellent web applications. We’ve started this mission with our first browser game “Social War” which is currently in pre-production.

Although it’s not XBox Indie Games I’m still developing games 🙂

“Netzkämpfer” are born! was originally published by Kornelius A. Prell at kaape - personal website on March 27, 2012.

The “Gründerzeit” Elevator Pitch of Social War

2012-03-14T00:00:00+00:00

This post was originally published on netzkaempfer.com. The old blog and domain is no longer active, but I’d still like to keep my old articles about web-based game development.

We have attended the Gründerzeit Baden-Württemberg event on 2nd & 3rd of March and participated with our game idea “Social War” at an Elevator Pitch contest. Altogether 35 teams tried to convince the jury with their business idea.

Social War Elevator Pitch Gründerzeit

A nice summary report can be found on Startup-Stuttgart.

Unfortunately we couldn’t win the jury for our project and therefore haven’t been nominated as finalists. Overall the experience, new contacts and the feedback that we could gain at the event are an important building block for our next steps. To bring our complex game concept into a pitchable summary and highlight the economic potential was a big challenge.

This event has shown us, how important it is to shape and present your vision convincingly. Especially if you are reliant on funding this competence is a basic requirement.

Here is a recorded Livestream of our pitch and the questions from the jury afterwards:

We are around minute 20 on stage. Sadly the audio is asynchronous to the video.

Please help us with your comments.
Where can we improve our presentation?
Which points of the pitch aren’t comprehensible enough?

The “Gründerzeit” Elevator Pitch of Social War was originally published by Kornelius A. Prell at kaape - personal website on March 14, 2012.

Browsergames Forum Starter Trophy 2011 – 3rd place for Social War

2012-03-12T00:00:00+00:00

This post was originally published on netzkaempfer.com. The old blog and domain is no longer active, but I’d still like to keep my old articles about web-based game development.

The team around “Social War” is bright winner of the bronze medal at the Browsergames Forum Starter Trophy 2011. The Starter Trophy by Gamesload has been awarded within the Browsergames Forum for the first time. The best games or game concepts have been rewarded.

bgf Starter Trophy 3rd Place

The intense preparation for the event was worth it and has been rewarded with the 3rd place. We had the sparking idea for the game Social War for a while and could develop it for some time. After countless conversations, scrapped sketches and controversial discussions, the Gamedesign document developed step by step. It describes the basic game concepts.

With the affirmation and validation of the concept in the course of the Browsergame Forum and the acquired motivation to intensively pursue Social War, we take the step into preproduction.

Browsergames Forum Starter Trophy 2011 – 3rd place for Social War was originally published by Kornelius A. Prell at kaape - personal website on March 12, 2012.

kaape - personal website

Migrating netzkaempfer.com

About

You fight the entire time with the question: Who are the “Netzkämpfer”?

Social War

Social War in 20 seconds

Concept

Migrating kaapedev.wordpress.com

About kaapedev.wordpress.com

Payout

Outlook on netzkaempfer.com migration

Successful performance for AppCreator at Elevator Pitch BW 2016 in Böblingen

AppCreator tries to participate at Elevator Pitch BW 2016 in Böblingen

Why Böblingen?

Please support us!

Same procedure as last year: my experience with Startup Weekend Stuttgart 2015

The good stuff

The bad stuff

Our project AppCreator

Will I do it again?

A year of freelancing

What is my mission as a freelancer?

My first big freelance project

Comparing freelancing to being an employee

Reduce your risks

Hard decisions: from freelancer to entrepreneur

How I quit my job to become an entrepreneur

Taking risks

Preparation for the jump

Comments & Critique

Nearly a year later

Looking back on and reappraising Startup Weekend Stuttgart 2014

An ambitious timeline

The good stuff

The bad stuff

Our project Metapherus

Will I do it again?

A spark of motivation

My take on entrepreneurship

Future content expectations

Stay connected

Document your RESTful API with Swagger

Rise of distribution channels for Indie Games

Airrise: Release

Airrise: Gameplay Video

Airrise: First Playtest

Chat with Node.js

Character traits in Social War

Onlinetime

Quickwittedness

Charisma

Creativity

Repartee

Empathy

Humor

Technology & Tool choice: GWT vs. jQuery+PHP

“Netzkämpfer” are born!

The “Gründerzeit” Elevator Pitch of Social War

Browsergames Forum Starter Trophy 2011 – 3rd place for Social War