Self-funded. We're not averse to taking outside capital, but I want to make sure we don't take money until the right time in our company's lifecycle. Given how many times our assumptions have been proven wrong, I don't think we've reached that point - I like having the freedom to change directions and try a different tack without having to justify it to investors & staff. I've been an early employee in a couple funded companies that were at roughly the same point in development that we are, and was always struck by how stupid management was. This way we can be stupid and correct for it without getting caught in the blame/frustration cycle that overtakes a lot of VC-funded companies. Investors probably also appreciate us not spending their money making mistakes; I doubt we could get funding at this point if we tried.
I've been working full-time for 4 months (+ 9 months with a day job), my cofounder still has his day job but is quitting in a month or two. I'm still in my 20s and saved up a whole lot of money from my last job, so we could go for quite a while like this.
Everyone's completely right about the reduced effectiveness of moonlighting; in my experience, a 10x drop in productivity is not unusual. Also, I've found that there are some projects that you just can't do while employed elsewhere, because you can't load the whole project into your head on just nights and weekends. The two sites we released while I was still employed were basically dead in the cradle, because they don't solve anything that hundreds of other sites haven't already solved. Quitting has given me the time & attention to pursue much more ambitious coding projects.
Also, those cost figures seem high. We spend $80/month or hosting and make about $60 back on advertising, so it basically pays for itself.
Word-of-mouth and search engines, apparently. We posted one game on Digg back in the summer, had a flurry of hits and then about 6 (yeah, I'm not leaving off a digit) uniques a day for the next 3 months. But traffic has grown steadily since late October, and we haven't been doing anything. No Google ads, no promotional postings, not even telling anyone other than linking it in our social-network profiles and answering family friends who ask "What are you up to these days?" We're at about 1000 uniques (73,000 hits) for the month of February so far.
I'm kinda amazed that we even have users, given the quality of the product that we've got up there and the lack of updates in the past 6 months.
I've been working full-time for 4 months (+ 9 months with a day job), my cofounder still has his day job but is quitting in a month or two. I'm still in my 20s and saved up a whole lot of money from my last job, so we could go for quite a while like this.
Everyone's completely right about the reduced effectiveness of moonlighting; in my experience, a 10x drop in productivity is not unusual. Also, I've found that there are some projects that you just can't do while employed elsewhere, because you can't load the whole project into your head on just nights and weekends. The two sites we released while I was still employed were basically dead in the cradle, because they don't solve anything that hundreds of other sites haven't already solved. Quitting has given me the time & attention to pursue much more ambitious coding projects.
Also, those cost figures seem high. We spend $80/month or hosting and make about $60 back on advertising, so it basically pays for itself.