This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Hey friends, what's up? Welcome back to Side Hustle School. It's Chris Guillebeau, your host here. I'm excited to return to a segment we ran for a couple years. We didn't run it at all last year, but we got a lot of questions about it.
It was really popular. It was kind of polarizing in a way because the segment is all about failure. And when I started it, some people were like, why are you running failure stories? Like, isn't this about side hustle successes? But if you ever listened to the episodes, you would know it's often about what we learn through something that doesn't go well.
And the side hustler or small business owner sharing the story often had built a pretty good business, but just something went wrong along the way. And so we can learn a lot of lessons from that. So I always loved working on this segment. So we're gonna return to some of our greatest hits from Failure Friday. And in these stories, they vary, but they often begin with an idea, what somebody thought would happen, and then what really happened, and of course what they learned.
So sometimes there's a disaster. Sometimes it's a mistake or a misstep, all kinds of variants. I'm gonna bring you a bunch of these throughout the year, most likely two a month or so as we go along. But without further ado, today's short story features Matt from Western Massachusetts. He's gonna tell us about an ambitious idea he had for an indie mobile game.
Now, because this is Failure Friday, you might suspect it doesn't turn out that well, and you'd be right. But of course the magic, or at least the lesson, lies in the details. So let's hear it from him. Gonna pass the mic to Matt. I'll be back at the end with a quick wrap up.
[Music]
My name is Matt from Western Mass, and I work as a front end developer for a clothing manufacturer. I'm also working on a news site for coders that I hope you'll be able to feature as a future case study. But that's not what today's story is about. This one is a failure story. That's right, before I started working on the news site, I had another idea that I thought was brilliant.
You already know it probably wasn't that smart, but for the record, here's how it turned out. Mobile gaming is a massive industry where even the games that don't become super popular can end up bringing in good income for the creator. I've been especially interested in Pokemon Go and anything else that uses geolocation data as part of the game. My idea was to make a game that relied on users making in-person connections based on their location. Imagine everyone being at a mall, for example.
The game becomes a scavenger hunt where strangers need to meet up in front of different stores. Creating this game posed a number of different challenges, both technical and otherwise. I worked on it nights and weekends and finally had a working model. I plan to spend most of my free time over the next few months on marketing. But first I submitted the app to the iOS app store and nothing.
I didn't hear anything for days. Finally, I heard back and it wasn't good news. The app had been rejected, damn. But actually I wasn't too worried at that point. Most of the time rejections occur.
It just means you made an error in your code or need to make a small adjustment in response to a developer note. However, in this case, they didn't really say what was wrong. They just said something about how the app violated Apple's terms and conditions without specifying how it did that. I still figured I'd get in with the next submission, but that was swiftly rejected as well. Over the next few weeks, a troubling sequence set in.
I'd make some tweaks, write an appeal and send in the app. Then either a day or two later or sometimes up to a week later, I'd get an email that a response was in and it was never good. You might think, okay, well, that sucks about Apple, but why not put it on Android? The thing is, developing for Android is a different process. It's not just a matter of flipping a switch.
Second, at least in the US, a lot more people use iPhones. Finally, the process was just starting to feel discouraging. I'd done all this work and my game was rejected without a clear answer. I just decided to put the project on pause for now. I still think it can be great, but I can't do much until the main platform for it comes around.
I learned that I should have researched the approval process a bit more in advance. Somewhere along the way, I made a mistake that turned out to be unrecoverable. The other thing is that my news site won't be dependent on Apple or any other company. Even though this is a failure story, I want to say that I remain positive. Hearing other people's struggles and successes has been a big part of that.
So thanks for all you do. See you next time with a story that has a better ending. [Music]
Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat as we return to failure Friday. That is in fact our theme, the theme of these episodes, the fact that often something can go wrong and then you can regroup. You can try again, you can rework.
So thanks to Matt for sharing this story. We look forward to featuring the Coding News site. And listeners, I'm excited to bring you more of these, as I said, probably every other week, at least for the next few months or so. And if you're not into failure stories, well, we have plenty of other successes as well. So stay tuned for those.
You can access the complete archives of sidehustleschool.com. And of course, new episodes drop every day. So excited to make this show for you. Thank you for being out there. My name is Chris Guillebeau.
You're listening to Side Hustle School. [Music]
From The Onward Project.
