Play Perl is a Startup
Yep.
I'm leaving my daily job at Yandex in 2 months to see how far I can take the concepts behind http://play-perl.org/.
I spent 7 years at Yandex, it's pretty much the only job I ever had.
I never participated in any startups.
I have no idea what I'm doing :)
But I really want to try.
Here are the slides I showed at Moscow.pm meetup today:
(I'm not sure how comprehensible they are without the talk, though.)
What this means for the Play Perl future:
- Source code stays open (for now; I'm not making any promises, but don't see reasons to close it either.)
- Service stays free. (I have several ideas about monetization. None of them include ads or require payments for the current functionality. And I promise none of them are evil.)
- I have a big incentive to take this beyond the Perl community, to the other open source communities, at least. Maybe to non-programmer communities too. I'm planning to do this as soon as possible.
In the meantime, it's been 1.5 months since my last post, so here are some new features Play Perl got:
- tags!
- comment likes;
- reward circle, displaying the number of points you're going to get on quest accomplishment;
- "quest completed" modal box;
- lots of frontend optimizations and other minor improvements.
I wrote Ubic. I worked at Yandex for many years, and now i'm building my own startup questhub.io (formerly PlayPerl). I'm also working on Flux, streaming data processing framework.
CPAN ID: MMCLERIC.
Go for it!
How will you monetize this project if it all stays free? I'm worried about you quitting your day job, if you're not already independently wealthy or have a sugar-momma to live off of... :/
I've got enough savings to keep me afloat for a year or so :)
Ok, possible monetization routes:
- freemium - not the kind of "pay if you want to add more than 5 quests", but more of "donate this fixed sum if you love this service", or of "private quests are a paid feature" (github-like)
- private installations for businesses (will require closing the source code, probably)
- take payments from big companies which want to support their open source developer communities, e.g., take money from twitter for adding twitter-specific achievements (this will require making play-whatever really *big*, I know)
Gabor, I remember you talked to me about "take your project and turn it into startup" last year at YAPC::Russia. I think it was one of the several reasons I decided I should do this. Thank you :)
Good for you. If you don't add the ability for people to donate to support, maybe you should at least add flattr :-)
So a year from now, when you're living on the street, holding up a piece of card with "will hack Perl for food", we'll know who to blame!
Fantastic! The world is a very big place. If you can conquer just a tiny patch of it, you can live quite comfortably. At least, that's what I tell myself every morning. Follow your dream.
Oh yes, flattr. I love flattr. Even though nobody ever clicked on my flattr button for Ubic; maybe that's got something to do with my "I don't need donations" note...
I added the button to the play-perl's footer. Let's see if anyone clicks it!
And then let's see if I can manage to process the money, because I'm pretty sure Paypal doesn't support withdraws in Russia. (But I think Skrill does.)
When I saw this post's subject "Play *Perl* is a startup" (emphasis mine), I thought "what the..." but then you wrote "I have a big incentive to take this beyond the Perl community, to the other open source communities, at least. Maybe to non-programmer communities too."
Ok, that makes more sense now.
You, sir, are a brave man.
Best of luck! I hope we'll be able to give you a hand along the way!
Way to go! Congratulations and good luck! :)
Best of luck to you!
Good luck! I hope this works out for you :)
Thanks, everyone!
I, too, kind of hope it works out :)
Awesome! Wish you all the best.
Definitely wishing you the best of luck. Running a business can be a huge PITA, and it can be very rewarding. Generally it's both at once. :-)
When you start adding features, put me down as a +1 for adding GitHub login.
@thaljef:
Nice one, man. I'm totally adding that to my fortune file. ;->