Pivots

It’s been a very long time since I posted.  It’s a different world now.

Ten years ago, I was contacted through Meetup by Matt, an entrepreneur and developer who had previously started a successful online test administration company.  He had cashed out and just secured seed funding for his next idea: an “Uber for Doctors.”  I signed on as an iOS developer, employee #1.  A few weeks later he hired Brandon, an Android dev, as #2 and we started working out of a literal garage in the Baldwin Park neighborhood of Orlando.

Over time, we made a few strategic pivots.  We became a SaaS focusing on telehealth, patient notifications and forms.  Instead of just mobile development, we built the whole stack.  Covid came in 2020 and truly tested us.  It was a tremendous amount of work but today our company is a multimillion-dollar-a-year patient engagement platform.

It’s been an interesting road for me.

The iPhone

In February 2007, I was doing console game development at Electronic Arts, and they sent some of us to the Game Developer’s Conference in San Francisco.

In a diner on Market Street, a colleague of mine pulled out his brand-new iPhone, typed in en.wikipedia.org and showed it to me. It was the full desktop version. I was transfixed.

Later I met another developer at EA who was writing games for the iPhone on the side.  Apple was not yet distributing apps from third party developers, but they had released the SDK beta and he was preparing his games for release as soon as the App Store opened in summer 2008.  They were straightforward 2D arcade games.  Once the store opened, he started pulling in huge amounts of money on a monthly basis.

The iPhone, in my mind, was the dream device for the individual game developer.  It brought back all the promise and joy of the days before and around the time of Doom and Quake and Unreal when a single developer could still make a game that would be a success on their own.

The first device I bought was an iPod Touch — which was an iPhone without the phone.  I still remember the elation of having my own full 3D game running on a device I could hold in my hand.

Indigo Ocho

I released my first game, Indigo Ocho, in early 2009 to poor sales, but great reviews.   I was late, and my game landed among many others in a deluge of new entries in the store, many of them backed by sophisticated marketing.

My successful friend had chastised me for building a 3D game.  “It takes too long, you have to strike while the iron is hot.”  He was right, of course, and he had seen his sales dwindle significantly as time passed.

I was approached by another small studio to collaborate on an updated version of the game that they would market.  We released that to poor sales as well.  When we temporarily made it free, it was downloaded twenty times more frequently than when it was priced at $.99.

It caught the attention of a company called Chillingo.  They were not interested in trying to remarket Indigo Ocho but they were impressed by it and wanted to collaborate on a multiplayer Gauntlet/Diablo style game.  That initial idea would eventually become The Relic.

Eventually I struck out on my own and started Axolotl Studios for my games and other contract apps.  During that time I built a couple other games for clients.  I also built white-label banking apps, sports apps and apps for security checks. I even built a few for Android and BlackBerry.

It was at the end of this time that I saw Matt’s message in the Orlando iOS Developer’s Meetup board and my life moved away from games and apps.