Happy 2020! May all your companies turn into unicorns and all your projects be bought by Facebook!
I have a tendency to blindly jump into new projects, lose interest along the way and then abandon them. It’s been a constant in my carreer, so in january 2019 I decided to do something about that. I started doing timetracking on my just-for-fun projects.
Turns out I worked on 16 projects this year, some of them as little as half an hour. I have also kept note of any income generated by the projects, and calculated an hourly income. Note that I’m ignoring any costs involved (servers, transport, equipment and external labour), and all amounts are VAT excluded.
| Project | Hours | Revenue | Hourly |
|---|---|---|---|
| Work for hire | 1.013,76 | € 77.897,38 | € 76,84 |
| QuizWitz | 388,75 | € 8.547,76 | € 21,99 |
| Dolumar | 10,25 | € 78,67 | € 7,68 |
| Quizfabriek | 336,00 | € 925,00 | € 2,75 |
| Quizkalender | 33,00 | € 13,78 | € 0,42 |
| CatLab Drinks | 167,00 | € 0,00 | € 0,00 |
| Kitten Race | 55,00 | € 0,00 | € 0,00 |
| Werewolves | 34,00 | € 0,00 | € 0,00 |
| Escape game | 21,00 | € 0,00 | € 0,00 |
| Research project | 13,00 | € 0,00 | € 0,00 |
| Administratie | 11,00 | € 0,00 | € 0,00 |
| Word game | 11,00 | € 0,00 | € 0,00 |
| Eukles | 8,00 | € 0,00 | € 0,00 |
| Dolumar TCG | 6,00 | € 0,00 | € 0,00 |
| Trading game | 2,00 | € 0,00 | € 0,00 |
| Wittegeit | 0,50 | € 0,00 | € 0,00 |
Since this is the first year I’m doing time tracking, I don’t have running totals of the projects. The bulk of QuizWitz development has happened over the past few years, and a quick estimation shows at least 5000 hours have been put in before (by various people). However, to not completely lose my mind, I have decided to only measure this years activity.
In total, I’ve logged 2110,26 working hours, which is about 44 hours a week (at 48 weeks / year, holidays excluded).
An overview
Don’t quit your dayjob just yet is probably the lesson to learn here. I deciced to turn down a lucrative project in May, in order to take some time off and take on projects a little closer to home. It took a cut out of the hourly rate, but at least I don’t have to drive for two hours every day. But even then, pet projects don’t even come close to working for the man.
Next up: the big one. QuizWitz has been my main project for the past few years, so I’m happy to see at least some revenue coming in. Quizfabriek, a little lower on the list, should actually be added to QuizWitz as well, as any income from Quizfabriek comes in the form of license fees for QuizWitz. That brings QuizWitz to €9472,76 in revenue, or €24,36 hourly. (I’m not counting the 336 hours worked as a volunteer, since none of the other volunteers get paid either.)
The bulk of the QuizWitz revenue comes from offering support at live events and renting out equipment (so basically me doing actual work) totalling €6544,50. That means QuizWitz generated €2928,26 in software sales (including Airconsole).
Related, but not exactly the same: Quizfabriek, our now 10-headed non profit that tries to revolutionise the traditional pub quiz. As stated above, all revenue that is listed here comes out of QuizWitz license fees. All hours put in should be considered ‘unpaid voluntary work’, but just for funsies I split them up anyway.
I’m not sure what happened, but for some reason Dolumar also generated some sales this year. Not enough to keep the server running, but since this game was my first proper try to build a strategy browser game, I can’t bring myself to shutting it down. And obviously thousands of hours have sunk into the Dolumar project, so the hourly revenue is way off. Thanks for the support though!
The last project that generated any revenue was Quizkalender. This project was built to give to provide some free advertising space for our Quizfabriek quizzes. It uses data from various sites to compile the most complete overview of the Flemish quiz scene. When we’re not advertising our own quizzes, we’re using the space to show paid ads, resulting in a tiny bit of extra beer money.
On to another big time-waster, but one that has had a significant impact on the way we organise our quizzes at Quizfabriek. CatLab Drinks is a very rudimentary web based cash register system with support for NFC topup cards. It can be integrated in the QuizWitz quiz software, which allows players to order drinks from the bar during the game. When the NFC topup system is used, players can topup their card and all payments are done behind the scene, so that bartenders don’t have to worry about anything. I’ve released the code under GPLv3.
That leaves us with the projects that have had no value whatsoever. Kitten race was an attempt on an educational ‘classroom game’, but ended up being a refactor of our ‘CatLab Remote’ engine. That same refactored engine was then used to create a party game implementation of the game Werewolves (also known as Maffia in some parts of the world). Both games are still sitting on a shelf and might be released on Airconsole or Steam at some point in the future.
With Escape Game I wanted to see if the CatLab Remote engine could be used for a mass escape game, where tens to hundreds of people would try to solve a mystery or avoid a disaster, but I didn’t get much further than a few sketches.
Finally there’s a bunch of projects where I only spent a few hours on; prototypes that I still want to explore at a later stage. I even have a rough draft of a Dolumar themed card game, but it hasn’t come to the playtesting stage yet.
Technology
Overall, I’ve had a fun year. Not always productive, but I’ve played around with fun ideas and tinkered with lots of things I hardly knew anything about.
I’ve used DMX and WebMidi to automate moving lights and led pars at our quizzes. I’ve used WebRTC to stream QuizWitz to raspberry pi’s connected to displays (to avoid having to use HDMI splitters and unhandly cables).
I’ve played with NTAG213 NFC tags and readers to implement a cashless topup system and used html offline features to make sure the system runs even when internet connection fails.
I’ve made my old libraries compatible with npm and typescript, to make the game development less painful.
Oh, and I’ve also bought a new car!
Next up
I don’t think 2020 will be much different from 2019. I’ll probably try to put in some more work-for-hire hours, as you can’t spend every summer sitting on your arse, but I don’t think I’ll stop starting silly projects and giving up on them. It’s just too much fun.
I should look into more ways to get QuizWitz into the hands of event planners and quiz organisers. Everyone who’s used the software is enthousiastic and our very first client still calls us for every quiz they organise. I feel like I’m leaving a lot of potential on the table. I’m just not very confident reaching out and doing sales. Improving my business skills is pretty high on my list of new year resolutions. Or finding a cofounder who can handle that part.
Finally, I should finish renovating my tiny little house. I haven’t really done any construction work in 2019, and renovating a house of this size shouldn’t take 5 years to finish. 🙂
One reply on “My 2019 in numbers”
Amai