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TomGullen

2,868 karma

Founder and of Scirra Ltd

Posts49
Comments1,045
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www.construct.net 3y ago

Building your own store and pricing your SaaS is hard

TomGullen
3pts0
www.construct.net 3y ago

Why you should build your own store. Handling pricing & currencies for SaaS

TomGullen
1pts0
www.construct.net 3y ago

Build your own web store. Pricing, currencies and SaaS

TomGullen
2pts0
www.youtube.com 4y ago

A 100mph basketball hoop you can't miss a shot in

TomGullen
62pts10
www.starterstory.com 4y ago

From bedrooms to $100k p/m in recurring revenue with the Construct game engine

TomGullen
3pts0
www.construct.net 5y ago

Goodbye Scirra.com

TomGullen
1pts0
www.construct.net 5y ago

Show HN: Our new Game Asset store

TomGullen
1pts1
news.ycombinator.com 5y ago

Ask HN: Is being able to bypass 2FA on PayPal a security vulenrability?

TomGullen
1pts1
www.seomoz.org 14y ago

Negative SEO - Rand Fishkin of SEOMoz

TomGullen
3pts0
www.scirra.com 14y ago

AirSpace - An absolutely awesome HTML5 game

TomGullen
2pts0
www.scirra.com 14y ago

Grav Suit - A very cool HTML5 game

TomGullen
1pts0
news.ycombinator.com 14y ago

Show HN: Our startup Construct 2, how far we've come and lessons learnt so far

TomGullen
12pts7
www.scirra.com 14y ago

Make your website fast. (And why you should).

TomGullen
146pts67
www.scirra.com 14y ago

A most excellent pure HTML5 platform game

TomGullen
3pts1
www.scirra.com 14y ago

Cute HTML5 platformer - WebGL, Physics and Particle Effects

TomGullen
3pts0
www.scirra.com 14y ago

Cute, smooth and very playable HTML5 platform game

TomGullen
5pts0
www.scirra.com 14y ago

Construct 2 adding particle effects to their HTML5 game engine

TomGullen
3pts0
www.scirra.com 14y ago

People need to know 'Link Building' they're paying for is funding spam industry

TomGullen
1pts0
www.scirra.com 14y ago

SEO - On the receiving end of Link Building campaigns

TomGullen
2pts0
www.scirra.com 14y ago

An outstanding HTML5 game - Tiny Prince

TomGullen
2pts0
www.scirra.com 14y ago

Magnificent looking HTML5 game - "Project Blaze Zero"

TomGullen
65pts42
www.scirra.com 14y ago

Graphics card drivers, one of the most awful areas of software engineering

TomGullen
1pts1
www.scirra.com 14y ago

Super Adventure World - A pure HTML5 platform game

TomGullen
1pts0
www.scirra.com 14y ago

Samira the Girl in the Bubble - Pure HTML5 game

TomGullen
3pts1
www.scirra.com 14y ago

RobotCog Escape - Pure HTML5 game demo

TomGullen
2pts0
www.scirra.com 14y ago

Trashoid Attack - An HTML5 game

TomGullen
2pts1
www.scirra.com 14y ago

Our HTML5 arcade (redesign, shamelessly inspired by Youtube)

TomGullen
1pts0
www.scirra.com 14y ago

Why you really shouldn't use MP3 in your HTML5 and Flash games

TomGullen
11pts2
www.scirra.com 14y ago

8 Bits Runner - A very fun HTML5 game

TomGullen
2pts0
www.scirra.com 14y ago

Should you remove mentions of competitors on your website?

TomGullen
2pts0

Maintenance plans is something we considered, but though it wouldn't work well for us. This is because it's infinitely more difficult to maintain software when you have your customer base split into different versions, complete abandonment of lower version customers is a no go when bugs are discovered or a feature breaks due to technology change. This significantly impacts the complexity of our product deployment and maintenance. There's also other complexities around documentation, tutorials etc etc, the list goes on.

It could also reflect badly on us if customers on older versions are demoing the product to other potential users when they are many release cycles behind the latest version. There's a myriad of benefits of just having all customers on the same version. To go down the maintenance plan route for us would be a mistake.

Generally propositions from customers for different or more exotic pricing methods over what we've gone with tend to involve a lot more complexity to ultimately allow people to buy it for less. The model we've got is working well, and we don't see any advantage to changing it right now.

I never made noises on the forums about it because I was fairly new to Construct 2. I just left quietly.

Which is fine, but we're a much more successful company than we ever were with Construct 2, largely because of the direction we went with pricing. We accept it's not for everyone. I think looking back over our history we've gone from Open Source to Pay Once to SaaS. When you go through these changes you're going to lose customers who were attracted to your original payment model, this is just a reality we have to accept.

Tom here from Construct, spent a lot of time recently working on improving reliability/scalability of website so when I see comments like this always sends a pang of fear through me :)

Site resources looks to be coping just fine which is great (we often get upwards of 20 pageviews per second on our site at peak times) so will put this down as a blip.

Look forward to hearing more about how you get on with Animate, Ashley and Diego have done a stellar job in getting productivity software running in the browser!

Construct 3 and Construct Animate are not Chrome only, it works in all major browser and even mobile/tablet devices. Chromebook support has been a major plus for us in the educational market.

Construct 2 was pay once, but we found after a few years sales really plateaued. Going to SaaS was a difficult transition for us, but it's worked out well and we now see year on year growth which gives us a lot more breathing room.

I think it's important to also recognise that pay once software just doesn't work as a model for a lot of countries around the world. As an example, for Construct 3 we charge the equivalent of ~$12 USD per year in Malawi which makes it a very affordable option, whereas a one-off price would have to be roughly quadruple that for it to be economical for us, and would likely put it out of reach of a lot of people who otherwise may of paid annually for it.

SaaS puts more onus on us to cater for our current paying customers, before with pay once our focus was weighted on acquiring new customers. To what extent this actually plays out is kind of tricky to put your finger on especially from where I'm sitting but there is certainly an element of this in our work.

I'm not going to pretend that SaaS is suitable for everyone and every product and I understand why people are adverse, but for us it's worked well and a lot of noisy predictions from some of our customer base about this being our downfall never played out. The transition to pay once to SaaS was a vulnerable time for our business and a very interesting one at that.

Some people also log on to live blackjack at 3am and drop a few thousand dollars just for the fun of it as well. You are in a very small minority.

Notably unregulated gambling available without oversight and also readily available to addicts and children. Helpful in smashing down that redundant bureaucratic red tape the gambling industry so desperately is in need of at the small price of destroying, debilitating or general increase in suffering in peoples lives.

This is probably a preference thing (and scale is likely an important factor) and can never be definitively answered, but I find that denormalising data such as SSO ID's into a third table comes at the cost of slightly more complex code and more boilerplate if you've got a caching model, I used to denormalise to this level but have now gone back to putting it all into a fairly wide user table as a short string field is also very cheap.

I loved Koyaanisqatsi, trailer here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PirH8PADDgQ Not your typical documentary.

Anything by Werner Herzog is incredible as well, I find his approach extremely sympathetic and respectful to the subjects but without sacrificing detail (EG Grizzly Man)

Not strictly a documentary, but Threads by the BBC is a researched film depicting life in the UK if every city was hit by a nuke and it was incredibly disturbing and informative: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threads_(1984_film)

Carl Sagan's Cosmos has to be one of the most charming and moving documentaries I've ever watched - arguably a little out of date now but it reached a place the subsequent Cosmos series just couldn't reach.

MayDay! Air crash investigations are all amazing documentaries that manage to balance pretty intense technical information with real life suffering very skilfully and they are incredibly engaging.

Went to a bunch of the original meetups years ago, good times! Pizza was great :)

Dmitri did a great job organising it all and kindly let me speak about our startup at one of the events. I was completely overshadowed by an amazing talk on quantum computers by a very educated and funny guy afterwards though, 10/10 best talk I've ever seen.

Doesn't have to be cash, but I think it's important to remember when Dropbox was doing it disc space was a lot more valuable - I don't think it would work as well nowadays.

I think Chrome when it first came out was giving $5 per install as well.

You see similar rewards here in UK for referring people to new bank accounts, Chase made a big move over here and was giving £20 to the referrer, and £20 to the referred for minimum commitment. If you got the money it's a fast way to gobble up market share.