Inside the Mind of a Code Monkey
As a budding entrepreneur, I have co-founded a few startups these past few years. The notable ones being Prophecy Store and Pear-U LLC. The other major co-founder was a friend of mine, Sachet Gagwani. I’d like to update you all on what he’s been up to because he’s really been grinding.
Since we started Prophecy Store together, he’s been churning out code and has freelanced, helping clients satisfy their needs. A major project he worked on was for a fantasy sports app called FlashLeagues and after that and some other smaller projects, he’s gotten into indie app development.
Indie app development has become relatively popular as you’ll probably notice if you take a look at the App Store charts. Sachet has built a news aggregator, a slick Donald Trump game, and a great tweaked version of popular game Color Switch, called Color Swapped Omega.
With our occupied schedules, I was able to get in contact with him and conduct a brief Q and A session where I got to pick his brain a bit. Find it below!
You have two games that have become big hits, your previous apps were a social network and news aggregator, how did you decide to delve into indie games?
Well, with the controversy of Donald Trump running as president, I figured Cranky Trump may be a hit on iOS. With several thousand downloads on the game, I figured it was a good experiment, but wasn’t satisfied. I wanted to build a better game that was even simpler but higher quality, and after switching to Android from iOS, I figured I would make it cross-platform. So my new game, “Color Swapped Omega,” will be closing in on 10,000 downloads within a month of launch. It’s all about trial and error. Every time I release something, it does better. That’s why I’ve launched so many apps. Pear-U, BlueOwl, BlueOwl+, and Cranky Trump were very fun to work on, and great portfolio pieces, but I think Color Swapped Omega has been the official turning point for GagwaniSystems.Com to get into indie game development, since there’s a lot more creativity in engineering games, and the other markets are very dense! I also want to try to release every app on both iTunes and Google Play from now on. I used to completely avoid the Android community out of laziness, but now I’ve learned that Android is just as important as iOS in terms of publishing apps.
Where do you get inspiration for your games?
Sometimes I think of original ideas randomly. But now I’ve been focusing my efforts on making better versions of existing games I’ve played. That’s how I ended up launching “Color Swapped Omega.” I took the hit game “Color Switch,” and made it better by replacing the main object (ball), with a donut, making the physics more sensitive, making the colors more solid, and adding my own touch to the obstacles throughout the game. Sometimes people tell me that some of my work isn’t original, but those people haven’t looked into anything at all. For example, the Color Switch “developer” didn’t write a single line of code. He actually used this drag and drop software called “Buildbox” to “develop” his game and published it to iOS/Android. The Fortafy guy used to work for LeadBolt. LeadBolt has been reported as a scam by basically every mobile developer who integrated their mobile advertising platform. None of them ever got paid. I’m assuming Fortafy used LeadBolt to get millions of free hits on “Color Switch,” a game that they didn’t even write code for.
With a rounded skill set, what would you say makes you an entrepreneur?
I think that my balance in knowledge of both software development and marketing has made my indie apps so successful.
What have been some of your failures, and what have you learned from them?
Pear-U was my first official venture. After getting 30,000 users in less than 2 months, spending all my savings to scale the app for a mere 60 days was a bad decision. Yeah it was on its way to becoming a household name, but at the time I didn’t know that scaling so fast could be a bad problem to have. We couldn’t migrate to the cloud and the app crashed because of all the traffic. If the company crashes once, that’s the reputation that the users are left with. That’s why I decided to stop building full stack, dynamic, applications, and focus on indie games, the most popular native applications.
How long do you stick with an idea before giving up?
There are a lot of variables. I usually go until I run out of resources. If it’s not successful by then, I acquire more resources and work on my next idea. I think this strategy works. Every time I start a new venture, it lasts longer. Gagwani Systems has been going for over a year now, thanks to having both B2B and B2C products.
What is your greatest fear and how do you manage fear?
My greatest fear is having fear. That’s why I continue to improvise and remain optimistic. Something always ends up playing out, even if it’s short term. Life is too short to be afraid, especially as an entrepreneur. You can’t be afraid as a leader, or you will end up failing!
What important truth do very few people agree with you on?
Aliens exist. Public schooling is a waste of time and useless. This includes college (why I left). If you really want to learn, you don’t have to pay someone to teach you. That’s what the internet is for. That’s what networking is for. I also believe on a 100% free market system. I could go on forever, but you get it. I’m basically your stereotypical neighborhood libertarian.
If you could talk to one person from history, who would it be and why?
That’s a hard one. It would probably be Steve Jobs. I’d probably ask him how he convinced the entire world that he was a good person, and how he became the face of any innovation what so ever at Apple (which didn’t really ever invent anything original, or actually anything at all).
Who (alive today) is your biggest inspiration?
I get asked this a lot. It would probably be a tie between Elon Musk and Sean Parker. I think they’re both people who’ve had extreme ups and downs just like myself, and I developed part of my mentality and lifestyle by studying them. They know how to survive and thrive in the long term by giving up everything they have, or even sometimes by not having anything to work with in the first place. They both went out of their way as inventors, innovators, and entrepreneurs to continue working on what they believed in regardless of peoples’ opinions. And now they’re both two of the greatest technology and business leaders in the world.
What can we expect from Gagwani Systems the rest of 2016?
I don’t want to reveal too much, but I’ll tell you this. It’s going to be huge!
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To find out more:
Links for “Color Swapped Omega” free on iOS and Android. It’s free on the App Store and Play Store!
Download on iOS: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/color-swapped-omega/id1095548781?mt=8
Download on Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.sachet.colorswapped
Comma Post: https://commaful.com/play/nakurane/interview-with-founder-sachet-gagwani
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sachet-gagwani-400b65b0
