A business is born
What led to a LLC?
YLEMS INK LLC started my lifetime catalog of artistic endeavors, a small fee to set up a single-member LLC, a Claude Annual Pro subscription, one year domain name and web hosting and a small bank account cushion to avoid overdraft fees.
Three apps are currently up and running under my name. I have been a hobbyist game developer. All three are monetized, but only 2 with ads. When Ylem’s Ink was founded, the collective revenue of the 3 apps was about 9 cents advertising earned (with a minimum $100 required earnings before payout).
I write code and develop games. I love creating music. I detest the chore of marketing and putting in the long hours of “business” to do things right. Sales is work. Therefore; I have been happy to just create, and occasionally release, art on the web.
The coding was experiential learning. The experience of creating my own games in first Flash, then Unity and deploying them was invaluable towards my career. So much goes into developing a game. Project management was an unexpected skill I fine tuned as I worked on releasing those games, and project management is invaluable to anyone innovating.
When ChatGPT was released, at work we quickly picked up projects that involved AI. Although I found the tech fascinating, my news feed fed me a constant stream of negative AI stories. I was skeptical, unnerved. I rooted against it. Until.
I came to the conclusion that I could only remain relevant to the working world for about four years without embracing AI as a tool. I have more than 4 years until retirement. Just like how I learned HTML, CSS, JavaScript, ActionScript, etc… I needed a home project to really learn and understand the capabilities of AI.
Around the time of the initial dust up between the pentagon and Anthropic, I purchased a Claude Pro subscription to conduct an experiment in three phases: Update my Unity game that had fallen many versions behind, convert my old Flash Assets and ActionScript 3 code into Unity and create an entirely new game using AI.
Stack And Bomb, the Unity game, was saved from being removed from both app stores. Table Shuffleboard, the Flash game previously titled ShuffleGolf, was rereleased. I was two thirds of the way through the experiment when I decided to pause. Start a LLC. Set up a website. Market my creations.
I have utilized Claude, a lot. Future blog posts will provide many more details. For now I will say that after 6 months of utilizing Claude I have decided to continue with the experiment and create a new game utilizing AI.
AI disclaimer: My blog is meant to be my own voice, my own writing, but I reserve the right to utilize AI even here. Maybe I will. Maybe I won’t. Probably…
I will be utilizing summaries from AI as notes on my experience. Everything other than the blog will unapologetically have varying degrees of AI usage. Given the opportunity to do all of this with humans and 2019 technology I would strongly consider it, but I do not plan on raising any capital to fund such endeavors. For now, I am paying 20 some dollars per month for Claude, and I intend to get my money’s worth out of that investment.
The current goal is to get revenue high enough to fund Ylem’s Ink without further investment. The operating cost, assuming I am current going without salary, would be the cost of domain name, web hosting and Claude Pro. Ylem’s Ink has 12 months to earn roughly $300 to avoid further investment. The revenue steams are app sales, ads and website merch.
At the time of writing this (first month of twelve) the three apps have earned $2.60 in ad revenue, primarily Table Shuffleboard on Android. The financing of it all is interesting, but what is important to me is to complete the third phase of the experiment. The concept has been chosen, and the work is already underway.
But first, the next few posts will be about my experience in the first two phases of the experiment.
