Making the Jump to Working SL Full Time

This was taken verbatim from a thread in the SL forums. It is in response to a resident named OSourcerer Flytrap, who is considering making the leap to doing SL full time. He has well thought out ideas of the pros and cons for doing this, and I think this serves as an excellent case for people to look at the topic as a whole.

I've italicized OSourerer's text for differentiation.

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I'm excited when I hear folks interested in making the leap. If I may, I'll comment so that perhaps something I say may aid your thought process on the matter.

Originally Posted by OSourcerer Flytrap
I am once again contemplating going fulltime into SL development. I have a thriving SL business that has consistently produced around $2,000 a month for over a year. I know that if I go at it fulltime I can easily double or triple that this coming year. But it is a risky venture and I’d like to hear from others. Here is my pros/cons list:

Okay, right away, if you're already making $2000 / month, you have a successful business. Most real world businesses fail, and it seems you're already beating those odds.

Pros:
SL has unlimited potential right now.
I would be doing what I love to do.
SL membership is at an all time high and increasing so the market for products in increasing.
I have mastered SL and don’t have to fight the learning curve.
It is work at home.
It is a pioneering position allowing for me to break new ground.
It is dual hemisphere work - creative/logical.
LL has had a lot of positive press lately and seems serious about marketing.
My business is unique with fewer competitors than most (not clothing/jewelry/club/land).

These sound familiar.

Cons:
LL/SL can go belly up at any time with zero warning.

Nothing that has over $20 million invested simply goes poof. Second Life makes press nearly ever day now. Even if a competitor comes along with another, better metaverse, the time it will take them to catch up and solve some of the problems that Linden Lab has had to heuristically tackle will allow you to learn and switch over to a new system.

That being said, you don't have to consider yourself a SL developer. Consider yourself a Metaverse developer. If you see opportunities to do stuff in There or Activeworlds, by all means do it! Right now, a lot of us use SL primarily simply because it is the best metaverse out there.


I have no way of knowing what LL’s financial position currently is.

Do you attend town halls? Do you read the Linden blogs?

I recommend doing some research into Linden Lab. There's a lot out there.


At anytime a new competitor can come out and leapfrog SL’s technology.

Code doesn't just appear "at any time". Consider the complexity of SL's system:
- streaming data
- massive multiplayer
- the most per-user-intense server farm, anywhere. (Philip, at last year's SLCC, quoted that if they had Google's server farm it'd only support 1.7 million SL users.)
- building tools
- physics
- scripting
- streaming music and video
- uploading textures, animations, and sounds
- avatars and animations
- chat communications
- the economy
- permissions systems
- compatibility with multiple platforms and video cards
- land ownership and sales
- inventory
- search features

Now add to that certain ideas that are not directly code-related that Linden Lab has tackled:
- An economy stable within 30% of target exchange rate for 2 1/2 years.
- A community of half a million people
- People with years of expertise in the technology who can churn out cool stuff
- Player-player dispute resolutions systems
- extensive feedback as to the needs of users.

A competitor may pop up any time, for sure. In fact, there are some. Google Earth may decide to let people create new landscapes and add avatars.

But.

It will still take at least a year or two for any community to approach the complexity of a system that Linden Lab has, and in that time Linden Lab will have the chance to take more action.


The security of my IP within SL is definitely questionable.

The security of your pictures online is questionable. Period. So is 3-D data. No Metaverse, ever, will ever be able to protect these 100%.

What Linden Lab does do is aid in the legal recourse for going about in stopping IP violations.


LL’s customer service history leaves a lot to be desired and any problems I have may never be addressed.

You obviously have never been on any other MMO. Linden Lab's customer service, while it has problems, is leaps and bounds beyond other systems. You think you can get Microsoft to give you personal attention to the most trivial of your problems? No. But Linden Lab employees routinely are doing this, and with the help of talented and dedicated volunteer staff.

When I first entered SL, I had come from Everquest for almost 3 years. It took hours to have a service request answered in-world in Everquest, and the outcome was almost always unsatisfactory. There was no formal way to make suggestions to improve the game. There was no talking to staff directly. Period.

Linden Lab is the closest I've seen to the receptiveness of an open source community without the code actually being open source.


LL has a habit of producing very disruptive updates that require retooling and repackaging of products.

Curse those updates! We should go back to 1.1!

Seriously, any complex metaverse is going to have an elephant load of updates. Any contemporary MMOG, who lacks many, many of the elements of an MMOVW, still have regular weekly patches. It's stellar that Linden Lab has recently committed to a bi-weekly schedule.


The shifting rules of SL (taxes, public land, dwell, telehubs, etc...) makes business unpredictable.

Are you kidding? The examples you've given are either ancient (taxes and public land) or were talked out to death with the community for months, even years!

No one knows "the rules" of the Metaverse. We're making them up. Any system that tries to be a metaverse is going to have these pains.


I have no convenient reliable means of backing up products.

Very important con, agreed 100%. Linden Lab has said they want to do this, it's a matter of time, etc. We can only try and press them to hire more staff and get things done sooner.


Griefers and scammers are on the upswing. I hate dealing with them.

Welcome to the Internet.


Knockoff artists have historically duped most of my best items and taken credit for the original idea.

Take pictures, file an abuse report, send the person a cease and desist letter, and download the DMCA report claim and file it. Document, document, document.


Anything I make in SL has zero transferability into other systems.

Not so true. You can use a GLinterncept program like OGLE to rip out the geometry and textures and then put them into Maya / 3DSMax, which is pretty much exportable to everything else. The problem isn't getting stuff out of SL, it's getting stuff in.


The blatant copyright infringements that go on daily in SL must catch up to LL one day. How will that impact LL and therefore my SL business?

Again, if you wish to act as a business, you will have to deal with what businesses do on a regular basis. Be prepared to fight for your IP and get aggressive. It's not a unique problem to Second Life.


The sex culture within SL really gives me the heebeegeebees.

Again, welcome to the Internet. Sexual urges are a common and natural thing experienced by all human beings. People express it freely in SL, and I've been told (by a Linden Labber, no less) that pornography is actually responsible for a great deal of the advancements of tricks on the world wide web.

Still, you're right that an unwanted presence in your storefronts can be disruptive to business and unprofessional.

I think, though, it would be nice to have a landowner be able to toggle avatars off, for this reason, and lag. Linden Lab I've heard is actually looking into doing it for the latter purpose - so we can cram more than 80 people into a sim for an event. Look for this as a good fix for your stores.


Owning a sole proprietorship in SL means I have to do product support, updates and promotional events.

Hire a part-time staff. There are a lot of SLrs willing to earn L$ to do stuff part time. I was just speaking to a colleague yesterday who said sales have doubled in her SL store since taking in a staff member to help run the store.


Being self employed means I need to earn about 30% more to cover equivalent benefits and insurance.

Minus gas for commuting, a reduction in car insurance, and the money you probably normally spend on feeding the soda machines and going out to lunch at work. Buy sandwich stuffs and prepare food for yourself more and you'll save a lot of money.


How can I cash out more than $2,000 a month? If this works out I will need to convert 5x that much.

I recommend adding value to your products with scripted elements, or branch into new fields. (Which also reduces the risk of your particular industry in SL.)


I would be taking a 50% pay cut for the first year and there is no way of knowing if I will ever make it back to my current salary or possibly surpass it.

It's very good to be aware of this risk.


SL is not good future resume fodder.

You think the website designers who started in 1993 feel that way?


How confident am I in LL? Are they truthful with their statistics? How much is hype and how much is real?

Those are excellent questions.

Some of the statistics are hype, but I like to look at the big four as accurate indicators of the health of SL:
1. Amount of land owned. This indicates sunk investment of users into the platform.
2. Average simultaneous online. This indicates average usage.
3. L$ sold for US$. Not L$ traded - that's essentially meaningless. But people paying for L$ is e-commerce, plain and simple.
4. Users logged in in the last 30 days. Let's face it, most Internet users don't surf all day, they use it in periodic bursts. Some people log on, check their email, read the news, and that's it. Some people only go online to shop. If we look at the behaviors of how people use the regular Internet, it will show us what to look for in usage statistics of SL.


I see my cons list is longer than my pros list. That is a bad sign.

Not really. You haven't weighted anything. If you really want to measure this, associate a number 1-5 for each, and then sum up the numbers.

But honestly, I think people need to follow their passions or they will be miserable in life. Even if people fail at their passions, they wind up being happier people. And happiness trumps money or success.



On the upside my significant other’s income easily covers both of us as well as insurance. We aren't supporting children ...

Oh, man. If you're in this position, to me, there's no question that you have the perfect opportunity! Many people have a family and can't do the jump because of that.

I definitely, hearing this, feel that you're in the prime position and I would say go for it!


but do need to consider retirement (early 40s).

And the rest of your life what? Sit in a rocking chair? 40s? Wow.

Seriously, if you do something you love, you will want to do it the rest of your life, even if it means on a limited basis or a different level.

As for money for a nest-egg, that's just going back to how well you think you'd do full-time in SL.


I don’t know. I have been riding this fence for a long time now. I’d like to hear from others that have already made the transition.


Some other suggestions for you:

1. Above all else, you need to close your eyes and visualize yourself doing it. Picture yourself working from home, or whatever your longer-term goal with working with SL is. Imagine the benefits, and seriously visualize them in your head. This is absolutely a secret to anyone's success, SL or not.

2. Research business owning with your state's rules. You'll feel much more comfortable knowing the procedure you'll be doing. This means registering a business name, possibly getting a tax ID, etc.

3. Look into the tax benefits of owning your business. Two words, my friend: "Tax shelter".

4. Aimee Weber did a great article for New World Notes:
http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2006/05/going_pro_in_sl.html

Best of luck with your decision, and I hope, personally, that you do decide to make the jump.