Continuing the story of how we started the cactus and our growth since then.
Jack: The start of Well Placed Cactus. We were 5 at the time Nic, Paul, Tyson and Kai were all about to graduate from Honors in Game Design at Griffith and I was about to graduate with a Bachelors in Music Technology. The others all went through their degrees together and I had been working with them for their final assessments. I had been talking design with Nic and I knew who Paul and Kai were but at the time my closest link to the group was Tyson.
As the end approached we needed to decide what we were going to do with our lives. The industry had massively downsized that year and so getting jobs seemed unlikely. There was a bit of conflict from the very beginning about whether we should even start a company, something that should have been a warning to us. Tyson even then was interested in academia and Kai mentioned at various times that she was hoping to have a break from full-time art. I can be very strong-willed at times and I think now that I probably played a role in bullying the company into existence because I had run a small business before, worked in management for other small businesses and I played the I’m the oldest card. It’s a speech I give to a lot of students I meet “it’s tough and risky to start a business and if you don’t do it when you’re young and have nothing to lose you might not be able to do it once you have a family and commitments”.
Paul: Tyson, Nic, Kai and I were all pretty close, having suffered through honors together. Then Tyson introduced us to Jack, an audio guy who was keen on games. I thought he was a nice guy to begin with (now I know better) and somewhere along the line it was decided he would join us. Now, at the time I barely knew him, so it was a very stupid move on my part. Going into business with people you know is hard enough, let alone someone I hardly knew – just silly.
Nic: Towards the end of honours my goal was to keep making stuff. I came to the conclusion that I was still young and had plenty of time to fail and make mistakes,so why the hell shouldn’t I dive head first into any opportunity to keep doing what I love. A group of friends making games together, maybe we could do some cool stuff and I might end up learning something.
Jack: In short I wanted into games and out of music, Paul wanted a clear path and Nic was going with the flow. Those are very different interests but nevertheless we decided to form as equal partners which seemed fair but was a bad choice.
We knew about the NEIS program which is a government program to support new businesses. The others had won the arts category of the Griffith Innovation Challenge and had $4000 in prize money. I pulled together some savings and between us we had $5k seed money. NEIS is the dole in a fancy wrapper so we were each guaranteed $13k for the year and so it was time to start making games.
As part of NEIS we made a business plan, which we now know was completely bogus. Nothing about it was right, and looking back it showed how little we knew about the industry and business in general. We also hadn’t locked down what sort of games we were going to make, how we were going to make decisions or the company structure for running projects. Life was about to get real.
To be continued…
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