I am founder and CEO of PressTheDot, the revolutionary mobile game that asks users to press a dot, then another dot, then another dot, then another dot, until they are fed up with themselves for spending hours mindlessly pressing dots for imaginary points.
I am writing this because I feel it is my duty, as founder of PressTheDot, the 10,084th most downloaded game on the iOS store and critically considered “addictive,” “dumb,” “horrifyingly dumb,” to share some advice to young entrepreneurs looking to make it “big.”
To many people’s dismay and surprise, I only really have one piece of advice:
“Risk everything to make your dreams come true”
Believe it or not, this simple piece of advice is what motivated greats like Bill Gates, Michael Dell, and Larry Ellison to drop everything and work on creating their multi-billion-dollar companies.
It is also the same advice that motivated me to drop everything and work on creating multi-hundred-dollar company, PressTheDot, previously named PressDotsWithYourFriends, Here Are Dots For You To Press, and Oh There’s A Dot, Press It, Then Press It Again — all of which failed to crack the top 20,000 most downloaded games; hence, the rebranding to PressTheDot.
Many of you, ambitious persons, have probably heard very influential people, similar to myself, say that the only way to achieve your dreams is to “give up everything for it.” But I want everyone, especially those who don’t believe their dreams will ever become a reality, to ask themselves – have I really risked everything to make my dreams come true?
If you haven’t, then there’s your issue. You think you have a revolutionary idea, maybe of a game where you press bubbles on a screen, or a game where you press an unidentifiable round thing on a screen, or just a game where you press a screen and hold your thumb down, I don’t know just spitballing, whatever it is though, I have to ask — what are you waiting for?!
I dropped out of college, broke up with my fiancée, shunned my parents, ruined all my friendships, and yelled at random people on the street, so that I could be the next Steve Jobs. Just, as the innovators before me, I had to make tough decisions and sacrifices to invent PressTheDot and, if you want your dreams to come true, you will have to as well.
It wasn’t easy to say “no” to my family when they asked me to come home for Thanksgiving, but I did, because I knew, if there was one thing I was put on this planet to do, it was to create a competitive dot-pressing mobile game that would be in the hands of users all across Bozeman, Montana (34 of our 42 users are in that area).
Now you might be wondering, did I ever regret throwing away my life to create this application that only until recently fixed a bug that was causing an embarrassing selfie of mine to randomly flash during gameplay?
Well, there was a moment, a few months ago, when I was sitting in an alley at 3 AM, between two coffee shops, trying to connect to either of their free Wi-Fis, that I considered that maybe I made the wrong decision to leave Harvard the day before graduation and steal my roommate’s money to buy a plane ticket to San Francisco. But then, after I took a bite out of a slice of bread that I had been nibbling on for the previous ten days, I realized something.
I risked it all.
And, although I have no one dear to me or have anybody that would call me a friend, I am now the founder of a company that a guy at Forbes, who I chased down after a TechCrunch conference, said “[would definitely be the next billion-dollar tech company, even though, a small-fraction of people would call it] pretty stupid”.