Written by Otaku Apologist
During my time in the hentai industry, I’ve watched companies here rise and fall, friends come and go. These are the rules I live by after making many painful mistakes, and watching the mistakes everyone is making.
1. Make good products. Don’t skimp on quality just because you think your customers won’t care. Within the extents of your resources, aspire to make the best product possible. You will attract the customers you wanted, and customers you never planned would take interest in your services.
2. Don’t treat your customers as stupid. Most people are simply overwhelmed by the demands of everyday life, which makes them act on irrational heuristics when their time and resources are limited. Don’t be tempted to use manipulation and abusive tactics to gauge resources from the less intelligent. Create excellent services that can be enjoyed by both the intelligent, and the average.
3. Don’t over-hype your product to gain greater resources. The worst is when projects don’t finish. More important than making a good product is to make many products. Rather than oversell your ideas to your crowdfunding backers to reach more stretch goals, focus instead on building the conventions and infrastructure that enable you to produce a stream of releases.
4. Identify universal beauty standards. While the standards of customers differ vastly between groups, some aesthetic preferences are more universal than others. While a game like Tactics Elemental can succeed despite terrible artwork, you have a higher chance of success when you produce high quality art, ie. Crystal Maidens, that a larger segment of customers will consider beautiful.
5. Honor your contracts. It’s easy to make a quick hundred bucks with a scam, but good partners and reputation will bring you far more benefits. Don’t get into any contracts hastily, so you can honor them to the end. When trust has been established, subsequent deals are often much larger.
6. Don’t aspire for evil. While the world has many shady individuals in high positions of power in both business and politics, the dark path fails many. When you start using people as stepping stones, you’ll quickly find yourself being used by others. You are far more likely to achieve lasting greatness by aspiring to become a flickering glimpse of good in the world.
7. Make it your personal responsibility to uphold the rules. You can only break the rules if everyone else is upholding the rules. Cheating is part of every game as a high-risk strategy. But when too many people start cheating, the rules break down. People stop playing. Without anyone playing, nobody can win.
8. Keep your hustling at 10%. Everyone tells little lies when attending a job interview, when talking deals, seducing girls, etc. You pull off invisible sleights of hand to seal deals. Play your trump cards as rarely as possible, because repeating power moves will quickly start backfiring on you.
9. Speak the truth. When everyone is lying, staying silent, manipulating the facts to protect their self-interest, great tragedies begin to manifest. Every great evil in the world began as a tiny snowball that grew into a wrecking ball. Push the limits of truthfulness before defaulting to the degree of secrecy necessary to your situation.
10. Treat your employees and partners with respect. Pick only employees and partners you can respect. Act like someone worthy of respect. While you may have to lower your standards occasionally to achieve short-term goals, work towards creating long-term partnerships with the right kind of people.
11. Study people with empathy. Humans are animals with great potential and great limitations. While your product should appeal to people’s emotional side, the animal is only one layer of him. You have to see beyond his flaws to truly understand who you are servicing. This understanding will let you connect with him, and that connection will enrich you.
12. Care about first impressions. New people you meet have limited information to assess your character. They judge your intentions based on their personal experiences of abuse, betrayals, failures, and tragedy. Every social interaction is full of chances for misunderstandings. When you put care into the first impression you give, many misunderstandings can be avoided, more business can be conducted.
