How to build a VR company in 2 minutes

First, you need 3 years of sweat equity before your VR studio will make any substantial income.

The only way to predict the future is to build it.

If you’re in VR dev for the money, now is not the time to be in VR dev.

But, if you’re willing to put in the effort for the next 3–5 years, then you’ll likely find success down the road. For now it takes passionate developers who are wiling to build without much pay for quite a while. You will need to build up the user base with your own two hands until the user base itself is filled with evangelists who can continue to build the community for you.

You must build a community from scratch one user at a time.

Assume the only way to make your game/app popular in these early days of VR without a large marketing budget is boots on the ground, directly connecting with players, actively providing updates to the community, actively recruiting players as testers, etc.

There are no short cuts, no silver bullets. Marketing a VR game, and accomplishing any sort of market penetration, will require a hands on user by user growth strategy.

Start a discord, invite players. Give away your game on subreddits and other communities in order to get testers. Receive feedback and build the game accordingly. Update the game on a weekly basis if possible, sending your updates to each and every member of the community, personally if you have to.

Join the conversation with your community. Give up time wasting activities in your life and replace them with dev time or community engagement time. Work a day job to keep the lights on. Rinse and repeat until the market is able to pay you for your work.

If you’re not willing to do all that, then I wish you luck and suggest a lottery ticket may be a better option than starting a company.

Originally posted as an answer on Quora to the question: “What’s the best way to predict a VR game’s potential market penetration upon launch, short term, and longer term?”