Startup Freak

About this game

In Startup Freak you take the role of a budding entrepreneur, and grow your very own software startup from humble beginnings to a multi-million dollar company. Along the way you will have to overcome countless challenges, from building, testing and securing your product, to devising the ideal marketing strategy and securing investment. Through it, you must ask yourself the ultimate question: are you a Startup Freak?

Build a stellar team

Your staff are everything especially in those all-important early years. Hire an awesome team, skilled in technical, design, operational, or sales aspects of your startup.

Build out your product

Create your very own product by researching the market and building bigger and better features that match your users' demands. But building features isn't everything! You must ensure they are tested and bug-free, well secured, and tuned for performance. Features can also be upgraded and enhanced, for example by incorporating responsive design, or adding accessibility.

Plan your infrastructure

Even the best software is worthless without the right hardware to run on. Manage your data centres across the world, by researching better and more powerful servers, and dealing with ever increasing and shifting user traffic to your services.

Find the right sales channels

Not every sales channel is created equal. More importantly, not every sales channel works well for all types of product. It's your job to use data, and a bit of intuition, to figure out the best go-to-market strategy and win against the odds.

Tune your pricing

Pricing software is more art than science. Plan a pricing strategy, test it, and adapt to the market.

On-board investors

Early stage startups are always in dire need of funding. But pitching your venture to a potential investor is no easy feat! Research and understand your would-be investors, put together a convincing slide-deck, and watch them offer you millions for a small share in your company. P.S. don't forget to haggle!

Deck out your office

What startup doesn't want to be the talk of town for its fancy office? Buy all sorts of gadgets and furniture for your office and give your employees yet another reason to stick around.

Make a big exit

Sooner or later, every founder wants to make an exit from their startup and see the fruits of their labours on a check. The number on that check is dependent on every single decision you have made along the way.

Latest news

• Announcements·19 Oct 2019Official

  Version 1.0.0 is Now Out!

  Startup Freak is finally in full release with a number of requested features, UX improvements, and bug fixes! It's been a fun and challenging journey and the game has come quite a ways from its early days on itch.io and Steam early access launch. My aim has always been to bring you an experience that's unique and different, and captures a more faithful and in-depth look at software making and software startups. But first, let's look at what's new: Features Added an "Experiment Mode" where you start with $1,000,000 so you can try out strategies at your heart's leisure. Achievements are disabled in this mode. Added 24 new investor traits. The overall products stats are now shown in the main view so you don't have to jump to the backlog. You can now disable tutorial hints in the options menu. You are now prompted to confirm when trying to overwrite a save file or load a save file. Employees' salary can now only be reduced to 50% of their market value, and they take a few sprints before quitting. This avoids getting around paying redundancy by forcing the employee to quit. Network topology graphics have been updated. Add a "Guide" button to the main menu which opens the related article in Steam community. Be sure to check it out if some of the concepts in the game are unclear. When moving to a new office, once the credited furniture have been placed you automatically exit "place mode". This avoids accidentally purchasing new items. When opening the backlog, the view is automatically restored to feature mode. Bug Fixes Fixed: clicking on an employee does not open the right tab and focus that person. Fixed: the store panel on the left does not use up the whole vertical space on tall resolutions. Fixed: changing the screen resolution after the investment area has been opened causes clipping or a black bar at the bottom of the screen. Fixed: when closing the investor UI there is a small pause. Fixed: when closing the investor UI the store panel on the left can get stuck. Ho...
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• Patch Notes·13 Jan 2019Official

  Beta 0.11.0 is Here!

  G'day Startup Freaks! https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/30885292/86fc9a8f38ba87637eac2d984c2ee8fc35854424.png Version 0.11.0 is indeed here. Now I know it has taken a while to get there, but that's not for a lack of working at it! This release focuses on some big UI changes which involved complex changes in the code. Excuses aside, let's have a look at what's in this build: New Store UI The biggest change in this release is the introduction of a new UI for the store. One of the biggest issue with the previous UI was that getting to and placing furniture was clunky and time-consuming. There is now a new slide-in UI on the left hand of the screen where you can get to the office store, as well as offices and logos. More importantly, when placing furniture you can easily span around and place multiple instances of the same item. The UI remains translucent while this happens. https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/30885292/041b97ccba1eb0f444955104c5ffa02bc8afda8d.png Post Level-10 Task Perks Another important change is that now all backlog tasks provide some form of bonus or benefit beyond level 10 (some tasks previously would have no additional benefit after this level). Here is a full listing of all tasks and what you can expect beyond level 10: Infrastructure - Reduce overall infrastructure cost by 1% Branding - Increase visitor count by 1% All Marketing Tasks - Increase visitor count by 1% Market Research - Continue opening up more areas on the product map Job Advertising - Continue to increase the pool of candidates Company PR - Continue to increase candidate quality See Investors - Continue to find new investors Office and Supplies - Reduce office rent by 1% https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/30885292/c5af6e71f8fc264aef22a1aaa6823a4db4b52048.png Other Improvements Beyond these, many more bug fixes and improvements have been made to the game, such as: Context menus are much ...
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• Announcements·31 Aug 2018Official

  Beta 0.10.0

  https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/30885292/ab32efbaa710c652a46e751d3ea2dc4d814c9f1d.png Hi Startup Freaks! Yes, Beta 0.10.0 is finally here and to celebrate, a 20% promotion will be kicking in shortly! Without beating around the bush, let's get into what's new: Copycats and Patents I had already talked a bit about this in a previous update, and it has evolved since then. Let's go over the basics: Around the mid game competitors will start copying your features. Copying a feature will take several sprints so you'll have a bit of time to react. A copied feature will have its rating reduced by 50%. You can now "patent" a feature. You can see both the progress of your patent, as well as progress of copying (assuming the feature is being copied). Patenting a feature has an upfront cash cost and uses Operation effort. So you'll need to plan accordingly. Remember, it may not be cost effective or necessary to patent every feature. https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/30885292/52ce90e82f3d3ba4d1a2ec04270a4391285c3a98.png Traffic Shifts During the game you may also receive messages telling you that the market is shifting. This means that there is a change in which regions (continent) most of your visitors are coming from. In turn and over time, your user base will also shift. Ultimately, you need to be more aware of where your servers are and move them to more optimal data centers. Data Center Statistics Related to the above, I have added a bunch of statistics for the data centers which describe a number of things like the percentage of total traffic that's being generated by visitors and users in each region, any external traffic being directed, and also the current server capacity. This will hopefully give a bit more clarity about what's actually happening and where you should optimally place your servers. https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/30885292/6addf53052b8321dcd8e25ff4e4331f...
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• Announcements·15 Aug 2018Official

  State of Affairs #4

  Patents I thought I would quickly share a couple of screenshots to explain how to the "patent" mechanic will work. The idea is that at some point later in the game, you will start facing competitors trying to copy your better features. You'll see a message like this: https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/30885292/9e92e742db94df307f77e98d73b48d9a4b6937ae.png As the text explains, a copied feature incurs a rating penalty. Your options are to ignore and let it happen (can be a valid choice), or patent the feature. Features that are being copied will be flashing so you will be able to identify them. You can file a patent from the feature details screen: https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/30885292/770a604143c00772bef0f1263957cba9498104dd.png Patenting has an upfront cash cost, and will use up operations effort. Both go up exponentially based on the size of the feature so you'll want to think twice about patenting every feature. Once the feature is patented, you'll see a special striped border around it: https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/30885292/6fef3d2603164568624d3c74ec77190b0cd5b4cb.png I'm still trying to balance this feature so the numbers are all still being changed, but so far I'm happy with the overall design and I think it adds another dimension to the game. Infrastructure Besides the patent mechanic, I also wanted to pay a bit of attention to the infrastructure section. There are two changes I'm making here for the next release: Adding a "detail" view. One the of the things that was sorely lacking here is numbers. You will now be able to see a few key information such as visitor vs user traffic being generated in each data center, how much traffic is coming into a data center from outside (i.e. from other data centers that are not active), and most importantly the exact server load that is being used in each data center. Currently the spread of visitor traffic among re...
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• Announcements·8 Jul 2018Official

  State of Affairs #3

  Hi Everyone, As you have noticed, the last update, 0.9.0 was a little while ago. This is just a short update to let you know that development is still progressing with Startup Freak, alas a little slow at the moment. My purpose here is not to make excuses but I just want to give you a bit of background and context as to why this is: Startup Freak, as you might know, has been a passion project and something I have worked on tirelessly in addition to my day job for the past 2.5 years. A huge amount of my personal time, including nights and weekends have gone into it. The past couple of months I have let myself reclaim some of that time and focus on other things. Keep in mind I'm still working on the game; just not as much. I have done a good bit of brain-storming around larger system / feature changes. One of the areas, for example, is the concept of a "super feature" which requires you to do all sorts of research and information gathering to work out the optimal shape, size and make-up of the feature (filled a few butcher-papers worth of ideas). However I have not been able to settle on a good / meaningful / interesting concept here. This kind of goes back to one of the primary difficulties I have had with the design of this game: because a "Startup", even a software one, is such a broad and all-encompassing subject, it's really hard to design something that puts you in the shoes of an entrepreneur, allowing you to make meaningful decisions. Either I have to add an incredible amount of content to the game (something that is beyond a 1-person studio), or I have to settle for more generic / abstract features, which is something that I have already had negative feedback about. In short, I'm parking some of these ideas until and unless I can come up with something really enjoyable and meaningful, and can be at least somewhat concrete. For now my focus instead is going to be enhancing, improving, and increasing the depth of existing features. I'm currently actively workin...
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