#192 – Quitting It All to Follow Your Passion with Dave Geddes of Mastery Games

Indie Hackers

Courtland Allen and Channing Allen

Startups, Entrepreneurship, Makers, Indie, Bootstrapping, Online, Technology, Business, Founders, Bootstrappers, Ideas, Tech, Indiehackers, Hackers

4.9 • 606 Ratings

🗓️ 23 February 2021

⏱️ 54 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

So many kids decide to become software engineers because they were captivated by video games at a young age, and they dreamed of crafting that magic themselves someday. More often than not, they end up working at Facebook or Google building web apps and selling ads. But not Dave Geddes. Dave (@geddski) followed his passion, quit his lucrative job, and is making a living creating games that teach people to code. In this episode, Dave and I talk about the moment that led to him leaving his high-paying job, the launch of his first game, and how he's reaching tens of thousands of people.

Transcript

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0:00.0	What's up, everybody? This is Cortland from AndyHackers.com, and you're listening to the
0:12.3	IndieHackers podcast. More people than ever are building cool stuff online and making a lot of
0:16.9	money in the process. And on this show, I sit down with these endahackers to discuss the ideas, the opportunities, and the strategies they're taking advantage of, so the rest of us can do the
0:25.2	same. It's not uncommon for software engineers to get into programming because of video games.
0:31.9	The story usually goes that they played a lot of games when they were a kid, and they were just so
0:35.6	excited to be on the other side of that equation and eventually build and design and create and produce these games as a game developer rather than just a player.
0:44.3	And usually when I talk to these engineers, I ask what they're doing now and they've completely sold out.
0:50.3	They're working for the man. They're at Facebook or Google making hundreds of thousands thousands dollars a year to make web apps. They've completely lost that childhood spark that dream to go
0:58.8	make the games that inspired them. Not Dave Gettys. Dave is doing something near and dear to my heart.
1:04.7	He's actually making games that teach people how to code. He's not giving them away for free.
1:09.0	He's selling them for a lot of money, hundreds of
1:11.1	dollars in fact, and actually sustaining a living by doing it. I had a really good time talking to
1:15.8	Dave. He's somebody who follows his dreams, doesn't give up on them. There's a lot to learn from how he was
1:20.4	able to do that. Enjoy the episode. So cool. I'm glad you're here.
1:28.5	I'm just going to jump into things.
1:30.0	Kind of the origin of how he came across you is five years ago I was teaching my brother
1:35.2	how to code.
1:36.7	I was like, you should be a front end engineer.
1:38.8	It'll be super easy.
1:39.8	You can basically work from home.
1:41.9	You can make a ton of money.
1:43.3	And he wanted to be a writer at the time. So I was like, you could basically work two or three days a week and then spend the rest of your time writing. And so after I taught him out of code, I was like, before you apply to jobs, like you need some kind of project that you can work on. That'll be the culmination of everything that you've learned. All the skills put together,
	...

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