Company, App, or Individual – How Do You Represent Yourself?

Posted by on December 2nd 2011 @ 1:15 pm

Company, App, or Individual – How do you represent yourself when entering the iOS Market and communicating? This is a short entry outlining what I think some of the pros and cons of each scenario are and I welcome your contribution in the comments. But first, a short anecdote on my personal experience so far.

My own indecision

When I first released my game Pixel Fighters last January I was very conflicted about how to represent myself and, as a result, I did a little bit of all of them. In retrospect, I wish I’d been a bit more organized and consistent in my communications. Let’s take a look at what I did:

  • App Store Display Name : Pixel Fighters
  • App Store Display Company : BitWit Games
  • App Store Details Company Name : Kyle Newsome
  • Game email : [email protected]
  • Website : www.pixelfightersgame.com
  • Facebook Page : www.facebook.com/pixelfighters
  • Twitter : @pixelfighersgm
  • Touch Arcade: pixelfightersgame
  • Personal Twitter: @bitwitdotca
  • Cocos2d Forums Acct Name : spadict

All in all, I think I could have benefitted from a better consistency and it is something I will be improving upon in the future. Notice also, I mentioned a couple of development related usernames – It’s relevant how you represent yourself between customer and fellow developers alike.

Pros and Cons

With that said, let’s take a look at what I believe to be some of the pros and cons of each approach.

Represent yourself as an App/Game

Pro: It is to the point and there is no confusion for people about what they are interacting with. There’s no navigation necessary on websites from the homepage, or issue of multiple topics on various types of threads e.g. Twitter, Facebook, Support Email…

Pro: Popular apps can benefit from single focus if their threads are very active

Con: Smaller scale apps will probably have pretty stale and low activity

Con: Communicating to your entire fan base across all apps present and future is going to be more work if you’ve filtered them across different channels

Represent yourself as you

Pro: It has the benefit of a personal touch that all other representation lacks

Pro(/Con?): It can make it clear that you are small/indie

Con: Not all usernames can be your name (too long, taken already etc..), which may force you to be inconsistent for some accounts

Con: Not all personal names are catchy or different enough to be iconic

Represent yourself as a company

Pro: You get a unique name

Pro: You can make an icon/logo for your company

Pro: Filter all of your followers to one place across Facebook, Twitter, Website etc..

Con: For those of us who like to blog and participate in the community, you are combining your developer communications with your fan base communications

In summary

In my opinion, it makes the most sense for an individual to medium size company to go with company representation and large companies might choose to start dividing communications by app. Representing yourself as an individual isn’t wrong, but I question its long-term benefits if you are growing.

I also think it is a mistake as an individual or small company to start by communicating as a game, which is admittedly a fault of my own. I think it is shortsighted and irrelevant in its benefits when you are small.

I welcome you to share your thoughts on advantages/disadvantages of different types of representation.

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  • http://freefallapps.com/blog Scott Bradley

    Great topic. I just finished signing up to all the mobile app forums with my own name. Now I realise I should have used my company name.

  • Anonymous

    I’m struggling with this exact same thing. At first I only had one app and no company name, so I just created email, twitter, website under that specific app name. Now that I’m getting ready to release more apps, I’m dealing with how to consolidate that under a company name. I’m leaning towards keeping the accounts for the one existing app, releasing any new ones under a company name, and then maybe slowly bringing the original app under the company branding. Either way, I’m still going to have my name show up in iTunes because that’s how I’ve registered, but twitter, website, support email, etc. will use a company name. Thanks for the article, gave me some good pros and cons to think through.

  • http://blog.plicatibu.com/ Marcio Andrey Oliveira

    Hi.

    Decision for me was easy: In Brazil you pay a LOT OF MONEY to government. And people pay MUCH MORE than enterprises. For this obvious reason I choose to create my own enterprise Plicatibu.

    Anyway I think there are other advantages to present your products through a company: your company’s logo and name can be used to promote your products and give them more credibility.

    I know many people don’t care whether the product belongs to an enterprise or to a person. Many people even prefer to deal with people than with enterprises but my experience shows that a great majority feels more comfortable dealing with enterprises.

    Many indies can’t make a living with its own games (for instance, me) and take projects as freelancers (me again). So I’m able to issue invoices as required by law without any problem.

    Do the math: In your country who pays less taxes? Enterprises or human beings?

    Oh. And I just like to say in every occasion my enterprise is a business runned by one man. I’m indie. It just happens I have an enterprise :)

    Regards.

  • Anonymous

    Those are some awesome points – I didn’t think about the pros/cons of registering a company name by country or about how to face potential clients.

    Thanks so much for chipping in!