Thought Ops celebrates 3 years!

Hi everyone! Wanted to reach out briefly and share some observations and insights I've learned over the past 3 years.

First, what is Thought Ops? Why even have a Thought Ops? What's behind the name? These sound like basic enough questions on the surface, but deserve what I hope is a better answer. In short, Thought Ops is a media creation and consulting company. The ironic thing though is that it took me a very loooong time to succinctly boil it down to that one-line description. I'll be honest, being succinct isn't always an easy thing for me. The lesson? It's very important to be able to describe what your company is about in one sentence.

Second, why Thought Ops? I could say, well, why not? Mostly for me, it's about following my passions and having a creative outlet that's not tied to someones else's dreams or goals. I want to share my creative ideas, story-telling, visuals, & key-learnings with anyone able & willing to listen. If for any reason, in the hopes that others can learn from my mistakes. (Believe me - I'd love to save others time & money). What I didn't bank on though was how hard it would be to actually try creating a company of one's own in order to simply follow one's own passions. If you want to ever productize, brand, copyright, consult, and so forth; one can quickly start racking up costs you didn't expect. The Lesson? In my experience everything seems to take 3x as long to complete, 3x the cost, & about 3x the pain & sweat one would think. I've heard this before from many other start-ups, but OMG... it's an understatement if there ever was. My recommendation is to not give up hope. Do your best to stick with it, and be very open to others' ideas or suggestions.

Lastly, what's behind the name? This is a funny question for me at some levels. Honestly; it wasn't my first choice. However; thanks to portal sniffers and domain grabbers I lost out on being able to get even my top 5 company domain names registered. How crazy is that? How is that even possible? So... what I did is went with a name that was along the lines of Black Ops or Special Ops, and settled on something that connoted taking ones thoughts and putting them into an operational sense. I didn't do any searches. Just immediately registered it and the rest is history. The lesson? Do not, and I repeat DO NOT, do an internet search for a company name for any length of time; either in searches or domain registries. Just come up with your top ~7+ company names, see what's available up on something like GoDaddy, & grab it immediately. Also; grab the the other .net, .org, etc key domains & save yourself the trouble of being contacted by opportunistic scammers.

So...just some quick insights!

So in closing, what's in store for the future? 

My goals for 2017 are two-fold. One: Double the volume of users that have played Rescue Bear Operation from 17k to 35k! and Two: To start publishing more about Project Azhure. I'm still not sure if I'm going to use that as my final name for that world. We'll just have to wait & see.

Here's a toast to all of those that have supported me & given me words of encouragement to make Thought Ops a reality!

Thank you!!!

Matt