The Ghost Howls celebrates its 5th birthday!

August, 15th is a special day in Italy: it is called “Ferragosto”, and people go out with their friends and families and grill some BBQ in the parks, have picnics, or just chill together. Almost no one works, and people are focused on enjoying good food and good company. But 5 years ago, at Ferragosto, I had another plan: I wanted to start a blog of mine. Following the piece of advice of marketing expert Tommaso di Bartolo, and encouraged by my friends and colleagues Gianni Rosa Gallina and Massimiliano Ariani, I started this blog to talk about the work I was doing at my startup Immotionar. I had no idea of how long I would have kept doing it, and I was pretty sure no one was going to read me. 5 years later, I guess I was wrong.

These 5 years lots of things have happened. Usually, in all these birthday posts I thank everyone for the support and recall all the huge milestones I have reached in all this time. And yes, I can begin this way… I have for sure reached interesting results these years:

• I have been put in many “Top XR voices” lists
• I have ammassed 18K followers on Twitter
• I have made some memes that became a bit viral

• With New Technology Walkers, I have launched our fitness game Hitmotion:Reloaded in China, then recently published it on App Lab, and seeing the news of the launch also reported on Upload VR
• With the support of NTW, I have launched The Unity Cube, a silly app with just a cube that has been featured by Forbes and Road To VR and is now the 20th top rated app on App Lab
• With VRrOOm I have worked on amazing VR festivals like Welcome To The Other Side, a virtual concert with 75M overall views worldwide, and that gave me the opportunity of being featured on the Unity blog
• I have interviewed people from Facebook, Sony (Pictures), HTC… and influencers like Alan Smithson, Charlie Fink, Eddie Siman
• I have tried headsets many people have not, like for instance Huawei VR, Aryzon, Skyworth 4K, HoloLens 2, Cosmos XR, etc…
• I have collaborated with other amazing people in the VR space, like Sebastian Ang from Mixed Reality TV or Nikk Mitchell from FXG

All of this has been possible thanks to my perseverance, but also thanks to the help of everyone that is around me. I’m talking about my colleagues at New Technology Walkers and MID Studio, my Patreons, the people in the XR communities that are always willing to help… and most probably you that are reading this post. Alone I wouldn’t have been able to do anything… even if some of you may think that it is all a merit of mine, I want to underline that this is not true. For instance, I wouldn’t be able to notice some elements of game design in my reviews if it weren’t for my working every day with Max (Ariani); I wouldn’t be able to work on VR festivals if Louis Cacciuttolo wasn’t so good in finding collaborations and so passionate in motivating us all in the team; I wouldn’t have been able to experiment on mixed reality on Focus+ without the help of Enea Le Fons and Alvin Wang Graylin; I wouldn’t be so good in reporting news in my weekly roundup of posts if there weren’t journalists that report so many interesting VR news, and people like Mathew, David, and Rob that make me read many of them. Of course, I can be an “influencer” (I HATE this word, actually) only because there are so many of you that support me each day by reading what I write, commenting, and resharing it. And I could go on for hours in telling why I have to be thankful to so many people out there.

But today I don’t want to talk only about that. If I look back in these 5 years (and the 7 in general I’m in the XR ecosystem), I see also a lot of failures. When talking on Linkedin, of course, we usually only report our successes, because they are what make us shine when we are looking for collaborations online. We want to appear strong and successful… and in fact, many people compliment me for the accomplishments I obtained in all these years. But actually, there have been many failures, mistakes, critics, things that made me sad, and some of them are known, others a bit less. Some examples are:

• I have started a devlog about a game called Annoying Apple that embarassingly never came to light
• I have started many new column of posts that lasted very little: the posts about SteamVR low-level development made with Matias Nassi; the one about eye tracking experiments with 7Invensun AGlass DK2; the VR Fast series of videos on Youtube

• I have made some Youtube videos with really terrible quality
• My bonds with China have brought me some critics. The same holds for my relationship with some people in the community that have a complicated past
• I have been criticized for my non perfect English grammar in my posts and my mediocre English pronunciation in my Youtube vidoes
• I have a long series of reviews I promised to make but I’ve never found the time to write
• I have been contacted by some people or companies angry about what I had written in some posts;
• I tried putting popups on this website to invite people to subscribe to my newsletter and I have been insulted by some members of the community because they were annoying
• I haven’t made my newsletter (subscribe to it!) and my Youtube channel to grow as I wanted (I sucked at it, let’s be honest)
• I made lots of business errors with my first startup Immotionar, that so died in a very bad way
• I wasn’t good enough in handling the business of New Technology Walkers during the bad years of VR (2017-2018), when it was very hard to make a living out of VR
• I haven’t been able to close the deal in many XR projects that were proposed to me
• I’ve had a bad work-life balance
• I’ve worked like crazy in 2020 with a team for a contest, and even if we arrived in the finals, we haven’t reached the first place, the only one useful to get money, with much of my disappointment

Again, I could go on in this list for a lot of time. There are many things also on the personal side that I could add. I would say it’s pretty normal: we all make mistakes… and especially if you always try something new, you end up making many errors. I can’t say I’m happy with the errors I have made, but I’m glad of the ones that have happened because I tried to do something new (like the series of posts that never went on): it’s only by trying new things that you can innovate. Those who fear making wrong things will never make the successful things.

Also, errors, problems, and all these other things are just part of life. I know my readers love that I talk a lot about them, and I do that because I think it’s normal: the process of growth goes through making mistakes. And, unless you are a heart surgeon or a parachutist, it doesn’t matter if you make 1000 things wrong, it matters if you make a few right. These will be the ones that will make you succeed in your field, the ones for which people will remember you.

But if I look back all these 5 years, more than the successes, more than the failures, what I remember is the fatigue of working every day. Being a blogger (and a developer) for so much time requires a lot of perseverance and consistency. It requires sacrifices, it means having less time for yourself and for staying with the people you love. It means that every week, even if I have absolutely no willingness to do it, even if I am busy with other projects, I have to write some articles. I can assure you that it is not always easy: every content creator will tell you that when the page is all white, starting writing is always difficult. Even today, I was just there one hour ago wondering “It’s the birthday of my blog, what I’m going to write? Am I able to say something relevant also today?”. And honestly, I don’t know if I’m writing something that people will find worth reading, but I’m trying the same. This is what has connected my successes and my failures in all these 5 years: trying to be disciplined, working a lot, trying to do many things, and seeing what sticks. I can’t say that I’m a “successful” person, I leave that title to who has really made lots of money or disrupted the technological field, but the achievements that I obtained have been just because of my discipline, consistency, and effort.

And I guess the last thing that I want to add, is that in all of this, I have also tried also to be coherent to who I am: I love technology, I’m a bit nerdy, I like to do my job well, but I also like doing business, and I love jokes and memes. There’s all of this in my blog, and that’s why it feels authentic because it is just… me. I haven’t done some market analysis to see what posts the community was looking for: if I made some SEO expert look at my website, probably he would scream at me for my reviews that are walls of texts 5000+ words long. Probably he would criticize that I add too many memes in articles that should be serious. But honestly, I don’t care, this blog is my space, it is where I like to express how I want, it is truly a part of myself. And I’m sure that it is exactly what people love about it.

Steve Jobs said, “stay hungry, stay foolish”. I agree with him, and I would also add “Be disciplined, be authentic”. It sounds less cool than Jobs’s words, I guess also because I have not founded one of the major tech companies of the last 30 years :D.

I’m very happy to have reached this milestone, these 5 years have been very long and full of things that have happened. I’m even happier to celebrate this achievement with you. Thanks for your support, and I hope that I will go on for the next 5 years, in which we can all support each other to succeed all together as a community. I’ll blow this birthday candle with this wish 🙂