Wagner James Au / New World Notes

Here's twelve highly useful tips from veteran SL creators, taken from the survey for my report on the state of the Second Life economy in 2025 (Patreon subscription required).

I framed it in the form of the question, "What are some important lessons/tips you wish you'd known before starting out as an SL creator?", and got a slew of valuable answers, some of them running along the same theme which I then stitched together.

Excising the snarky replies ("try VRChat instead lol"), here they are, running from the highly practical to the somewhat philosophical:

• Create under an alt.

• Advertising is key, word of mouth is ineffective.

• It takes time, but return customers are the lifeblood of the business. Just make what brings you joy.

• Happy customers are loyal customers. Don't stress about refunds, you're selling a digital product and you don't have [RL] inventory. You only really lose money on the SL Marketplace fee if they bought the item there, and lose nothing if they bought it in-world.

• Don't expect to get rich, to make a decent living income long term takes years of hard work. Have realistic expectations, you have to be very lucky to make SL profitable.

• Keep in mind that customers do not read a product’s documentation and will throw a fit because they did not. Don't expect everyone to understand English. The average user does not have a creator's understanding of how SL works. Try to make items easy to use.

• Talk to other creators, the official Second Life documentation is unhelpful, unclear and outdated the vast majority of the time. Look around at what others are doing.  

• Second Life is old and outdated and as much as we learn to create better for it, we will always be behind from current technology in the 3D industry. So not isolating yourself from the rest of the industry is important; create for SL but also look at how you can use your knowledge or better your knowledge outside of it, because SL’s future is uncertain. Don't take a decade to realize you should get Substance Painter.

• Get trained in classic 3D development for games, it will immediately raise your level of work and increase your chances of making a good brand in SL. Right now the average level of work in SL is very good. And a beginner with poor knowledge and skills in 3D will have a hard time entering the market. Learn 3D before you start doing anything in SL, and don't stop learning when you are selling here and your brand has grown.

• You need to prepare for constant adapting and changing. So radically changes every 6 months to a year. Be prepared for financial instability in Second Life.

• Test everything in the most extreme ways possible. People will break your items in ways you didn't anticipate. 

• Get your file organization game together early on. Nothing humbles you like digging through 2014 folders named “finalFINAL_fatpackFIXED2.psd.”

I feel like "make things easy to use" is the most valuable, in the sense that I've had to deal with far too many SL items with were definitely not that. So. Many. Exhaustive. Notecards.

Anyway, what's your favorite among these — or the one you disagree with most?