A photography guide's site that rallies amateurs for walk tours. A planning board for a foreign language practice group. A site with a schedule and registration form for a sports event.
When I read "online social" my head thinks "not-really social".
The game tricks you into going for walks or runs regularly since you need those energy points for everything, and I'm building out more cooperative behaviors to give you reasons to go walk with someone else, go work together to fight an alien infestation, and more. You'll discover other players in the game who are near you in the physical world, and be able to request help, thank them, give them benefits, all positive.
I've learned a lot from Niantic's strategy, but they've never leaned into actually helping people improve their fitness, or work out together. I'm hoping I can help solve this problem you're talking about, at least for getting people fitter!
Note that the walkthrough system is very new and finicky, and I'm rewriting AI slop copy by hand as I get farther through the story. I update on average more than once a day. Have a look, and feel free to email ben@yourstrategy.co if you have questions or feedback, I'd love it!
Note that the walkthrough system is very new and finicky, and I'm rewriting AI slop copy by hand as I get farther through the story. I update on average more than once a day. Have a look, and feel free to email ben@yourstrategy.co if you have questions or feedback, I'd love it!
Note that the walkthrough system is very new and finicky, and I'm rewriting AI slop copy by hand as I get farther through the story. I update on average more than once a day. Have a look, and feel free to email ben@yourstrategy.co if you have questions or feedback, I'd love it!
What's your monetisation plan and how can we be assured that the data collected won't be used for military purposes?
Since I do actual workout tracking, all health and fitness data and raw location data stays on device. The only thing I send back to my web service is what interactions you've made with the game world, what you've captured and built. I have no plan to have you take photos of anything, either. I won't have any monetizable data, really.
My plan to monetize is an optional subscription that gives you more capabilities, like having more allies together, being able to build more than one thing at a time, and being able to hold more energy from a workout before your meter caps. If it gets successful I'll definitely do paid cosmetics. I also think there's an avenue for me to get grants from local health departments if I can prove I increase people's fitness through the game, but that would be opt in and way down the line.
I'm a big fan of not growing your company speculatively, and instead proving out your revenue and growing organically.
What else would you suggest? If this ever got big enough for its own corporate entity I think I would bake a lot of protections into the corporate structure, and definitely be a B corporation.
My meetups rapidly filled up with fake people, so real people couldn't sign up ... unless ... I signed up for the more expensive plan.
I gave up on it as a scam, at that point.
Then when there’s enough demand, you’re shown meeting spots and times to vote with RSVPs.
The key is the widget has to be embeddable and agnostic of the content so it can manage itself based on sensible rules (only show possible events when there’s enough demand, but make the demand really easy to measure).
95% of people choose utility and convenience over ideological preferences, and that's not necessarily a bad thing. I too miss the old Internet sometimes, sure, but I'm not ashamed to admit that I'd much rather deal with anonymous strangers or LLMs than ye olde phpbbs with their anal moderation, resident schizos, and weird cliques.
I've had a lot of success lately relying exclusively on Partiful as my one social app. I know it's nearly an inevitability though before they will need to monetize and introduce some way to ruin the elegance.
(My proposal for the modern successor to Zawinski's law: Every social media platform attempts to expand until it has a scroll-based algorithmic content feed).