I've been working on this for about two weeks now before I go to sleep and on the weekends.

I love content creation, but I've noticed that I find it very hard to stay motivated and consistent.

However, I never have that problem with video games. In stark contrast, I have to continuously uninstall them to get anything else done.

So I decided to merge both of the things I love!

(or am addicted to... very similar feelings, I admit)

The general idea

In a nutshell this is a content creation and social media growth platform that is wrapped in an RPG, or vice versa, I haven't decided yet.

All of the actions you need to take to grow as a content creator are quests or challenges, and the "game-loop" is growing your audience/channel.

I intend to launch with a few MVP features:

• Character setup
• Quests (daily, weekly, monthly)
• Guilds
• Content discovery

While I get initial feedback, I'll be working on extending functionality:

• Content creation for written (scheduling for twitter, and blogs)
• Engagement builder (easily reply to comments)
• PvP content creation challenges
• Leaderboards
• Events (topical, think "who can make the best content about X topic")
• Skill tree - Allows you to learn things like video editing, storytelling, sound design, etc
  • Dungeons are used as the "teaching format" for these
• Themes, so that the aesthetic of the tool can target other markets

I've got a bunch more ideas, but I'll stop there as those are the table stakes I'm looking to put up to have a well-rounded product.

Competitors

There are a lot of competitors, as I'm aiming to integrate as many social networks as possible (though I'm starting with YouTube, and Twitter (X, bleh)). Each of them has their own tools, mostly targeted at either corporate or just generic users. Nothing is particularly niche, and nothing stands out.

For YouTube, the competitors aren't that great in terms of visuals, so there's an easy win there. And for most of the platforms there isn't much, if anything at all, that targets gamers specifically.

It's all bland, soul-less tooling.

So that's the first target market that I'm aiming to capture. Gamers.

I've designed a lot of the visuals around Fortnite simply because of how large the game's userbase is (500 million players). It dwarfs all other games by a large margin (300~ %).

However, even the generic products are netting about $500,000-$10,000,000 a year from my research (vidiq, tubebuddy, tweethunter, hypefury, etc).

Looks like a healthy market, and the trend for "content creator" does nothing but rise year over year.

The process (so far)

I'm a mediocre marketer, a decent designer, and an excellent developer.

I put up a landing page early in order to gauge sentiment towards the idea, threw about $200 behind it on some ads (Reddit and on Twitter) and got around 50 waitlist signups + 6 discord members joining. That was enough validation for me to push a small set of hours into it.

I'd estimate so far around 15-20 hours.

First I dug in with ideation. Threw it all down in my Notion, and used ChatGPT to help me think up ideas and solidify others I had.

Then I started wireframing out the MVP features.

I took a lot of inspiration from Fortnite (some of the comments on the Reddit ad were "You just stole Fortnite's look, which I used as a thumbs-up that I was on the right path).

Once I got all the basics down, I started throwing some color onto it.

For the images I used Midjourney. This truly brought out the Fortnite. I tried to match the colors and placements of UX items with the game so that players could easily jump into the app and know where things generally are already.

I did most of the wireframes in around 4-5 hours, and then another 1-2 hours adding the color and images.

I used Figma for everything except cutting out images, which I used Photoshop's new AI stuff (when it worked at least).

Next steps

I have a few more designs (the guilds and some setting screens) and then I'm off to coding. I'll be using SvelteKit and NodeJS with Couchbase as my database for my stack, as these are the tools I know best and there's no point in learning new tools for this.

I'm mildly familiar with the YouTube API, and the Twitter API, so it shouldn't be too big of a discovery process, though I'm not entirely sure that all of the quests I want to be able to do are possible directly through the API. I might need to develop a chrome extension that allows tracking some things while you're on YouTube/Twitter.