I maintain a Google Drive filled with “to do” articles. I sat down this morning an hour later than usual and stared at all of the topics I wished to write about. I want to apologize because I am not feeling any of them at the moment. So I am going to ramble about my own product for a few minutes.
I wrote a while ago about my Joe-the-elf problem and how tedious creativity is a problem for storytellers. I decided to take my own solution for this tool, which I have been using on and off since 1997, and “productize” it. You can picture me doing the finger guns things when I say “productize”. I give you permission to do that.
I have managed to get it in front of a dozen users now and I am internalizing all of their feedback. Some of it is amazing, some of it is helpful, and some of it is concerning. What do I mean by that? I just finished saying I am internalizing it, didn’t I?
The one piece of feedback I am taking action on comes from spending some time embedding myself in the tweeters and the discords. I took the liberty of joining a few TTRPG (table top role playing game) Discord servers and spent a while lurking before reaching out to the administrators to blatantly ask them to try my stuff. I similarly set up a Reddit account and I went there for five minutes. We will not speak of what happened there—the pain is too fresh.
My cold-calling efforts were predictably mixed. Some people flat out said no with varying levels of politeness. Some people said that sending strangers random looking links over the internet is creepy. I suppose that is fair. At least one Discord owner took it to heart to check out my merchandise and spent an hour giving me absolutely valuable feedback. I am sponsoring the prizes for one of his upcoming Discord events as a result. If you care to give this charitable soul a follow, here is his clever twitter handle.
The takeaway from the conversation is that I have a presentation problem that I need to solve for Derfdice. There is a vibrant TTRPG homebrew community out there. They have been building, sharing, and even selling content to the gaming community at large. The result of this is that homebrew consumers and buyers have become habituated to a specific look and feel. The best example of that is this amazing site.
I already incorporated rules for people to make their tables “public” to other registered users. If you make your table public, other users of the site can roll on it to their heart’s content. If you are a premium user of the site (thirty dollars a year, great value!), then you can also copy a table, with the caveat that it comes with a tag indicating that this table originated with a different user.
The next step for me is to modify the site to let people make their tables “superpublic”. A “superpublic” table is one that can be rolled on by anyone, without the need for a registered account. It will also (eventually) include the ability for content creators to show the table itself. If someone has a better name for this feature, I am open to suggestions.
I made a few of my own tables “superpublic” just to show what that looks like. Over the coming weeks I will modify the output so it can be presented in a format that people are already familiar with.
There are some additional things to consider here. How does a player get to make their own “superpublic” tables? The best I could come up with is “earn 10 premium followers”. The more astute among you might realize this turns my power users into marketeers. I am very aware of that. I don’t want to make it just any number of free followers. It is far too easy to make 10 or even 100 accounts just for the sake of amassing fake followers.
Do I create a parallel “superpublic” option? Is this a one-time fee that users, who do not have 10 people willing to click a button on their behalf, would be willing to pay? I honestly do not know.
I am going to wrap this up here for two reasons. The first is that I am not feeling it. I told you that at the beginning. The second is that I am going to throw up a superpublic page that is not just this:
{"tag":"derf.roll","tableresult":"The Assassin's Surprise seats 29, with an entertainment stage."}
We are now at the point where I am iterating from my DRMVP (Da Real Minimum Viable Product) into product market fit.
I hope you all find this journey as interesting as I do!
Next week stay tuned for some more heavy duty writing and perhaps another entertaining amazon dot com affiliate link!
