25) What's Next?

Existing Market

1) What's next in my venture is actually designing the product. I don't necessarily need to do the art and such for the game, but I will need to design the mechanics and gameplay of the RPG so I can test it out. Making the rules, the combat mechanics, classes, places, character design and such. I'll need a prototype to test over like Skype or Zoom, to find out how I can make it intuitive and easy when being played online.

2) Two of the people I interviewed for this are people I've talked to already, so I've kept them up to date on how the project is forming. The third is someone I haven't talked to, and I described my venture to him. Two of them agree with me that designing the game would be the best next step, and the third thought that I should be reaching out to people a little better about helping me with the venture. They agree that making the game is a good idea, but they believe getting the help is the best next step. They may be right, I don't know.

3) The next step may be a combination of the two ideas from earlier. I may design the game in my spare time, while reaching out to the friends and colleagues I planned to talk to and asking for their help. It shouldn't take terribly long to design a 0.5th edition game that is at least playable, if not buggy, and I'm going to need people to help me plan out the next steps in terms of building the business and getting the name out there.

    I'll use my knowledge of existing RPGs and may talk with a few friends I have that play a lot of RPGs and ask what they'd suggest. The prototype may take one or two months to finish, as I'll be basically be building it from scratch. I can edit some mechanics from other RPGs, but I'll have to make sure that it is functional and smooth when played online. I'll also be talking with my old friend from the non-profit I worked in about his experience in starting a business and the best way to go about it. I'll probably talk with the social media and coding people I know last, as I'll want to have a business and product to advertise and build about before I start... advertising and building.

New Market

1) A radically different target market could be B2B as a training/team-building exercise.

2) Reworking Constellation a bit, we could turn it into a training and team-building tool. This idea actually came about after reading the Elon Musk biography, apparently they would play like Call of  Duty or CS GO in several of his startups for fun, which I believe led a lot to the incredible teamwork and job culture that such a business as building rockets or electric cars would require.

    We could talk to each company, ask them for company values and traits they'd like to instill in the employees, as well as situations they'd be likely to go through in their work, and essentially write a pre-made "campaign" to run the employee teams through. This could be sci-fi themed or not, up to the company.

3) I spoke with two people, one being the CEO of a credit union from back home, one being an industrial/organizational psychologist with an internship at Honeywell, and they both agreed that this would be useful. The CEO mentioned that, because of coronavirus, they have had to shut down training programs for new roles. They are also considering, like a lot of companies out there, giving employees opportunities to work from home even after the pandemic. The product I'm offering could be used to keep up the corporate culture and family feel of several companies while employees are seeing each other less.

    I had really not thought of this idea before, and I questioned the feasibility of it after I thought of it. Running it by my interviewees helped a lot, and the idea of using it to help instill the company values in employees' interactions with customers seems actually pretty doable. For startups with younger employees, probably in more technological fields (just an example, but something like early SpaceX), I feel that offering the sci-fi themed RPG team-building would help companies work together more effectively and become friends with their coworkers. For more "corporate" companies, I'm certain a simple rework would allow for useful training exercises.

    Basically, this could be a package we offer outside of the simple B2C product of Constellation. Could call it "Corporate Constellation" or something. Once the B2C product gets launched and starts making money, we could essentially offer custom pre-written campaigns for each company, and get payed as a service. Or we could start out with this, but the problem is this would require several more employees to reach out to companies and to write semi-realistic corporate campaigns.