How a Card Game Exploded into a Global Movement

Hey Indie Hackers! I created an online interview show called The Digital Campfire Download, and on last week's show I interviewed Koreen Odiney, the founder & CEO of the phenomenally successful game We're Not Really Strangers. Yes it's a card game, but it's also an Instagram community with 2.2 million followers and growing and a text community with over 150K subscribers. I wanted to share some of the community-building insights Koreen shared on the episode which IMO get to the heart of why the brand is blowing up.

👉 Find your flow and the rest will follow.
For years Koreen photographed and interviewed strangers, documenting her encounters on IG. "When you're doing what you’re supposed to be doing... things that seem impossible to someone else flow naturally"

👉 Scaling slowly has its advantages. But eventually you gotta jump.
Turning her passion for photographing and asking strangers personal questions into a product took almost 4 years. But it allowed her to continually iterate the game. Despite her self-doubt, she came to see failure as information, and put the game into the world.

👉 If you let emotion dictate the shape of your product, it will be more likely to connect with people.
Koreen thought about the emotions she wanted people to feel when they played, which led her to think about different levels of the game like acts in a movie & designed questions to elicit the feelings she wanted people to experience during each. Putting emotion at the center of her product had a big influence on how people connected with it.

Check out more on this including two more insights from the episode here https://bit.ly/2RzotgU

Want more like this? Tomorrow (Sept. 17th ) I'll be interviewing the whip-smart women behind the High Tea newsletter, a brilliant weekly report on Gen Z culture, media and tech trends. Get the deets here: www.digitalcampfires.co/jointhenext