Gaming Beyond

Needed greater accountability for my inaction around this project, hence wanted to surround myself with other people who are building things.

Big shout out to Georgia Ritter, the founder of OutOfHours.org, who has continuously amazed me with her execution. Definitely recommend listening to her podcast

Being a big proponent of testing ideas from an early stage, I started by testing a single sentence describing my newsletter.
Gladly, Substack allows you to create a simple page with a logo, 1 sentence and a sign-up form in a few minutes.

This was the MVP
https://gamingadvocate.substack.com/welcome
and I interviewed my circle of friends who are into games (5 people). I also thought my niche would be Russian speakers.

My hypothesis was that people lack time, so would like to avoid shitty/average games. Hence my newsletter would be about reviewing games from a "busy bee" point of view.

First, I started by asking about their current behaviour and attitudes on gaming. I tried to tease out how people are currently discovering games. Turned out that my hypothesis was wrong, and even people with a huge backlog of games didn't mind spending money on games they would only play once/twice.

Hence, I had to pivot.

I was inspired by one of my senior colleagues who is a serial entrepreneur to work on a side project in my free time - this would be the best education I would ever get (and better than an MBA).

The next step was finding a niche that is growing, and I am innately curious about. After some deliberation, I settled on Gaming since I spend my free time playing and researching the industry.