The Character Creator

I was approached by IH after being on the site since March. The Character Creator has steadily been gaining traffic and making progress every month.

This interview made me reflect on how the project started and what makes it appealing to its users.

This is coming on momentum that's been building up the last three years. I keep my social media up to date on new items and futures, but most of the traffic is coming through Google. The quarantine may have helped to increase traffic too. Along side the traffic, revenue has doubled too. I'm starting to build a team to help me grow this project into a full fledged business.

For the first time since the soft launch in 2014, traffic has reached 100k visitors a month. Since then it has continued to grow and is at 130k a month as I am writing this today. Visitors come from all over the world but most of the traffic is coming from the USA.

Not sure of what the business model for the project will be, I started a Patreon page to allow visitors to contribute to help the project grow. I had help from friends for the launch, but new patrons joined shortly after. For the first year it has remained stable as I still didn't know how to maintain and grow the following.

In 2018, YC has a bug where they accepted all applicants. I had applied and took the class and it helped me take the project to the next level. I had chosen unique visitors as the metric to follow and was able to grow the traffic by 10% every other week. It gave me momentum to keep the project growing.

The first rudimentary version, with hardly any items or functionality went online. From there I was able to build it in full view of the world. I had no knowledge of javascript or SVG back then, but I had a vision , patience and persistence to see it grow from here.