Lenny Hu came up with the idea for our bonfire hack. Last week he was talking about a recent trip to Japan. He got lost wondering the streets and realized that it would be incredibly useful to have a real life Starcraft-like fog of war map to help so he doesn't get lost.
We decided that since everyone isn't a gamer, we'd try to market it as something more mass appealing. We settled on "social discovery map". I think that was a good approach but a little difficult to pull off in 24 hours. We didn't win but it was a lot of fun and I'm excited about finding some time to develop it a little more and see where it goes.
Also, I have a completely different motivation as a personal use case. I'm not really interested in the idea of not getting lost or even having a personal repository for my photos/activity. What really gets me motivated is...
1) Discovering new spaces
2) Having a spacial map to represent that discovery
3) Seeing how the map evolves over time
4) Competing with friends to see who can collect the most lights
So it seems like we've got at least 3 different use cases. Because of that, maybe it would be a good idea to not try and force any one use case but to keep things as simple as possible and let people decide if this thing is valuable and how to use it. Then maybe we could start telling stories to help inspire new users. From there we could build specific products on top of the 'platform' to better accommodate those use cases.
I think a lot of product people prefer to specialize before you generalize. I think that's great advice, it just depends on the situation. For us, if we had the time to really take this thing seriously and put more time behind it, I'd advocate for generalizing first.
FollowUp by AssetMule
FollowUp by AssetMule