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Co-Founder & CEO · Beta Camp · 2023
ONEXP
What if life worked a little more like an RPG?
My first startup, and the reason I fell in love with building products.
The idea: turn everyday life into a multiplayer RPG. The first version: a Discord server. There was a pretty big gap between the two, lol.
- My role
- Co-Founder & CEO
- Team
- 5 people across 4 time zones
- First version
- Manual missions and a community on Discord
- Context
- Beta Camp · 2023 · Early-stage venture
The quick version
- Why I cared
- I kept saving the things I wanted to do for “later.” ONEXP started with wanting to stop doing that.
- The idea
- Give people little missions to go outside, try something new, and maybe meet someone along the way.
- Where we started
- Five teammates, four time zones, seven days. We posted missions by hand in Discord to see whether people would give it a go.
I kept saying “later.”
One of my best friends from elementary school passed away from brain cancer. It made me think about how I was spending my own life. At the time, almost everything revolved around school.
Try something new? Later. Meet new people? Later. Actually enjoy life? Apparently that could wait too.
I was treating those things like a reward I could get once everything else was done. But when would that be? There would always be something else to finish. Losing my friend made it hard to keep assuming I’d have all the time I wanted.
That’s where ONEXP started. I wanted a little push to do the things I kept putting off. Something small enough to fit into an ordinary day, without needing to plan a whole adventure first.
What if going out and trying something new felt like picking up a side quest?
Okay, hear me out: life, but with side quests.
We imagined a multiplayer RPG you could actually walk around in. Open ONEXP, pick up a mission, then put your phone down and go do it.
Catch today’s sunset.
Yes, you have to leave your desk.
Literally touch grass.
A very achievable side quest.
An aurora at 3 AM?
Go find it.
Okay, this one takes a little more commitment.
I liked that a mission could make a vague “I should go out more” into something you could actually do today. You wouldn’t have to come up with the idea, find a special occasion, or suddenly become a completely different person.
Then there was the multiplayer part. If a few people got the same sunset mission, maybe they’d end up in the same place. There’d already be something to talk about: “Wait, are you here for this too?” That was the kind of moment we wanted to make possible.
One little mission could lead to…
- Get a mission
- Go IRL
- Complete & share
- Meet people
- Earn EXP
- Try another mission
Seven days. So… Discord?
We had five teammates across four time zones, seven days, and nowhere near the technical skills to build this entire world. The imagination was there. The ability to casually build an AR game was not.
A real-world RPG
- AR characters and NPCs
- Our own app
- EXP and rewards
- Local businesses with hidden quests
A Discord server
- Post the missions ourselves
- Invite people into the server
- Give them somewhere to share what they did
- See what happened next
Going from all of that to a Discord server felt a bit underwhelming. It’s harder to get excited about posting messages when you’ve been imagining a whole city full of quests.
But there was still something worth trying in that smaller version: would someone see a mission and think, “Actually, I’ll go do that”? We could put that in front of people within the week. We didn’t have to wait until we knew how to build everything else.
See a missionDo something IRLShare itMeet the other players
People actually found us!
7 countriesUsers reached in four days
3,000+Organic impressions in four days
For a first startup, seeing the idea reach people in seven countries was exciting. Something we’d been talking about among five teammates had made it outside our little group.
I can’t turn those numbers into a story about people coming back every day or making lifelong friends. We didn’t establish that. They tell us people found ONEXP; there was still a lot to find out about what would make them keep doing the missions.
And no, ONEXP didn’t become the giant RPG world we imagined. I wish I could end this with “and now everyone is doing side quests.” We didn’t get there.
But I did get to take an idea I cared about, work on it with other people, and make a version someone could actually try. It was messy and much smaller than the thing in my head. I still wanted to keep building.
I’m still glad we tried it.
Looking back, there were two things tangled together: why I wanted ONEXP to exist, and whether other people would want to use it. My reason was personal. That made me care enough to start, but it couldn’t tell me what would get someone else out of the house.
Even “do a mission” hides a lot of questions. Does the idea sound fun to them? Do they have time today? Would they go alone? Would sharing it feel good, or just feel like another thing to post? I’d want to get much closer to those moments if I picked this up again. A person seeing our post is only the beginning of that story.
I also don’t think every experience needs EXP attached to it. The whole reason I cared was that I kept postponing living. I’d want to be careful that the missions didn’t turn into another list of things to finish before I could feel good about my day.
ONEXP was my first time finding out how much I liked making an idea real, even when “real” meant a Discord server instead of the game in my head. The full version never happened. The part where I fell in love with building things very much did.
My first startup. A very ambitious side quest.