| Been a long day. Sorry for the late reply again. BTW, haven't had a stimulating conversation like this in a while. I'm glad you've looked through the situation from different angles. Sounds like you've learnt lots. Wow. You've made some drastic changes to your life. Freaky indeed. On the upside, you've beaten this huge monster of a disease. It's great that you've got a list already. Also great that you've been featured in a health book. Perfect bunch of reasons for why it'd be great if you'd consider raising some funding over at kickStarter. Take things to a whole other level. It'll help you collect your thoughts about how you'd build an ideal community for CF-conquerers. Where members could share what worked for them, have very customized 'plans of action' even. (hope you've explored http://crohnology.com) You'll need some funding for the game, as well as the ad campaigns, etc. Also, with this one move, you'd have built up a list of 1000's. I'd be glad to help out a little, if required. What is your web comic about? Have you got a marketing/distribution plan handy? Webcomics certainly are interesting, but I'd say the existing publisher/writer distribution model sucks to say the least.
I recently convinced a friend of mine, who'd been turning his freshly baked novel into a web comic, to turn it into a Facebook game instead. Drove the idea's monetization potential up a hundred fold possibly. "power dressing for women". Love the idea. Feel you certainly should pursue it in some form or the other. How about starting with a dribbble/pinterest-like community for fashion designers. Get them to submit ideas etc. I'd be more psyched about curation/community, utilizing network-effects and so on. Than a pure clothing line. But either way, you'll get a lot of great feedback from HN about the most vital parts -- e-commerce, marketing, seo etc. An internet-first clothing line around this concept seems doable, and the community aspect 'empowering women' etc. would drive it ahead.
Every successful business needs to start with inspirational stories. And you've got plenty of 'em. Interesting that you'd say people weren't as forgiving 'cause you got better. This seems quite plausible. Empathy is indeed a depletable resource.
Reading through, can't help but feel inspired by your attitude towards all of this. Massively inspired. You haven't elaborated on the mechanics of the game yet. But I love the idea of the shift in mental models -- leveling up on the characters health through subtle changes that can be visualized. What might the game look like? 2D side-scroller? top-down/isometric? (farmville/diablo) 3d environments? text-based? (like mafia wars)
What sort of environmental / personal changes would the character make?
I've gotten myself all worked-up about the game concept. Would love to send over a single page write-up of what I imagine this should look/play like, if you don't mind ie. I'm really curious about the 'complex set of choices' you make throughout the day. Have you considered parallels that could be applied to curing other diseases. More often than not, there tends to be subtle links between certain diseases. |
Please do send it over. Email address is in profile. And we can continue this conversation privately.
I'm really curious about the 'complex set of choices' you make throughout the day. Have you considered parallels that could be applied to curing other diseases. More often than not, there tends to be subtle links between certain diseases.
I'm pretty sure a good bit of it would generalize. I mostly learned how to heal my gut from an autism list (I have two ASD sons and gut issues are really common in ASD kids). The CF community knows rather little about how to do that. People with CF are still human and our bodies still mostly work like that of other humans. One channel in the cell is defective and this makes a few things go very, very wrong. Some of the issues found in the CF community seem fairly common to citizens of 1st world countries generally, but are just taken to real extremes. For example, acidosis is a major issue with CF, one largely overlooked by doctors. Addressing that issue did quite a lot for me. From what I gather, the modern American diet is generally too acid and many of the health issues we have are likely made worse by widespread acidosis, though probably generally milder than what people with CF go through. One issue that seems likely impacted by acidosis is diabetes. People with CF are at high risk for "CF related diabetes" and diabetes is rather common in the US.
I've had quite a long day. My apologies for not replying more thoroughly at this time. I look forward to getting an email from you.