Arcanetable Insight

I checked in on an app I hadn't touched in over a year, and what I found had me utterly gobsmacked.

Last night I randomly decided to check in on Arcanetable.app, an app I basically haven't touched in over a year, and what I found had me utterly gobsmacked.

I started writing software pretty young, when a friend and I had a competition to build a messenger. After the initial excitement wore off, we ended up spending most of our time building games together in OpenGL, and it was a blast. Fast forward to the present day: we live on opposite ends of the country, but we still try to keep in touch. My wife surprised me for my birthday in 2024 by flying him out to spend the week with us.

We got pretty deep back into Magic: The Gathering while he was here, and it made me realize there was a massive hole in the market. He headed back home after the visit, and I started writing code on a new pet project. I wanted to mess around with cards the same way we did in person, without needing to constantly pay for plane tickets, and that didn't seem to exist. After several months of sleepless nights, and a desire to code I hadn't felt since those small games in my youth, we were both able to join the same session and see each other moving cards around. We played a couple of sessions over the next few weeks, then I got back to the real world and to building products for Sparkstone, and eventually forgot about Arcanetable.

Which brings us back to last night.

It has grown to over 100 weekly users, roughly 20 a day. Digging in deeper, I realized these are people investing serious time in it: more than 30 sessions lasting over 20 minutes in the past 90 days, and one that ran over an hour and a half.

I've been focused on building products I perceived as creating value, and I've kept my passion projects on the shelf, assuming my toy projects were just a waste of time. Am I still stuck chasing shareholder value even though I'm the only shareholder at Sparkstone? Maybe old habits die hard.

Maybe there's something to Arcanetable, and I should take another look. Have you ever shelved a passion project because you thought it would get in the way of profits? Did you have second thoughts about it?

If you don't know what Arcanetable is and would like to, here's a good place to start.

This remind you of a problem you've been dealing with?

I'd be happy to discuss it with you and see if it's something we could turn into a solution.