Turn your site into a place people can bump into each other

You had your IRC, with no message persistence, no image hosting, and no persistent account names (being able to reserve a username was an optional add-on feature). People would show they were away by changing their username from bob to bob_afk.

And it was common for people to use a nickname (for safety) and never show their face (because posting photos was a big effort). A person could be called 'cmdrtaco' or 'hemos' and that was enough, didn't need their real name or photograph or anything.

But you're right that there were also more small forums using things like phpBB which would be dedicated to a single interest, and they were much more human-scale communities. And people could have big signatures and animated GIF avatars, so you couldn't help but remember them!

While I’m sure some folks were doing it for that reason, there are a whole bunch of us who were just doing things like that because it was fun. We didn’t need to be popular (but that would have been nice too), we were just kids looking for a community where we fit in.

The Internet back then was a grab bag, a hodge podge, a diaspora, and a most importantly a place to be who you wanted to be instead of a place where your “real” identity followed you everywhere.

Since I do actual workout tracking, all health and fitness data and raw location data stays on device. The only thing I send back to my web service is what interactions you've made with the game world, what you've captured and built. I have no plan to have you take photos of anything, either. I won't have any monetizable data, really.

My plan to monetize is an optional subscription that gives you more capabilities, like having more allies together, being able to build more than one thing at a time, and being able to hold more energy from a workout before your meter caps. If it gets successful I'll definitely do paid cosmetics. I also think there's an avenue for me to get grants from local health departments if I can prove I increase people's fitness through the game, but that would be opt in and way down the line.

I'm a big fan of not growing your company speculatively, and instead proving out your revenue and growing organically.

What else would you suggest? If this ever got big enough for its own corporate entity I think I would bake a lot of protections into the corporate structure, and definitely be a B corporation.