Hi!

I had a business idea come to me on Saturday night.

As you may know, I have no shortage of ideas. But I figured instead of just sitting on the idea and hoping that I get to it "one day", I could share the general concept with my newsletter list in the case that you think it's worth pursuing!

Side note: I love seeing people build their own things. My ultimate dream would be to help 1,000 people launch their ventures and collect small bits of equity here and there.

The Idea

Working Title - SHATR (So Here Are The Rules)

Idea - A website that explains the rules of a game in under one minute.

Why it needs to exist - I have plenty of friends and family that love to play board games, drinking games, etc.

A common problem is the amount of time it takes to explain the rules of the game to someone who is playing for the first time. This process is rarely easy; the person who regularly plays the game can have a hard time dumbing it down and no one has the patience to read through the rule card.

The objective of each SHATR page would be to explain just enough of the rules that a player would need to get started (since most games are best learned by just playing a round).

Building the Minimum Viable Product (MVP)

Being a content website, it'd be pretty easy to launch the first version.

1. Buy the domain
2. Use a website builder like Webflow, Wordpress, etc to start blogging
3. Write your first five articles with specific emphasis on making it as quick and clear as possible on how to start playing the game.

I looked at the top trafficked pages for GameRules.com and looks like you could start with Solitaire, Monopoly, Cards Against Humanity, Codenames, and War.

I would break up each article into sections for:

• The Objective
• What you need to know before you start (keep this as short as possible!)
• What you should know by your third game (additional information that should be explained to them as the game is played)
• Strategies

Further Content Ideas

Board games and card games seem like the most intuitive place to start. From there you can also do drinking games (beer pong, kings, etc) and tailgate games (cornhole, ladder, etc).

Written content is a good place to start because it is quick and cheap to produce and has good potential for search engine (SEO) traffic.

Ideally, you'd like to get this to a place where people can Google "[Game Name] SHATR" any time they are playing a new game.

But from there you can build it into a YouTube page where you physically show the quick tips and rules they need to know.

Monetization

To keep the site running and build initial revenue, I would start with ads and affiliate links for the games that you're writing about.

Eventually, the goal would be to try to sell to a company like GameRules once you build your traffic up.

Conclusion

Hope you enjoyed this random riffing on an idea that I thought of while not being able to go to sleep.

If you're interested in building this I'd be happy to chat further and help you get this off the ground!

Cheers,

Aswin