Team-based territory game for IRL meetup groups to earn sponsorships
Been in the community space for 8 years, built small and large groups (20 to 10k); every single community founder will tell you it was hard to build up their group. Much of that is because no one comes to their events even though hundreds join their Discord/Meetup org.
Really it comes down to Is it valuable enough to show up to an event?
I have a few hypothesis:
- Gaming is the future of social networking
- Loneliness will continue to increase without in-person connection
- The effort needed to be an active member of an IRL community will increase
- We can reduce the effort to be a part of an IRL community through gaming
So to incentivize meetups, I think it would be interesting to create an application where members can collaborate on earning sponsored meals for their events by checking into a business that offers a loyalty program. For example you and your group can check-in 100 times (once a day per person per business) for a pizza if Pizza Hut offers that as a reward.
There's a real-estate simulation piece I'm playing around with where you can earn coins for RSVP'ing to events and checking into random locations to purchase the actual buildings. When people (anonymously) check into those locations your community gets points towards their only loyalty program for that business.
One question I'll need to figure out. Would restaurants/coffee shops pay to get people to visit their business, not necessarily *buy* anything? Similar to Foursquare. It was a big hit but they couldn't find a business model and pivoted.