There was a huge step change in my life and business this week. I’ve officially joined the team at LegendKeeper to help create the best app for Game Masters and Worldbuilders.

Our full announcement is posted publicly on Patreon.

LegendKeeper has been around for about 3 years now, with one full-time developer and one part-time designer. With me, the team is now 3 people, with 2 of us full-time.

I’ll be focusing on growth and marketing at first - something I know very little about and am excited to learn about.

As you can imagine, this is a big bet for me. I’m thrilled to be focusing and doing something more ambitious. But most of all, I’m excited to work with others again. Being a founder has been GREAT for me. Being solo… not so much.

Step changes

This move is further proof that the entrepreneurial journey is anything but linear. With this change I have adopted more risk, but potentially accelerated my progress by years.

The work I’ve been doing with Sword & Source could be described as exploratory. I was trying many small things, and observing what worked. I was still very much in a 0 to 1 mode of working. I had not yet launched a SaaS product or stable revenue stream.

LegendKeeper is different. We already have thousands of happy users and established MRR. I am leaving the ‘exploratory’ mode, and moving into something more like ‘scaling’ mode. It is still very much an early startup, with tons to figure out, but we have strong evidence for product-market fit.

It all started with one question

So how did this all begin? What went into this decision?

It all began with the realization at the end of last year, that I was not meant to work alone. I knew that my best contributions would always come from collaborating with others. This lead to one question:

How could I work with others sooner?

I pondered the question for months, arriving at these 4 options:

  1. Join an existing company as an employee.
  2. Join an existing startup as a founding member.
  3. Start something new with a co-founder.
  4. Raise money for Sword & Source.

Finding the unreasonably perfect option

After outlining 4 potential paths, I revisited my personal goals and desires.

A) I want to be an owner. (Not necessarily the owner, but an owner nonetheless.)
B) I want to work on a product I actually care about.
C) I really love the TTRPG space. Staying there would be ideal.
D) I want to learn more about product/business/marketing, and spend less time coding.

By cross-referencing these two lists, I could narrow things down. Becoming an employee was out of the question, so strike Option 1.

Raising money seemed interesting. There are more and more investors out there willing to support a calm company. But when I dug into this, it was clear it would take me most of a year to create a pitch worthy of investment. It would involve learning a bunch of skills I wasn’t very interested in right now. I saw better options on the list.

Starting something new could work, but how would I find a co-founder, and what would happen to the momentum I’d built up with Sword & Source? It felt like going back to the beginning.

Option 2 was the most compelling. I was strongly tempted to join my brother Brandon at Codex to help modern dev teams share context. I think they are solving an important problem, and I have some expertise there. But Codex is NOT related to RPGs!

If only there was some perfect option. If I was unreasonably picky, that option would be:

  • A company that was into RPGs
  • A founding team that still had space on it
  • A great product
  • A mission I believed in

It seemed like such a ridiculous ask, but guess what: That company existed and it is called LegendKeeper.

Holy f*ck, I can’t believe my luck.

Is it really that easy?

No. This has been a complicated process. There are countless details I’m omitting for the sake of brevity. By focusing on one product, a product I did not build from the ground up myself, I’m adopting some big new risks.

LegendKeeper is currently a B2C app, and those are notoriously hard to pull off. I’ve been building the relationship with its founding members for about a year now, but there is still a lot we don’t know about each other. Not to mention my eggs are moving into one basket.

But those risks are well worth it to me. I think LegendKeeper can really go the distance. I think the worldbuilding industry is the place to be for me. Most importantly, having other people to lean on and build with will make me infinitely happier and unlock my real potential.

From that perspective, it is really easy.