What it does
For the group, land on the right game for this exact night, fast, matched to size, mood, and time, with enough confidence to sell the pick to everyone. For a venue, de-risk a physical space with real proof of demand and a warm waitlist before the doors open.
Currently
Live MVP, free, and unmonetized. A 5-question flow matches a group to three picks from a 201-game library, with a Guru Pitch that gives you the words to sell the choice. It is also uninstrumented: only tool-completed and thumbs events fire today, so I am steering on hunches until analytics land. That is the next thing in.
Roadmap
/now-next-later-roadmapNow/Next/Later Roadmap- NSM instrumentation (prerequisite for every target)
- Completion polish: occasion optional + smart defaults
- Results-screen confidence pack
- Progressive results streaming
- B2B willingness-to-pay interviews + dashboard mock
- Concierge onboarding readiness
- Per-venue ROI dashboard (build)
- First paid venue licenses
- Where-to-buy / where-to-play action
- Occasion SEO engine
- Saved history + what's new
- Lead export / CRM handoff
- Taste graph + we-played-it loop (the defensibility bet)
- Group mode (each person answers on their phone)
- Lead-to-event automation
- In-venue QR to the venue's Guru
- Embeddable Guru widget
Recently shipped
- Jun 3, 2026Polished and listed publicly on the /tools page.
- Jun 2, 2026Shipped the MVP: the board-game recommendation tool, with the library expanded to 201 games.
How it's built
How I built it
Game Guru started as the acquisition surface for a different bet: an upscale board-game cocktail lounge I want to open in Campbell. The tool was the cheap way to test demand. A 5-question quiz that matches your group to three games, plus an email capture that quietly doubled as a pre-launch waitlist. So I ran the full product process on it, the same one I would run for a client.
What the discovery surfaced
A jobs-to-be-done pass made the shape clear: this is two jobs wearing one interface. The consumer job is landing on the right game for tonight, fast, with enough confidence to sell the pick to the group. The venue job is proving local demand and building a warm list before signing a lease. Maya, the game-night organizer who always ends up choosing, became the primary persona. Marcus, the hardcore hobbyist, became a deliberate guardrail: the moment I contort the product to satisfy his depth needs, I am in a losing race against BoardGameGeek.
The pivot, and what it cut
Partway through, the strategy reframed. Instead of the tool serving one lounge, Game Guru is the product: a B2C consumer toy that feeds a B2B SaaS licensed to other venues. That reweighting forced a single North Star that had to serve both models without splitting in two: Acted-on Matches per Week. A match someone actually saves, shares, or plays is the smallest unit of real value, and it is exactly what a venue would license the tool to produce. It also refuses to inflate on empty quiz completions, which a vanity metric like raw plays would not.
RICE ranked the backlog and the cheapest B2C wins, completion polish and the confidence pack, rose to the top because they lift the action rate directly. But the pre-mortem named the real danger plainly: a solo builder running two go-to-markets at once is the classic way to do neither, and right now the tool is flying blind because almost nothing is instrumented. So the bet is discipline over surface area. Instrument first, win cheap on the consumer side, validate that venues will actually pay before building anything for them, and sequence the two models instead of sprinting at both.
The strategy behind it
A snapshot of the product process this app was built from. Each artifact comes from a k8 skill you can run yourself. It reflects the original plan, not the live state above.
Jobs to be done
/jtbd-analysisJTBD Analysis| When I… I want to… | Importance | Frequency |
|---|---|---|
| When my group is gathered and ready to play but nobody can agree on what, I want to get matched to a game that fits our size, mood, and time, so I can stop negotiating and start playing. | high | high |
| When I am the one choosing the game for everyone, I want to pick something the group will actually enjoy, so I can look like a good host and not the person who killed the vibe. | high | high |
| When game night has gone stale, I want to find something new that still fits my group, so I can keep the ritual fresh without gambling forty dollars on a box that sits unplayed. | medium | medium |
| When I want a social night out that isn't just another bar, I want a place where the games, food, and drinks are curated for me, so I get the game-night experience without the setup or cleanup. | high | medium |
| When I am about to commit real capital to a physical venue, I want evidence that local demand is real and a list of people ready to show up, so I can open to a warm crowd instead of an empty room. | high | low |
Persona
/persona-createPersona Create- Pick a game the whole group enjoys, including the newcomers
- Get to playing fast, before the energy dips
- Occasionally introduce something fresh so game night doesn't go stale
- Decision fatigue and the social pressure of being the chooser
- Mismatched picks: too long, too complex, or wrong for the player count
- Her own shelf is stale, but she won't gamble forty dollars on an unknown box
Persona
/persona-createPersona Create- A fun, novel night out without a steep learning curve
- Something they can do together that sparks interaction, not parallel scrolling
- Board games feel like an in-group hobby with a high entry barrier
- Fear of picking something too complex and spending the night reading rules
Persona
/persona-createPersona Create- Find genuinely novel deep-cut games, not the gateway hits he owns
- A community of equally serious players
- Recommendation tools insult him by suggesting Catan
- Casual venues don't stock heavy euros or run serious play
Persona
/persona-createPersona Create- Quantify local demand and intent before major capital commitment
- Build a qualified, warm email list of likely first-month guests
- Establish the lounge's brand and voice before opening day
- Generic notify-me landing pages produce low-signal emails
- No cheap way to test whether the cocktail-lounge-plus-curated-games concept resonates locally
North Star metric
/north-star-metricNorth Star MetricThe count, per week, of completed game-matches in which the user takes at least one meaningful action on a recommendation: saves their picks, shares them, gives a thumbs-up, or marks a pick as played. One match counts once regardless of how many actions. It is the smallest unit of real value Game Guru creates, and it works for both the consumer engine and the per-venue B2B cut.
RICE prioritization
/rice-scoreRICE Score| Feature | Reach | Impact | Conf. | Effort | Score |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Completion polish: occasion optional + smart defaults | 1500 | 1 | 60% | 0.25 | 3600 |
| Results-screen confidence pack | 1200 | 2 | 50% | 0.5 | 2400 |
| Progressive results streaming | 1500 | 1 | 50% | 0.5 | 1500 |
| Where-to-buy / where-to-play action | 1200 | 1 | 50% | 0.75 | 800 |
| Occasion SEO engine | 2000 | 1 | 40% | 1 | 800 |
Pre-mortem risks
/pre-mortemPre-mortemRunning B2C and B2B at once exhausts a one-person team, so neither ships well. Two go-to-markets need different muscles and compete for the same scarce time.
highMitigation: Sequence, do not parallelize. The roadmap gates B2B build to Q4 behind a validated B2C engine; hold the line and do not pull B2B work into Q3.
Venues won't pay, so the B2B half never materializes. The nearest comparable lounge closed, and cash-strapped venues cut software first.
highMitigation: Run 8 willingness-to-pay interviews with a dashboard mock before any B2B build. If they come back cold, reweight to a pure B2C product with affiliate monetization.
The NSM never gets a trustworthy baseline, so the team optimizes blind. Only tool-completed and thumbs events fire today; save, share, drop-off, and return cohorts are uninstrumented.
highMitigation: Ship the analytics tree first as the Now prerequisite and re-baseline in week two before tuning any feature.
The warm-AI surface gets cloned, so there is no defensible advantage. Any LLM produces warm, opinionated copy now.
mediumMitigation: Reframe the moat around curation quality, venue integration, and an accumulating taste graph. Lead positioning with curation, not AI.