What I have so far, and where it's going
Like any good engineer, since I started Aficionado I've been working diligently (well, sol-5.6 has) on getting all the core features I had envisioned ready: a robust catalog of works across Books, Games, Movies, TV Shows and Music Albums to allow easily finding titles, adding them to your Scrapbook with optional notes, a separate backlog list (called Radar, as in: it's "On my Radar™"), and currently completing my biggest still-open piece of the vision which are Lists - basically a way to curate a collection of 2 or more media titles around a common narrative/theme/what-have-you. My vision for it is to give people to the ability to share so-called Mixtapes of media titles (think "Horror films for people who don't like Horror films", or "My Summer 2025" where I capture the music I listened to and the games I played, that sort of thing).
These are all well and nice and I'm mostly happy with the way things are shaping. And here comes the but:
BUT,
I still cannot easily explain, in plain english, the core idea and purpose and values that Aficionado aims for. The messaging (or is it positioning?) as the marketers would call it.
This bothers me mostly around the copy that's on the homepage, and more broadly when I try to explain Aficionado to people I talk to about it.
What's Aficionado trying to solve? For me, it was a longtime itch to be able to quickly lookup, in a structured search, the titles I want to keep track of - either because I experienced them and wanted to keep them in my memory, or because I heard they're worth my time and wanted to find them later when I was ready to try something new.
I think you'd agree the paragraph above is a mouthful. And still doesn't capture the whole of it. Because there's a lot more - it's a single-player tool first, but also a place I envision can bring inspiration and discovery and connection with others around the love of Films, Games, Books, TV Shows and Albums (and maybe other forms of media or art, later down the road?). I currently only offer scarce discovery features (The Discover page and the Kept by X other people widget where you can see who else kept a title in their scrapbook).
It's painfully obvious to me that the core values are still fuzzy and not clearly defined.
So I'll be trying (with advice from a friend who's much more of an expert than I am in this regard) to write more both here in the blog and also for myself, to try to hone the essence of what I'm building.
-Lior