⚡ℙ𝕣𝕖𝕞𝕒𝕣𝕔𝕦 | One-Person Company

827 posts. 72 followers. That's not an algorithm problem. That's feedback. I spent years posting generic advice nobody could remember. I'm fixing that in public. Goal: 500,000. Starting from 72.

ModOrNot splits discovery into different jobs: Top: proven popularity. Trending: recent momentum. New: fresh arrivals. A giant list sorted by lifetime subscribers can't answer all three.

7.87M Steam Workshop items. 2.22M creators. Those numbers look impressive on a dashboard. But a player's actual question is much smaller: Which mod should I try tonight? That's the gap ModOrNot has to close.

If you make game mods, which is harder? Building something good or getting the first 100 people to notice it? I'm trying to understand the discovery gap from the creator's side.

A creator's first Workshop mod reaches 1K subscribers 8.59% of the time. By their 101st mod: 30.11%. That's what our catalogue study found. It doesn't prove posting more causes success. Survivorship matters.

A 500-subscriber mod means almost nothing without context. 500 in a tiny Workshop can be a breakout. 500 in a huge one can be invisible. So ModOrNot needs game-specific rankings, not just global totals.

The largest Workshop item in ModOrNot's Oct 29 snapshot? A Counter-Strike crosshair generator with 39.7M subscriptions. Not a sprawling expansion. A small tool solving a recurring problem. That's a product lesson I can't ignore.

Gamers: when you want a new mod, where do you look first? Steam search? Reddit? YouTube? A friend's modlist? I'm building ModOrNot around the discovery step.

Only 0.2% of the Steam Workshop items in our snapshot have 100K+ subscribers. 16,514 out of 7.87 million. The top of the leaderboard is a tiny club. What interests me is how the next breakout gets found.

Here's a wild Steam Workshop number:1,406,491 items had ZERO current subscribers in our Oct 29 snapshot.That's 17.9% of the tracked catalogue.Publishing is easy. Getting discovered is the real challenge.

Publishing is easy. Getting discovered is the real challenge.

I stopped treating the Steam Workshop like one giant leaderboard. In ModOrNot's Oct 29 snapshot: 7.87M items across 402 games. But "most subscribed" and "worth discovering" are two different questions.

Skins reach 1,000 subscribers 60% of the time on the Steam Workshop. Custom scenarios: 4%. ModOrNot held the game fixed and measured the mod's own type instead. Within one game, the file type swings the odds by up to 41x. Playable content is the hardest kind to get discovered.

ModOrNot uses 1,000 subscribers as its yardstick for a mod that worked. But that bar means wildly different things per game: in one game a top-100 spot costs 4 subscribers; in another, 1.2 million. A 1,000-sub mod is No.1 in six games — and rank 137,101 in Wallpaper Engine.

Favorites look like the warm signal on the Steam Workshop. ModOrNot tested it. A mod that gains a favorite today gains a subscriber tomorrow 63% of the time — 15% on the days it doesn't. But 84% of the days a mod gains subscribers, it gains no favorite at all. Real, but thin.

A ModOrNot research finding surprised me: 91% of Steam Workshop modders never publish in a second game. The catalogue looks like a vast cross-game network. The people behind it mostly stay in one corner. Measure the people, not just the pile.

My $1B one-person-company thesis doesn't get proven by a clever tweet. It gets tested in small, measurable loops: Build ModOrNot. Help someone discover a mod. Learn what they searched for. Improve the product. Find the next user. Then repeat.

The question for this two-week experiment isn't how many tweets went out. It's whether more of the right people discovered what I'm building. I'll judge the next iteration by relevant conversations, product visits and returning users—not post volume.

I'll judge the next iteration by relevant conversations, product visits and returning users—not post volume.

For a gaming discovery product, which would you build first? Better search Platform filters A personal watchlist Weekly breakout charts Creator profiles I'm deciding what reduces the most friction on ModOrNot.

My content calendar should be a hypothesis, not a script. If ModOrNot changes tomorrow, my upcoming posts should change with it. The publishing slots stay. The evidence improves. A scheduled post is not a reason to publish stale information.