Research and business hypotheses

This document separates what should be tested from what is currently known. No market-size estimate is asserted.

Research questions

1. Which users experience “the unit is too large” as a frequent publishing or creation problem?
2. Does card structure improve reuse enough to matter?
3. Which first wedge—publishing, games, archives, or education—produces the strongest repeated loop?
4. What visual constraint feels productive?
5. Do users value portable exports and lineage before lock-in becomes a problem?
6. Who pays: individual creators, collaborative workspaces, institutions, audiences, or hosts?

Competitor taxonomy

The project overlaps several categories without claiming that any one competitor offers the same model:

Category	Representative evidence	Card Commons distinction to test
Visual design	Canva creates visual artifacts and websites	structured object remains meaningful across render contexts
Page publishing	Notion publishes workspace pages as sites	the atomic unit is a portable card rather than a workspace page
Serialized publishing	Substack publishes posts, newsletters, audio, and video	cards can also compose games, collections, and protocol exports
Knowledge collection	Are.na connects blocks in channels	cards add authored surfaces, publication state, and optional play
Virtual tabletop	PlayingCards.io provides customizable synchronized play spaces	cards persist as addressable publishing objects outside sessions
Open social protocols	ActivityPub exchanges social activities between services	Card Commons first specifies the portable object and leaves federation open

These are positioning hypotheses based on current product documentation. Competitive research must include hands-on task comparison, pricing, export, rights, APIs, and switching behavior.

Interview program

Recruit 4–6 participants in each initial workflow:

• independent visual/text publisher;
• party-game designer or facilitator;
• educator, archivist, or collection maker;
• developer interested in portable content.

Use observed tasks, not concept interviews alone:

1. publish one bounded idea;
2. create 20 related objects;
3. change their shared visual identity;
4. reuse one object in another context;
5. export and explain ownership;
6. remix another person's object.

Record time, failure, workaround, confidence, and return intent. Do not ask participants whether the abstract idea is “good.”

Commercial hypotheses

Hosted workspace subscription

Hypothesis: creators and small teams will pay for private workspaces, expanded storage, generation credits, advanced templates, custom domains, analytics, and collaboration while the protocol and local tools remain open.

Institution and education plan

Hypothesis: schools, archives, workshops, and cultural organizations value managed groups, moderation, durable collections, role controls, provenance, and export guarantees.

Transactional services

Hypothesis: print fulfillment, premium generation, and paid template or game distribution can become optional services. A marketplace is not an MVP assumption because it creates moderation, rights, payment, and discovery costs before core retention is known.

Open-core boundary

The proposed open boundary is:

• open protocol, schemas, examples, import/export, reference renderer, and basic self-host path;
• paid hosted operations, collaboration, administration, storage, generation, analytics, domains, and institutional controls.

This boundary must be tested for trust and sustainability. It is not yet a pricing commitment.

Experiments

Experiment	Evidence sought	Decision
Concierge card publishing	repeat use after first published card	whether publishing is a viable wedge
100-card game build	time saved by table editing and validation	whether game creation is a viable wedge
Cross-context reuse	one card used in public, collection, and game views	whether portability creates visible value
Export test	successful import by an independent prototype	whether protocol investment is real
Pricing interviews after use	tradeoffs against actual workflow value	which capabilities belong in paid hosting

Evidence discipline

Every externally checkable statement used in the website or deck maps to research/claims.md. Claims are verified, inferred, or hypothesis. A source confirms what another system does; it does not prove demand for Card Commons.