BigBubble

BigBubble is a wall of floating bubbles, each one a startup's logo, and the pitch is exactly as simple as it sounds: "your startup's logo, floating among everyone else, pay more to take up more space." A dollar gets you on the wall. After that, you pay to grow your bubble bigger than the ones around it, which is the entire game.

How it makes money#

It charges for visibility, and more specifically for the very human urge to be bigger than the bubble next to yours. The dollar entry is a smart, frictionless hook, cheap enough that a curious maker just tries it, and once a few bubbles are competing for size, paying to grow becomes its own little status game. At its best a busy wall funds itself, because every bubble that grows raises the bar for everyone already on it.

The honest read is one this directory has already written once, for WordWar, because BigBubble is the same idea in a different shape. It is an attention product wearing a game's costume. The payments only continue while the wall is somewhere people actually look, and a novelty's attention is exactly the thing that fades. The founder seems to know it, he has already floated selling it, which is often what happens when the fun of building the thing outruns the work of keeping it alive. The mechanic is clever and the hook is real. Whether it is a business comes down to the same thing as everything else here: can it stay loud. See the rest of what its builder is shipping.