Derek Johnson

Print-and-play board game + facilitator guide for college courses in philosophy, business ethics, and AI policy.

Same intellectual frame as Exodus — Maslow's Hierarchy as a tech-tree — without the engineering build. A 60-card resource deck simulating colony survival decisions around Maslow tiers, a 4-page PDF facilitator guide, and a one-page rules sheet can be produced in approximately 80 hours using Canva or Adobe Illustrator. Colleges use physical games precisely because they bypass IT procurement approval cycles, meaning the 14-month district-approval wall that kills digital edu-products does not apply. Distribution via professor-network word-of-mouth through LinkedIn academic groups, ResearchGate, and department mailing lists. The $49 price point is well within an instructor's personal spending authority — no purchase order required.

Validate: Cold-email 20 philosophy and business-ethics instructors with a one-paragraph pitch and a mockup PDF. If 3+ reply with genuine interest, pre-sell 5 copies before building. Total: 8 hours outreach + 2 weeks waiting.

Risk: Ceiling is structurally low — $49 × 200 sales/year = $9,800. Reaching $2k/month requires 490 annual sales, which demands a marketing funnel the professor-word-of-mouth channel may not sustain without a second distribution layer (TikTok academic creators, YouTube curriculum-design channels).

A $9/month newsletter for instructors and corporate L&D professionals on applying Maslow's framework to AI ethics curriculum design.

The conceptual insight behind Exodus — that Maslow's Hierarchy maps cleanly onto AI capability progression and resource ethics — is genuinely underexplored in curriculum-design literature. A Substack covering this framing, with one essay per week (2–3 hours writing), builds an owned audience without engineering overhead. Target audience is college instructors and corporate learning-and-development professionals who design AI ethics training. The $9/month price point means 112 paid subscribers = $1,008/month. At 225 subscribers = $2,025/month, which is reachable within a lifestyle envelope if the content lands with the niche. The curriculum kit becomes the first paid product upsell for subscribers.

Validate: Publish 3 free issues, share in 5 LinkedIn academic groups and 2 L&D communities (Learning Guild, ATD forums). Count organic shares and free subscription rate after 30 days. If 100+ free subscribers with >5% engagement, launch paid tier.

Risk: Substack is crowded and educator discovery is slow without a paid acquisition budget. Organic growth in academic niches compounds over 12–18 months, not 6 — which tests the lifestyle rubric's six-month window.

A $29 one-time Notion template pack — 5 pre-built course-design frameworks using Maslow's Hierarchy applied to tech ethics, AI policy, and resource management pedagogy.

Notion template marketplaces (Gumroad, Notionery, Creative Market) have established educator-buyer behavior at the $19–$49 price point. A pack of 5 curriculum frameworks (one per Maslow tier applied to AI scenario design, plus a facilitator rubric) is a 30–40 hour build requiring no specialized skills beyond document layout and curriculum structure. Distribution is passive once listed — Gumroad and Notionery have SEO traction for 'teacher templates' and 'curriculum frameworks.' The $29 price means 70 sales = $2,030/month, which at a modest 2–3% conversion from organic search traffic requires approximately 2,300–3,500 monthly template-page visitors — achievable within 6 months with one or two well-placed LinkedIn posts reaching the educator audience.

Validate: Build one template (Maslow Tier 1 AI safety scenario framework), list it free on Gumroad for 30 days, measure downloads and qualitative feedback. If 50+ downloads with 3+ instructors leaving notes about classroom use, build the full 5-template pack and charge $29.

Risk: Template markets are commoditized and race-to-$0 over 12–18 months as competitors undercut. The initial sales window is real; durable income requires a follow-on product or subscriber list to cross-sell into.

Gap: The gold standard for design-thinking curriculum kits sold directly to educators. Physical, tactile, sold through department budgets without IT approval. Proves the $49–$75 educator-kit market exists. Exodus curriculum kit would compete for the same line item in a professor's personal budget.

Gap: Free, authoritative, and preferred by instructors with tight budgets. Any paid curriculum product must offer hands-on, participatory value (a game, a simulation exercise) that MIT OCW passive lecture notes cannot replicate. The curriculum kit's physical-game format is the differentiator.

Gap: The most direct comparable to the curriculum-kit adjacent — a role-playing game curriculum used in 600+ colleges globally. Proves the market exists for active-learning game curricula at this price point. The certification requirement is a distribution moat and an ops burden the curriculum kit should avoid.

Gap: Direct competitor to Exodus as a digital game, irrelevant to the lifestyle-adjacent curriculum kit. Included to mark where Exodus would land in the digital-game market if built — AAA polish, $44.99 price, 11-Bit marketing budget. A solo developer at <10h/week cannot compete on this shelf.

Gap: Platform for digital tabletop games that serves the overlap between digital-sim ambitions and physical-game-like design. A Maslow tech-tree game could be prototyped and tested here for free before committing to physical print-and-play production — relevant as a validation channel for the curriculum-kit adjacent before the $49 product exists.

At <10h/week, the low-end estimate (4,200 hours) is 8 years of part-time development. This single number is the lifestyle rubric's show-stopper for Exodus as pitched.

Relevant to the curriculum-kit adjacent. A well-positioned print-and-play educator game on Kickstarter can fund production and validate demand simultaneously. Median is modest but achievable at lifestyle hours with strong niche positioning.

The $49 curriculum kit price sits comfortably within an adjunct's personal spending threshold — no purchase order required. This is the single most important distribution insight for the lifestyle-adjacent: price below the approval threshold, distribute through personal educator networks.