Focus, Collect, Repeat
Phantom Interviews #6
I grew up obsessed with monster taming franchises.
Captured by that magnetic mix of anime, video games and TCG, I quickly fell in love with Pokémon and Digimon. Travelling through a fantastical world – be it organic or digital – while meeting and befriending creatures was a dreamy idea. Of course, the excitement of battling and saving the world only added to my awe.
As I grew up, the need for being productive finally caught up to me. Studies and work gobbled up most of my time, and the childlike wonder and the perk of having infinite time for video games and TV became a thing of the past.
But of course, I would always find the time to play.
While doing my best to be highly productive, I started looking for apps that would help me keep up with all my tasks. Still obsessed with video games, I would value any app with gamification features quite highly.
In 2018, I found Habitica (you might remember this story), which transformed any assignment or chore into an epic quest. I still think it is a solid app for anyone struggling to get motivated or looking for a fun way to get organised.
Way more recently (just last year!) I came across Focumon. Which is quite fortunate, as I have been going through a new Digimon obsession phase (more on that in the future, but I’ve already written a little bit about it).
Focumon is a gamified productivity platform that transforms focus sessions into a multiplayer monster collecting game. Users hatch, train and evolve unique creatures by completing timed focus blocks. Players can join focus rooms with others and enter parties, turning solo work into a shared journey of accountability. Its charming pixel art and character design, along with the social mechanics, make staying focused feel rewarding and fun.
After becoming a respectable Focumon trainer, I finally reached out to Milton Ren, the mind behind the app (he may be our real-life Izumi Kōshirō). We talked about his inspirations for Focumon, what’s next for the app, and what other ideas we can expect from him!
👻 The idea behind Focumon is gamifying productivity and focus, while also adding multiplayer aspects. The result is something that is both playful and community-based. I’m curious about what inspired you to create this platform, and if your own experiences informed what Focumon could be.
So, the origin of Focumon. It is actually the second iteration of a different product, which was called FocusVerse. It was a really stupid product, and I messed up with so many of its designs, but there were like, 10 people that kept using it for a year.
Then at the end of that year, someone sent me a long letter describing every feature I needed to change to make FocusVerse actually work. I thought I owed these few users something.
So I decided to make a better version for them and Focumon was born. But why did I create FocusVerse in the first place?
I used to have super bad ADHD as a kid. I had a horrible time staying focused on my homework and classes. And I usually created some little RPG-esque systems on the side of my notebooks, where I could check off some tasks and gain experience.
And then when I levelled up, I would make some modifications to my character. That RPG motivated me a lot as a kid.
👻 So you had your own paper-based, low fidelity, kind-of-RPG system for your studies.
Yeah.
👻 So Focumon brings that RPG idea to its productivity platform. Another similar app is Habitica, although it focuses more on task and habit management (as opposed to timeblocking), and uses a medieval fantasy setting.
👻 Something unique Focumon brings is its monster taming inspiration, both in its mechanics and aesthetics. Why did you choose this style, and how does it connect with the idea of focus and productivity?
First of all, I really enjoyed Pokémon as a kid. The first I ever played was Leaf Green. And growing up, I had a gacha addiction. It’s kind of embarrassing to talk about it, but the truth is that it feels really good to collect something. So essentially, I built Focumon for people who, like me and you, are collection-oriented.
Habitica, on the other hand, has a more linear progression. And there are a bunch of collections, but it is a secondary aspect. In Focumon, it’s the main mechanic.
So the tricky part for me was to figure out just how much gamification is enough. If you add too little, content runs out very quickly and users lose interest. But add too much gamification and complex systems, it’s easy to turn the whole thing into a full-fledged game.
And I think having a collection-based app is perfect for that. So that went really well with all the inspiration I had from gacha games.
Another good way to keep people around for a long time is to provide infinite content. I mean, not truly infinite… but a continuous stream of new things. And having a collection lends itself quite well to this strategy.
And I say this not only because I want to keep users hooked, but I want them to feel motivated with Focumon: the gacha mechanism is a really powerful tool to bend our brains into wanting something. It’s a great motivator for behavioural change.
So I love using gacha for all my gamification projects, but not its monetisation aspect.
👻 Looking back on your journey so far, what have been some of the biggest challenges in developing Focumon? I’m thinking about any type of challenge: technical, creative, or community-related.
I think it’s less about the craft and more of a psychological challenge to keep me motivated while I work on it.
So, a bit of context… I worked as a software engineer for big corporations for a few years, and realised I didn't like the corporate politics and all the bureaucracy. So I moved to a small startup, and what I ended up realising is that I just didn't like working for other people. So I quit my job in the second year.
This put me in a tough situation because my cash flow was kind of limited. So I needed to figure out something on my own, and quickly.
In the first year of my ‘indie journey’, I followed a guy on Twitter. He talked about an idea, to build one app or product every month for 12 months straight, and hopefully something would work, right?
So I did that for a year, and… nothing worked. But the beginning of that year was when I received this letter from my Focusverse users, and I started working on Focumon.
And fortunately, Focumon has been generating some peanut income for me to cover my utilities and other stuff. So I'm not constantly worried about… I don’t know, going homeless.
But now, I’ve been working on it for a year and a half. I am kind of comfortable with its current state. Focumon is serving, I think, about 50,000 people, who are registered… but there are a few thousand active users. This more active community seems to be getting value from the app, consistently.
👻 This ties well with my next question, which is basically a “to be continued…” What’s next? Are there new features for Focumon on the horizon?
I’m comfortable with it at the moment, as I said. But at the same time, I'm having some motivation issues. And I believe that breaks down to three factors.
The first one is about money. There is not enough cash flow coming from Focumon. So I'm starting to think that maybe I could use my time better if I were to work on something else. Get some more cash, and then come back to Focumon.
The second part is that it is hard to scale Focumon. I see a bunch of issues that need to be addressed. Sometimes there are people posting racist, violent comments on their focus session and personal goals. And these things are kind of tricky to deal with. I was considering some sort of voluntary moderation, or maybe even me moderating everything, or some sort of AI system, which would require a significant amount of thinking and trial-and-error to get right. And that would be a main blocker if I want to grow Focumon to a larger scale.
And the third aspect is that the product kind of reached a 1.0 complete state, where I think that in order to add something, I need to remove something. Otherwise, it would easily fall into feature bloat, and anyone new to it could feel overwhelmed.
So that and the moderation aspect are... like two big mountains in front of me, and whenever I come back to my workspace, I feel like, “Okay, damn, I gotta think about this too”. And it's really hard to solve these issues, right?
So I'm currently taking a break from active development, and I’m focusing on just keeping it running, until I feel right about what to do. I’m a very intuitive person, so I make a lot of decisions based on how I feel. I believe the time will come for me to be motivated again.
And there is one more thing, which is the most asked thing from the Focumon community: a mobile app.
But you see, the web framework I use for Focumon is Ruby on Rails. What it does is essentially generate static web pages on the back end and send it to the front line. So in order to create a mobile app, the easiest way would be to make a browser wrapper.
It’s possible to build an app by wrapping the website in a browser-like container and adding a few native elements. That way, you get some level of interactivity, but at the end of the day it still feels more like a mobile website than a true mobile app. I experimented with this approach, and the overall experience just wasn’t good.
If I were to return to Focumon, I’d prefer to build a mobile app from the ground up, natively. Lately, I’ve been exploring React Native, which is attractive because it allows you to build for both iOS and Android from a single codebase. The mobile version would probably be more streamlined than the website, but starting fresh would also let me reimagine the entire user experience while keeping some of the flexibility of the web version.
Still, that would be a much larger undertaking compared to the first iterations of the project, so I’m still thinking about it.
👻 It’s time for the last question: what’s next for you? Any other ideas that you have been brewing in the background or is Focumon the only creature on your mind at the moment?
What’s next for me? Honestly, I’m still trying to figure out what I’m actually supposed to do here on Earth.
I know I’m good at building software that faces customers directly, and I really enjoy it because it lets me create these little “world-like” experiences. That’s why I’ve been thinking about starting a sort of consumer gamification app studio. The idea would be to make apps that help everyday people in unique ways. I’d also love to contribute to the neurodiversity community, since ADHD is still something I live with on a daily basis.
Right now, I’m working on a calorie tracker. There’s been a trend in AI calorie tracking where you take a photo of your food and the app estimates the calories. The problem is, it’s never accurate. But I figured, even if it’s not precise, the act of tracking already helps. And currently, I don’t think there’s a really good gamified calorie-tracking app out there. So I’m making one.
The app is centered around a character named PakuPaku, who goes on little journeys. For example, in my last test run, PakuPaku’s journey failed because I forgot to feed them. Everything in the app will be animated; I even hired someone to do the animations. Each journey takes about five to six days, and when you complete one, you get to collect something. That’s the basic game loop.
The way you “capture” food in the app is by taking a photo of what you’re eating. My larger goal is to help people eat healthier. Right now, most calorie-tracking apps don’t do a good job at that, because they focus too much on numbers and not enough on motivation. My approach is to use the journey mechanic to keep people coming back, while also motivating them to stick to a healthier diet.
There’s a happiness score built into the app: the healthier you eat, the happier PakuPaku becomes. A higher happiness score increases the chance of unlocking rare items. So yes, there’s also a gacha element… but I want it to have a practical use rather than just being addictive for its own sake.
You can check out Focumon here!
— The motivated ghost,
almoghost.exe (or André Almo if you’re feeling serious) 👻
Focumon looks interesting. I’ve been loving my Focus Friend bean 😁 It’s not really a game but kinda feels like it. I started with 15 min breaks, and went up to 45 mins.