How a Card Game Exploded into a Global Movement

Below, 5 genius strategies We're Not Really Strangers founder and CEO Koreen Odiney used to build and hyper-charge her millions-strong community

I first encountered We’re Not Really Strangers or WNRS (rhymes with “winners”) a few years ago on Instagram. Amid a sea of Insta-sameness, the brand’s visually arresting images of posters and billboards on anonymous city streets featuring statements such as, “Stop carrying old feelings into new experiences” and “Don’t resent someone for something you clearly haven’t communicated” stopped me mid-scroll. 

It turns out I wasn’t alone in that response. We’re Not Really Strangers, which is based on a game former model and photographer Koreen Odiney created to serve as a “gateway to instant intimacy,” has a few other Instagram followers: 2.2 million at last count. And they’re wildly engaged.

That game—part BFF, part life coach—is predicated on the idea that getting people to answer thoughtful, soul-searching questions of themselves and others can help foster more intimate, meaningful connections. It consists of three levels:  Perception, Connection and Reflection. The final card, Intention, directs players to exchange a folded note with their partner, which they’re only allowed to open after they’ve parted ways, the goal being that by the end of the game each person has an authentic expression of feeling from the stranger with whom they’ve just connected or the person they already knew, but with whom they’ve connected more deeply. While Koreen can’t share specific sales numbers, the game has been picking up steam globally, with press (Forbes, Vogue), a popular clothing line, and partnerships with cult online series’ like Red Table Talk.

WNRS would not exist with an extremely engaged community—one that is quickly exploding into a bona fide movement, thanks to Koreen’s vulnerability and savvy. Here are 5 takeaways from our conversation you can use to super-charge whatever you’re building.

1. Find your flow and the rest will follow   

It sounds trite, but for Koreen, it was true.

At 16, and coming off her first heartbreak, Koreen was looking for a way to heal. A keen photographer who’d always loved connecting with others through her camera but who feared showing her imperfections, she decided the best way to process her feelings was to seek answers from those who’d been there before her.  After school one day, she went out onto Ventura Boulevard, took photos of strangers and asked them questions such as, “Did you ever get over your first heartbreak? How did you do it?” Connecting with others and hearing their answers helped her feel better. Although she didn’t know it yet, those exchanges became the seed for We’re Not Really Strangers. 

For years, she continued to photograph and interview people and document her encounters on her personal Instagram account. She sensed there was something worth developing there, but it wasn’t until she asked to photograph a man reading poetry who told her as she was leaving that one day she’d write a book called '“We’re Not Really Strangers” that she had landed on her handle—and the name of her future product.

Looking back, she doesn’t know how she got up the nerve to ask strangers such personal questions. She just knows she felt compelled to do so. “It felt exactly like the thing I should be doing, which I think is a big testament to the idea that when you’re in flow, and doing what you’re supposed to be doing, things that seem impossible to someone else flow naturally to you.”

2. Scaling slowly has its advantages. But eventually you just have to hold your nose and jump.

Turning her passion for photographing and asking strangers personal questions into a product and community took her almost four years. “It was a very long journey,” she says, but playing the long game allowed her to continually iterate the game.

For instance, seeing an image on Instagram one day gave her the idea to make the Dig Deeper cards transparent. (The cards, which players get to use once per level to encourage transparency, were originally black). While spending years making tweaks of that nature may seem like procrastination, Koreen believes that taking that time helped her acquire insights and make connections that allowed her to evolve the game, refine it and get it right. Along the way, she felt oodles of self-doubt and pressure from people close to her who told her to just put the thing out there already. While she saw small signs that the game was resonating—friends began picking up one of her prototypes before going on dates and giving her great feedback afterwards—she feared that if she wasn’t in the room playing along with people, they’d get confused. In the end, it was her businessman boyfriend, who’d learned to see failure as information, not devastation, who finally urged her to put the game out into the world. That, and fact that “it finally got to the point where everyone in my life knew I was working on it and it just got more embarrassing not to put it out there.”  

3. If you let emotion dictate the shape of your product, it will be more likely to connect with people.

Koreen’s biggest challenge in creating WNRS was figuring out its gamification elements. How, she wondered, would she differentiate WNRS from the other question-focused games out there, and create a game that doesn’t just involve drawing cards, but also allows players to have an experience? 

She thought about the emotions she wanted people to feel when they played, which led her to think about the different levels of the game as if they were acts in a movie. She then designed specific questions to elicit the feelings she wanted people to experience during each “act”. 

For Level One, she aimed for a light-hearted vibe that would prompt people to laugh and say, “Oh my god, What?! Really?” Level Two was about breaking down people’s barriers, so those questions were more intimate and emotional. For Level Three, she designed questions to elicit feelings that would make people feel “warm, seen and validated.” Putting emotion at the center of her product in that way had a big influence on how people connected with it.

4. Realness fuels growth.

When Koreen began building WNRS, the idea of “growing a community” was a foreign concept. She just knew she wanted to promote authentic connections, so kept focusing on developing the game in a way that would touch someone so personally they’d naturally want to tell others about it. 

At one point, a “massive influencer” offered to partner with her in exchange for what was essentially a 50 per cent cut.  While the deal was tempting (“in my head having a huge star influencer promote your product was how you made it”), ultimately it didn’t feel right, and she passed.  Instead, drawing inspiration from Simon Sinek’s Start With Why, she began to create artwork featuring WNRS themes like vulnerability, connection and shame and post the artwork, Banksy-like, on street corners. (A key element of the brand’s success is the way it straddles the analog and digital worlds via brilliant guerilla marketing efforts). When one of her favorite Tumblr bloggers posted one of her images, it blew her mind that something she’d created could be shared by someone she followed and loved so much. That experience gave her a boost, and from there “things just kind of evolved.” Eventually she figured out she could scale more quickly if, instead of going out with a friend in the dead of night to put up posters, she could just make them from scratch on Photoshop, and she began creating posts with sayings that didn’t even mention the game. 

In the beginning, she also conducted IG polls to see if anyone else was feeling the way she was feeling that day (“Are you anxious?” “Having invasive thoughts?” “Feeling dark emotions?”). It turned out that many people were, and their responses not only immediately made her feel less alone, they reinforced that if she was feeling that way, most likely someone else was too, so she kept posting personal content. Since it’s hard to guess what other people are feeling, she focused on posting content that felt real to her instead.  She acknowledges that, while everyone has their own version of what that means, ultimately it comes down to how you can touch others in a personal way and make them feel seen and understood. “People always talk about wanting to work with influencers, but the thing that’s really interesting to me is that on a human level we’re all influential to the people in our lives, so if someone sees something and wants to share it with their friend, to me that’s the greatest compliment, and also the most powerful because that’s how a community actually grows.”

5. Immediacy drives engagement

Individuals typically do better on Instagram than brands, but WNRS’s Instagram account bucks that trend—its engagement is off the charts (by comparasin, Beyonce and Justin Bieber’s IG accounts don’t hold a candle to WNRS’s when it comes to engagement). So what’s Koreen’s secret? Partly it’s the fact that she cultivates a direct relationship with as many followers as possible via IG and via texting plaform community. She also attributes the brand’s high engagement to the fact that she’s not only putting out highly personal content, but because of the immediacy of her content—she is often posting about an experience she has had (or is having) in the exact moment she’s posting it, versus creating content in advance and putting it in a calendar. “I really like the creativity of not being so planned and how just the morning or night of I might think of something and that’s the thing I want to go with.” 

She also uses Twitter as a testing ground for content to use on other platforms, often Tweeting content “just to see what the response will be.” Often, she’ll get comments like, “Are you a spy? How do you know I’m going through this right now? I just got off the phone with an ex. How did you know?” Says Koreen: “Just keeping what you put out there extremely personal is the best piece of advice I can give. Make it really honest and true to who you are.”

Want to hear more from Koreen? Check out our full hour-long conversation on The Digital Campfire Download here.

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