We recently connected with Joshua Marchant and have shared our conversation below.

Joshua, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Let’s jump right into how you came up with the idea?

Ideas, we all get them; some are good, some are bad, some are great, and some are laughable, but then, every once in a while, you get an idea that will change your life completely. An idea that turns your entire life upside down and changes your personality, outlook, and destiny, hopefully for the better. Only my idea happened by complete accident. My idea started from something as simple as a terrible picture I drew of my dog, Roscoe. My idea is called Roscoe’s World.

5 years ago, I was working on trying to come up with an idea for an NFT project, back when I thought NFTs were going to be the biggest thing to take over since the internet was created. It was important to me to create something worth wild. Something that I could sell, not for millions of dollars, but enough to have something as big as all the professional designers had. Normally, I prefer to be completely different than everyone else; I don’t like copying other designers’ ideas. I prefer to have a unique idea of my own making.

One day, I caved to the idea of having a character like the Bored Ape collection that everyone at the time was talking about. But what kind of character do people like more than an ape? Dogs. At the time, my dog had recently died; his name was Roscoe. He was a 13-year-old Miniature Schnauzer. Roscoe had a cyst in his stomach that he was born with. Surgery was not an option when he was a puppy to remove it. The vet recommended I leave it. He said Roscoe could live a normal life with the cyst, but at some point, the cyst would grow too big for his stomach, and he would have to be euthanized. 13 years later, that is exactly what happened. Worst day of my life.

What better way to remember my dog than turning him into a character like the Bored Ape NFT collection? The original idea was to have a newly designed character of my dog, Roscoe, visiting different places around the world. I started with Egypt. I created my first NFT for this new collection of Roscoe in front of the great pyramids in Egypt. I found out what a terrible idea that was that day. I finished this horrible drawing of Roscoe standing in front of “something”, I can tell you it wasn’t a pyramid in Egypt. Trying to save the picture or at least make it look better, I turned the picture into a black-and-white version. It didn’t get any better, but it did give me another idea. I could not sell this picture to adults for any kind of money, but I could sell it for kids, as a coloring page. Or even better, what if I continued and did an entire coloring book of Roscoe in different places around the world? I could sell that.

I got to work designing 15 more places for Roscoe to visit, 5 different countries around the world. I started calling these places POIs, Places of Interest. I did Egypt, Rome, Greece, China, and Japan. After I was finished with the 15 POIs, I felt like the pictures felt empty. There was no life in the pictures. The first 15 POIs were just Roscoe in front of landscapes in those countries I just mentioned. What was I going to do, as I just discovered I cannot draw, so the idea of drawing more dogs in the background of my POIs was not going to work? What if I just added more Roscoe’s, but these Roscoe’s wouldn’t be my Roscoe; they would be variants of my dog Roscoe. They would be famous people from the different places Roscoe visited on his travels. I created 15 more POIs, but this time I changed the original idea again. Instead of Places of Interest, I would do People of Interest. The 15 new POIs I designed were Mayan, Pirates, Vikings, Americans, and English. I loved it, I had 30 POIs with ten different countries, meeting ten different types of people. I called this finished coloring book, Roscoe’s World.

After I finished the coloring book, I didn’t want to stop designing with my dog. I was creating new memories with my dog, even if it was all in my head. I didn’t want to stop. What else could I create to expand on this idea? One day, I was looking at the 30 POI pictures, and I started to see a story unfold right before my eyes. You could go from Egypt to Rome, Rome to Greece, Vikings to England, and England to America. What if you wrote a story about my dog traveling around the world on an adventure? The only problem, I don’t know how to write. I failed every English class I took in school, and I am the worst speller you will ever see. If only you could see how many errors I have made writing this article. There are a lot of red lines, lol. What kind of story am I even capable of writing? Who would be traveling with Roscoe on this adventure? Why is he on this adventure? Who would try to stop him? All of these questions needed to be answered before I could continue. Once again, my original idea changed, except it was no longer changing into something different, but evolving.

After a considerable amount of time. I decided to give this a shot. The story goes like this. Josh and Roscoe are pulled into a different world by accident. They travel the world looking for a way back home. They meet new friends who all resemble Josh’s dog, Roscoe, except these new friends are famous people from throughout history to help them find the portal that brought them here. Unfortunately, a couple of cats, Chloe and Ziggy, have also found this new world, only they want to make this world a paradise of their own, a world without dogs. It’s a race to the finish line to save Roscoe’s World.

Once I had finished the official story, the ideas came flooding in. I created not only a story to be told over a series of books. I also created an activity book with over 80 different puzzles following the events from the story book, 500 different merchandise and products on a website that I taught myself to build, and of course, I finished the coloring book. All of this happened because I had a terrible idea that evolved into the biggest project of my life. 5 years later, I am still working on Roscoe’s World. I am currently writing the 2nd volume in the book series, designing new products, and working every single day to bring my dream world into reality.

Joshua, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

You know it’s funny. If you had told me when I was younger that I would be an author, designer, editor, actor, coder, builder, and animator. I would have died laughing. All of these things were nothing like me when I was younger. I couldn’t write, I couldn’t draw, didn’t know much about computers, and I was not the biggest reader. In fact, when I was in high school, I told everyone that I wanted to be a lawyer. Mainly because I thought they made lots of money, and I loved to argue. I was dead set on becoming a lawyer. I got an internship at Sandy City Hall and took several law classes at Alta High School. Once I graduated, I was ready to start my journey into becoming a lawyer. I was about to enroll in a bunch of pre-law classes at Salt Lake Community College. When my dad says to me, “Josh, before you spend all of your money enrolling in these classes. Why not just take one law class to see if you really want to be a lawyer?” I thought it was a joke, but I decided to listen to him and took a criminal Justice class. Let me tell you, I was so happy I listened to my father. After two weeks, I dropped out. I hated it so much. It was so boring, plus it had so much reading. I was crushed. For the first time in my life, I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life.

It took me 16 years to figure out exactly what I want to do with my life. The year was 2020, as with everyone. I was stuck inside my home for long periods of time. I had decided a couple of years earlier that I wanted to go into business with my father. After many attempts at starting a company together. We finally landed on an idea to build apps. We had an idea to build an app for college students to help them find money for college. As we were figuring out the backend of the app, it was my job to figure out how I wanted this app to look, to design the interface for the app. Only I had no knowledge of design. The only designing I was familiar with was Adobe Photoshop from watching my stepfather using it for his job. The best advice I got from him when I was a kid was that when you want to learn something new, the best thing you can do is to play around with all the buttons and mechanics of the software to figure out what they all do.

I downloaded Adobe Illustrator and just started messing around. I started to build my own logos and played around with the settings and all the tools, and slowly figured out how to design. I really enjoyed using my imagination to bring what was in my head into reality. It wasn’t long before I moved on from building apps to doing just design work. Everything from logos to clothes. It was at this time that I heard about NFTs and started to design NFTs.

After I came up with my idea for Roscoe’s World, that is when I realized I needed to teach myself a bunch more skills in order to build this massive project myself. I needed to learn how to write and design my book so that it stands out from the rest, to animate my designs into a movie or show, and to act and record lines. Record my journey on social media for marketing and building an audience, learn how to build websites, and eventually learning to code my website with interactive elements and special features that you can’t do on a normal no-code website, to build fun and entertaining puzzles and games to enhance the overall project. To create something that has never been done before. One massive project built, created, and developed by one person. Me.

It took me many years to learn everything I needed to build this world, but I did it. I taught myself all of it. I am very proud of everything I have learned to bring this dream of mine into the world. I feel that being self-taught gives you an added edge when creating. I may not know all the terminology or all the different ways to design, but what I do have is the ability not shy away from a challenge. If there is a skill or ability I need to do for Roscoe’s World or any of the other projects I work on, I am not afraid to teach myself how to do it. I am a quick learner, and I am able to pick up what I need to do to accomplish a task, no matter what it is. I have done it time and time again over these past 5 years. When I needed to design the overall look of my book. I taught myself to illustrate. To stand out from all the books out there by creating a unique cover and book design that makes reading fun and engaging that helps kids learn to read. When I was tired of being held back by the restrictions of a normal website, I taught myself how to code a brand new website from scratch. When I wanted to take my book to the next level and create a show. I taught myself how to animate, act, and build an audience by filming the challenges I would face on a daily basis. I am sure I am not done learning new skills. I am sure there will be new challenges that I am unaware of that I need to build, learn, and create something I don’t know how to do. I know I have the ability and drive to see it through.

Now, with that being said, I will say that there is one problem with being self-taught. That problem is more times then not, I feel like a fraud. Because I didn’t go to school to learn any of these skills, I don’t know the terminology or design concepts. I am not a quote-unquote expert in any of these fields. I just do the best that I can for any of the designs or projects that I am working on at any given moment. When I do show off my work, I always have this little voice in the back of my head that says,” they are lying, they don’t really like it. They just don’t want to hurt your feelings.” I can’t help it, I always feel that way, and because I always feel that way, I am consistently looking for real validation whenever I do show off what I am working on or what I have completed. I am always told the same thing: ” Oh wow, that’s cool.” There is nothing I hate more than hearing the words “That’s cool” when I am showing my work to someone. Because saying those words or any variation of those words tells me that you don’t care or have an opinion on what I am showing you. Honestly, I think I would prefer you to tell me you hate it than to say “that’s cool” because if you hate it, then at least that is an opinion. Yes, an opinion I don’t want to hear, but an honest opinion nonetheless.

I remember when I finished my book, I was so proud of it. I had never done anything like that before, and I never thought in a million years I would ever write a book. As most people do when they are proud of something, they show it off. I showed everyone my book, and I always got the same response. “I like it, that’s cool.” It always gave me the feeling that they didn’t really care or like it, but they just didn’t want to tell me the truth, and that feeling was always backed up by the fact that my friends and family, whom I showed my book to, never bought or even read it when I would give it to them. It was nothing but false hope. At the time, I was unable to get any literary agent or publisher to even look at my book. I had sent out over 150 submissions for my book and got back 150 rejections. After a while, you start to look inward at yourself. That may be the reason you can’t get anyone to look at your book, let alone read it, is that you didn’t write a good book, that even though I loved it, maybe I was the only one who did.

I decided that I needed to know. No more little voices telling me lies, no more friends or family members telling me “that’s cool”. I needed to know from someone who does not know me and has no reason to lie to me about my work. I submitted my book to a national book competition called Book Fest. I was very nervous. Finally, the day came when the winners were going to be called out in a live stream of the event. They were going through all the winners; this contest has a lot of categories, so there were a lot of books. As the winners were being called out, I kept getting more and more worried that I didn’t place or win an award, and not winning that would have told me that I didn’t write a good book. Just when I thought I didn’t win, I see my book cover and the name Roscoe’s World being called out. I couldn’t believe it, I freaked out. I actually have a video on my social media channels of me watching and waiting for my book to win. Winning that award was the validation I NEEDED to continue working and building this world. That all the rejections I got had nothing to do with the quality of my work. I later realized, after watching the video over and over again, that the reason my book was announced so late in the stream was that they were announcing the winners in alphabetical order. I ended up winning 3 awards that night. 1st place for Best Children’s Historical Fiction, 1st place for Best Website, and 3rd place for Best Overall Design out of all the books that were submitted.

After getting the validation I needed to keep pushing forward, I no longer have those voices in the back of my head that say “they are lying, they didn’t like it, they just don’t want to hurt your feelings.” Actually, that’s a lie; I still do, I just don’t listen to them anymore. I do, however, still hate the words “That’s Cool”. Just have an opinion, good or bad, as long as it is constructive and not hateful, I’m good with that. As far as the feeling of being a fraud, I still feel that way sometimes. Even though I have written a award winning book, I don’t consider myself an author, even though I have created over 500 different designs for products related to Roscoe’s World and other projects, I don’t consider myself a graphic designer. I don’t consider myself an animator, actor, editor, or any of the things I do to complete a project; I call myself a creative designer. I use my imagination, my determination, and my creative mind to build, write, and create the world of my dreams, the best way I know how, creatively.

Can you talk to us about how you funded your business?

Funding my business, this is a topic I think about consistently. Due to the fact that I don’t have any capital. Things would be so much easier for me if I had money to fund this new project, build my audience, or simply to let people know that Roscoe’s World exists. To let the world know that not only will your kids love Roscoe’s World, but you as the adult, will too. I mentioned earlier that before working on Roscoe’s World, I had several other start-up businesses that I tried to get off the ground but failed. Every single one of them failed due to a lack of funds. Roscoe’s World is no different. Only this time, I am too passionate about this project to simply let it go. Part of the reason I taught myself all these new skills for this project was that I didn’t have the ability to pay someone else to do it for me.

I live my life in a 4-day work week instead of a seven-day work week. I spend 4 days a week working a full-time job. The other half of the week, I spend my life in Roscoe’s World. I work graveyards in a warehouse at night, and during the day, I work on Roscoe’s World. I absolutely hate working my full-time job, not because the job is terrible, but because I am not able to do what I want to do by working on Roscoe’s World full-time. But this full-time job is the only way I can pay to continue my work on this project. I have been working on Roscoe’s World for 5 years, and I wish I were more successful at it. That everything I have built and sell provides me with enough money to be able to continue building and creating new and more exciting products for Roscoe’s World. But it doesn’t, it’s a catch-22. I need money to advertise and promote Roscoe’s World to make money to promote and advertise Roscoe’s World. It’s that old saying, you need money to make money. Truer words have never been spoken.

I do believe in my heart that I would be more successful with Roscoe’s World if I had enough money to advertise, promote, and push the products to where they need to go, but by the time all of my bills are paid, and all the other costs of running and building and inavating Roscoe’s World there is barly or no money left over to do so. I am stuck in this endless loop. In my mind, all I keep hearing is the definition of insanity is repeating the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result, but without the capital to change my patterns, I am unable to expect a different result. This year, I am going to be more focused on promoting. Hence, I decided to do these interviews to help get the word out about Roscoe’s World. I am always looking for new and cheaper ways to push Roscoe’s World to the world, but the problem with that is the cheaper ways very rarly successed. But this year I know it’s my year. Every year since I began this project, I have gotten better and better, and ended the year better than where I started. 2026 will be the year of executions. No more planning, no more building, no more waiting for the success that I feel I am deserving of. This is the year I go out and get it.

How did you build your audience on social media?

Building an audience with social media is a lot harder than it appears. I realized pretty early on with Roscoe’s World that in order to be successful, I needed an audience that loved the world I had built. I had seen many videos of creators or influencers talking about how easy it is to build a following or audience. I feel stupid in saying that because I fell for it. They always say the same thing: if you post once a day for a year, you will never have to work again. It sounds too good to be true, right? That is because it is not true. Over a year ago, I started 4 social media channels for Roscoe’s World. I filmed myself every day as I worked on a new project for Roscoe’s World. I would spend multiple days editing what I had filmed into social media videos. The problem is the execution of the videos. It is not as simple as just posting a video on your channels. Every day, I would record a two-hour video of myself showing off my work, showing others how to build and create using the same programs I did. Then I would edit those videos down from two hours to maybe an hour, after taking out all the boring stuff, mistakes, and errors I made during filming. I would post the video, only to get 1 viewer, that viewer was me.

The problem with that is that no one watches long-form content anymore. So now I had to add an extra step in editing my videos, I would now take the one-hour video and cut it up into 20 3 minute short form videos. The problem with that is I didn’t want to flood my content on the internet, I was trying to build an audince not annoy them to death with my constant uploads. I would take those 20 short-form videos and only post once or twice a day. The problem with that is that one day of filming would take me 10 days of short-form video. Which meant that for one day of filming, I could not film again until ten days later, which is something I could not afford to do. I decided to continue to record videos and hold on to the unedited videos and edit them as I needed them. Once again, that created another big problem. By storing all the unedited videos, I created a massive backlog of videos, to the point where if I asked a question or had something happen, the audience would not see that video for almost 3 months. This created a big problem: how am I supposed to connect with my audience and grow my audience if they were 3 months behind where I was?

The other big problem with social media is that people are not entertained by simply watching a video anymore; you have to create little shows. So I had created 2 shows for each project I was working on. At the time, I was working on writing my 2nd book, I had a show called Designing Interesting Facts, I would show a sped-up version of me designing new POIs for my new book while I had a voice-over telling interesting facts about that POI I was working on. the 2nd project with a show was called Behind the Scenes. I was building an animated Series based on my first book. I would show how I animated by walking them through the process of building a show with each scene. None of those shows worked. didnt gain many followers, and no one engaged.

The 3rd and final problem is the algorithm; no matter which platform you use to post your content, you are a slave to the algorithm. Say something as simple as YouTube on TikTok boom, the algorithm didn’t show your video. Mention your website where they can find more info, boom the algorithm didn’t show your video. Sometimes, for no reason at all, boom, no one saw your video. It was extremly frusturating to work on a video for days, only for you to not see a single viewer. And I know what you’re thinking, maybe your content just wasn’t good enough for viewers to watch it. My answer to that is maybe, or maybe not, but not a single viewer, not one of the millions of people watching content on that app, not one person watched your 3 min video. I doubt that. My theory, which I can not prove, is that any content that has something related to a business, they purposely lowers your views on purpose so that you get mad enough to buy their advertising program. Any time I mentioned Roscoe’s World, my view count for the video was nonexistent. Which, for a channel called Roscoe’s World, made it very difficult not say the name of my business. I got bitter from it. Seeing social media channels pushing copyrighted products, channels that posted videos of them literally filming the wall got millions of view while my videos that took me days to finish barely broke 20 views. I hate to admit that it made me feel that way, but I couldn’t help it. I tried following channels that could help me better work with the algorthm that maybe I am doing something wrong. But the problem with that, you had to be careful of who you watched because the information could be wrong or worse, misleading, like the follow-for-follow trends that pop up from time to time. That if you participated in only hurts your channel because the ones that did follow wouldn’t stick around once they got you to follow or would not watch your video or engage with it. So, as you can see from reading this, it was just one problem after another. Now I still post because I am persistent like that, but I don’t put as much effort into it as I once did. If I am being completely honest, I am not the biggest fan of social media. If it wasn’t for how important I feel growing an audience is to the future of Roscoe’s World, I wouldn’t have anything to do with it. The apps and the other creators make it too difficult to get a leg up.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.roscoeworld.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sin_syndicate/?hl=en
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/152001344578076
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@Roscoesworld
• Other: Tik Tok – https://www.tiktok.com/@roscoes_world0