Exploding Ideas

January 20, 2015 — 9:13pm my friend Adam Post messaged me “guys did a million in 7 hours” and a link to the Exploding Kittens Kickstarter.

Note that Exploding Kittens was produced by The Oatmeal and thus started off with what Gary Halbert would call a “starving crowd” of fans looking to buy something. Hence the spectacular results.

Exploding Kittens -- Kicktraq Mini

That set me down a path of researching what it costs to print a deck of cards which led to the discovery that the print minimums on playing cards are relatively low and that some card printers will even print a single deck of cards — a QTYONE advantage.

Since that message, I’ve been thinking about game design and marketing and publishing. Putting things together.

Dysfunctional Families is now on Kickstarter and just about to hit $1000 in funding. Not 8 million dollars, but it is a start.

There’s plenty more to come — and I’ll be documenting it all here on igpay.com so that whatever I’ve learned in the process can help others do the same.

Dysfunctional Families Card Game - You'll Say Funny Things! -- Kicktraq Mini

DO NOT SCATTER YOUR POWERS

Engage in one kind of business only, and stick to it faithfully until you succeed, or until your experience shows that you should abandon it. A constant hammering on one nail will generally drive it home at last, so that it can be clinched. When a man’s undivided attention is centered on one object, his mind will constantly be suggesting improvements of value, which would escape him if his brain was occupied by a dozen different subjects at once. Many a fortune has slipped through a man’s fingers because he was engaged in too many occupations at a time. There is good sense in the old caution against having too many irons in the fire at once.

from
THE ART OF MONEY GETTING
or
GOLDEN RULES FOR MAKING MONEY

By P.T. Barnum

THE ART OF MONEY GETTING by P.T. Barnum online text

Happy Friday the 13th!

Hi! Things are going great here and I want to wish you a happy (and safe) Friday the 13th!

I’ve got a new ad spot video for Dysfunctional Families – just under 1 minute 30 seconds. Please check it out and share it around.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQE8XAwAhHo

—> SHARE THE VIDEO ON FACEBOOK

–> SHARE THE VIDEO ON TWITTER

We’re almost at $900 — which is amazing!
Thank you so much for making this possible.

I think that at $1000 I’m going to have to come up with something special to celebrate!

Talk to you more on Monday! Have a great weekend!

– Eric

This post originally appeared as a Dysfunctional Families backer update here.

Is the funding goal really only $13? (Dysfunctional Families Kickstarter)

Dysfunctional Families Kickstarter Campaign – Part 2

I received an excellent question from a backer and I am posting the answer as a backer update and also posting it here on the blog.

Is the funding goal really only $13?

Yes, the funding goal this time is $13. This is for 2 reasons:

1. For publicity.
2. Because it IS technically possible.

Read more

QTYONE Business Plan for the Dysfunctional Families Kickstarter Relaunch – Part 1

Between my first attempt to launch Dysfunctional Families on Kickstarter and now, there has been an exciting new advancement in card game printing. DriveThruCards has started offering tuckboxes on single orders of a deck of cards. They are now my #1 choice for Quantity One (the ability to produce ONE end product for a customer) card game production.

This post will describe how I set up Dysfunctional Families as a QTYONE project and will fill in some broad strokes of what would be success levels beyond the minimum and how the project can scale up to a traditional publishing model if it sufficiently successful.

Feel free to use this as a model for setting up your own card game projects and to ask questions below.

Read more

MakePlayingCards is Creating a QTYONE Marketplace

MakePlayingCards.com (MPC) just announced that they will be offering a marketplace so that card creators can sell their creations directly with no upfront fees. This means creators can use them as a QTYONE storefront.

My first printed demo decks of Dysfunctional Families were printed with MPC and I found their printing to be extremely high quality. Very slick and they feel very good to shuffle. For me, it was right up there with buying a “real” deck of cards that was printed in volume. The turnaround time from MPC is also very fast — as it should be from a POD printer.

Read more

Thoughts on Kickstarter Funding Goals

It seems that a lot of Kickstarted projects run into trouble when trying to fulfill their reward levels because of the difficulty of predicting the future. A reward level could have been unexpectedly popular or unpopular and the cost of fulfilling it could be way off from predictions. Stretch goals are sometimes added without understanding their effects on costs.

I’ve looked at how a bunch of creators describe their math and I think that I may have a better simplification of how to do the financial planning.

Read more

Intro to QTYONE: The Game Crafter Enables QTYONE Production

QTYONE

QTYONE is a term I use to describe the ability to create one item and deliver it to a customer. This has a whole bunch of business advantages including the ability to service any order (no matter how small) and removing the need to keep inventory of finished product on hand.

As printing technology has improved, it has become more and more cost-effective to print a single item as a finished product. This is referred to as Print-on-Demand (POD) printing.

Read more