Dividend

My first board publishing company started strong, but ended up a financial disaster. 

I lost my initial ‘investment’ and 1/3 of the Life Insurance money I put in when I tried to go pro.

I started another. Some people never learn.

This one is going much better.

Thanks to Kickstarter and the popularity of FlickFleet, Eurydice is doing much better than Reiver Games ever did.

After the last Kickstarter we had enough cash in the company that I could withdraw my initial investment.

And now Paul and I are taking a small dividend.

Which game's money are we paying ourselves in?

We’re profitable because we don’t pay ourselves salaries for the many hours we work in our evenings and weekends.

We’ve earned a modest payout.

This one is doing much better.

Maybe I have learned something...

 

Done

Paul shipped the final rewards for our third Kickstarter on Friday.

One month early.

Paul and his family have their living room back.

All gone now.

Some of it shipped late due to COVID-19 related acrylic shortages.

But it's done now.

Now we can focus on what comes next.

We've a few games in the pipeline.

None of them ready yet.

They need playtesting.

But I can't meet anyone. And I hate solo-ing games.

This is the hard bit. I've been keeping busy until now with the books. And the accountants. And Kickstarter. And the website. And the marketing.

Now I need to focus. 

And do the thing I hate.

I can't wait to be able to playtest in the flesh again.

Independent

If I had to describe Eurydice Games in a word it would be Independent. Not in the Indie sense. Though we're that too.

Independent in the sense we do everything ourselves.

Self reliant. To a fault.

Not because I'm a control freak (though I probably am). But because it's free. In money, if not in time. And we started with very little money.

It opens doors. 

We design the games ourselves. No royalties.

Paul makes the games by hand in his garage. It means we can do small runs: 200-400 copies. Which costs a lot less than the 1,000 minimum order of your standard Chinese factory.

And ships them himself. So no freight and fulfilment charges.

I do the website. And the graphic design. And the marketing. And the social media. And the bookkeeping. So no contractor fees.

But things are getting missed. 

Due to lack of time. We have jobs. And families. 

And now we have some money.

Independent doesn't scale.

Time to lose control.

Letting Go

I'm a tolerable graphic designer. Or passable maybe. Adequate.

I really enjoy doing it, but I don't have a flair for it.

Until now, to keep costs down, I've done it all myself.

The website.

C-

The game boxes. The rules. The cards.

But it's homemade. And it looks it.

Thanks to the success of our last kickstarter we've finally got some cash in the bank.

We're thinking of investing it in some professional graphic design.

Make the website and the games look much better.

They really need it.

I'll miss it though.

Website

We need to up our game to be more successful.

One part of that is more website sales.

Our website is largely based on my previous game company’s one. It’s pretty dated.

A bit 00s!

I’ve created it by hand using HTML and a little bit of JavaScript.

Like the last one it had PayPal buttons for payment. Again pretty dated.

As part of a larger effort to create a better website, I’ve integrated card-based payment using Stripe as the (default) option. And done some re-design.

It’s still using a button per product though - no shopping cart. But it looks much nicer.

And the processing fees are cheaper.

We had our first Stripe sale last week. It works!

It’s a first step.

Next we need to completely overhaul our website so it doesn't look so homemade. And dated.