Improvement

Last financial year was awful.

We ran a Gamefound campaign during the year but didn't fulfil it until this year.

So all the costs.

And none of the sales.

We kept our cashflow up by running Meta ads.

Lots of Meta ads.

They worked.

Sorta.

We ended the year with some cash.

But made a massive loss.

The ads were barely paying for themselves.

This year is better.

We fulfilled a Gamefound campaign, but didn't run one.

All of the sales and few of the costs!

We've also massively reduced the ads.

They are still trickling along.

But ad spent is way down.

We're on course to have our third best year of sales.

And our second best year for profit.

Next year we're looking to do more events.

FlickFleet does well at shows

Run a Gamefound campaign and fulfil it.

Plus another new game I hope.

Awareness

One of my daily habits is now business development.

Every day I try to do something to drive Eurydice Games forward.

Some days it's tiny.

Some days it's big.

But progress. Every. Single. Day.

I group it into three categories:

• Awareness - introducing new people to FlickFleet and our roll and writes.
• Sales - driving sales among those who know.
• Strategy - longer term work on new products, new ideas, new markets.

We're still not at the point where we're sustainable outside of crowdfunding or conventions.

An ordinary month's web sales don't cover our overheads.

Last year I tried to fix that with ads.

It fixed the cashflow, but broke the profitability.

We spent way too much on ads.

This year I'm trying something different.

I've scaled the ads right back.

I'm trying to do more social media.

More reaching out to press.

Longer campaign previews.

I've even started a Tiktok.

It's pushing me out of my comfort zone.

This is excruciating!

I have a face for radio and a voice for silent movies.

But I'm giving it a try.

It's a low effort thing that might pay off given time.

Ads

We've spent a lot of money on Meta ads over the years.

Slowly upping the ad spent on each FlickFleet campaign.

Even spending a little on the roll and writes.

It's brought in pledges, I'm sure of it.

Last year we tried something different.

Tried to run the company more traditionally.

Using (more) ads year-round to bring in enough sales to cover overheads.

It worked.

Sort of.

The overheads were covered.

Cashflow was mostly stable.

But the ads didn't perform well.

The ad spend was so high we made a massive loss.

This year is much better because we've recognised the sales from last year's campaign.

And all the costs hit last year.

And we're spending a lot less on ads.

The small amount we are running is performing pretty well.

... according to Meta.

In my experience, that doesn't scale well.

Our last crowdfunding campaign for Gal4Xeon was our best roll and write by a factor of more than 2.

And we spent nothing on ads.

Not a penny.

We're not quite covering our overheads.

Except for events and good weeks of web sales.

But we're not burning cash.

Photo by Jp Valery on Unsplash

I'm considering not advertising the next FlickFleet campaign.

I'll need to do something else to bring in followers and backers though.

I've got a few months to think on that...

Diversify

I’m back from my holiday.

Rested.

And raring to go.

I have two things to focus on.

The pledge manager for Box of Xeno Flicks 1.

And global diversity.

55% of our sales go to the US.

Trump’s tariffs don’t affect us yet.

But he’s unpredictable and anything could happen.

So we need to diversify.

Photo by CHUTTERSNAP on Unsplash

Away from the US.

And our reliance on FlickFleet.

We have three other products. All print at home roll and write games.

Which are tariff-free.

And easy to sell to anywhere.

I’m advertising those in our top fifteen countries.

The US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and a chunk of Europe.

Added bonus: there’s no cost of goods sold or shipping to pay for.

So the ads don’t have to cover those costs.

But I also need to focus on the pledge manager.

Coming within a week or two I hope…

Adfound

Box of Xeno Flicks 1 is live.

And funded.

In 9 minutes.

Still doing worse than our last campaign, at the moment.

We've only just started running ads though.

Which is unusual.

Usually we run loads before the campaign starts.

Then more during.

This time we're pretty much only doing it during.

Which is interesting.

Because those early backers came from our mailing list.

Or Facebook group. Or Discord. Or Bluesky.

Or the nearly 200 followers we picked up during the week our campaign was approved and in the Upcoming section on Gamefound.

With our later ad spend this time, we might see a better second half of the campaign than we've had previously.

Also we're using Adfound.

It's Facebook ads. Managed by Gamefound.

They claim impressive performance.

Way better than we've managed in the past.

Will be interesting to see if that holds true for FlickFleet...

But it's off to a good start.

Despondent/Enthused

It’s been a weird week.

I’m still trying to get to the point where web sales cover overheads and we have a viable business that doesn’t rely on Crowdfunding to keep us afloat.

I’ve upped the ad spend, hoping to boost sales.

Now sales are just covering ad spend instead.

And with Trump on the horizon our games are about to get 20% more expensive for Americans.

That’s half of our customers.

Could have been worse: at least we don’t make them in China.

I’m feeling a bit despondent about it.

On the plus side, I finally joined Bluesky.

Come find me!

I moved from Twitter to Threads a while back.

It’s been fine.

But I missed my gaming chums.

The vast majority of the #CraftWednesday crew weren’t there.

Within hours of joining Bluesky, it felt like I’d found most of them again.

I’m feeling enthused.

I’ve found my team again.

Split

My focus has been split this week.

Photo by Lena Taranenko on Unsplash

Partly trying to fix the issues with the ads.

Partly preparing for next weekend.

For the third year running Paul has booked a remote lodge for a long weekend of gaming.

It's in the arse end of West Yorkshire.

Surrounded by the Yorkshire Three Peaks.

It sleeps about 40 people in bunks.

There's no mobile signal, and the first year there was no WiFi either.

Just gaming.

With great people.

All friends of Paul's.

I'll be there for 48 hours.

Driving down after work on Friday, coming home on Sunday night.

I'm really looking forward to a weekend of gaming with great people.

Some walking in the wilds.

And maybe even some playtesting.

When not focused on fixing the ads, I've been trying to get a new version of my troll game ready.

For the weekend.

Fingers crossed!

Learning

Our ads are stuck in the learning phase.

At least partially because I’m still in my learning phase.

Our ads should be showing FlickFleet to those people who might like it.

At the moment it’s either not showing them to the right people.

Or not interesting to the right people.

Not working yet…

I need to spend some time working out how to improve the targeting.

Or improve the ads.

Meanwhile Paul is boxing and parcelling the rewards aiming to ship them in the next month.

Early.

And I’ve started the Gamefound page for my next Roll & Write.

Lots to do.

Lots to learn…

Advertising

We have a great product in FlickFleet.

It has loads of fans.

People love it when they are introduced to it at conventions.

But our ads perform pretty poorly.

I've tried something new this week.

15 second videos of the game.

Taken at the UK Games Expo.

It's way more successful at driving traffic to our website.

But not helping with sales at all.

I really wish I had the time to work out how to do advertising right - I'm sure we could do much better!

Opportunities

I've spent this week working on two things.

Some 'proper' ads.

Which aren't working well yet, but might in the future.

And a business opportunity.

Which could be transformative.

It is, yet again, a busy time.

Meanwhile, Paul has got the laser-cutter repaired.

No longer out of action

And is boxing up the US/Canadian orders from the Gamefound campaign.

Now the laser-cutter is repaired we can make up the last few things required and ship them all to GamesQuest to begin their journey to the US.

After that it will be the EU ones and the last few standard rewards.

Fulfilment is well on-track.

Advertising

I’ve started running ads again.

We’ve not run any since the last Gamefound campaign closed.

Sales were great for a couple of months afterwards anyway, and then we almost completely ran out of FlickFleet stock.

So no ads.

Nothing to sell.

Except that’s not true.

New game!

We have our print at home roll and writes: Rocky ‘Roid and The Planets My Destination.

We can’t run out of stock of those - they’re digital downloads!

So I’ve started advertising them.

I’m hoping to get a few more sales of TPMD.

I think it’s a better game than Rocky ‘Roid and has had great feedback.

But we didn’t crowdfund it, or advertise it at all until now.

So sales have been about 1/100th of Rocky ‘Roid!

Crowdfunding works.

Might crowdfund the next one again :/

Deficit

Historically, our website sales have been very low.

Very low.

We lived from Kickstarter to Kickstarter.

Suddenly, last year we started getting some great FlickFleet reviews. 

And since May last year website sales have been amazing. Like two orders of magnitude better.

At times that made sense: a great review, some TikTok coverage, running ads during a campaign.

But it kept going. Once the ads stopped. 

Still amazing.

That great run finally came to an end in February.

Bit of a blessing really, we’ve run out of most things.

But now we’re running at a deficit.

Overheads outstripping sales.

It weighs on me. Saps my motivation. Eats away at our cash.

Takes me back to the dying days of Reiver Games, watching the money pour out of the account.

While I wallowed in self-pity.

Need to get my mojo back.

We should be getting the boxes and the baggies we need to start making everything again just after Paul gets back from his holiday.

That’ll help.

I’ll have to start running some ads again then.

Take some action.

See if we can get it to pick back up.

We need to be covering our overheads at a minimum. 

Hey! Over Here!

This week I’ve been fighting with adverts.

Advertising makes me really uncomfortable.

Weaponising attention.

Photo by Ｋｕｃｈｉｈｉｇｅ Ｓａｂｏｔｅｎ on Unsplash

Then I read “advertising is the act of introducing your product to the people who would want to buy it if they knew about it”.

Advertising now makes me slightly less uncomfortable.

But needs must. We’re now paying Paul’s salary.

Every month when we’re not fulfilling a Kickstarter we’re losing money. That’s not sustainable.

We have a great product in FlickFleet.

And it’s very popular with the few people who know about it.

So how do we get it in front of more people who would love it if they knew about it?

I’ve been fighting with Facebook and briefly Twitter ads this week.

Trying to tweak things to boost their success.

All my changes make things worse.

The ads are barely covering their cost.

I need to up my game.

A lot.

First Time

Marketing is not my forte.

I’m still learning a lot.

Doing things for the first time.

Badly.

But I learn.

And slowly, I hope to get better.

We’re running ads ahead of our next Kickstarter for the first time.

Pointing to our first ever dedicated landing page.

Needs work

It’s not very good.

So I’ll improve it.

Expectations are low for this Kickstarter again.

So we can use it as a learning opportunity.

And hopefully get better.

For the next one...

Serendipity

Sometimes you get lucky. 

Back in June I barely left the house because my MS made me vulnerable to COVID-19. Paul was laid up with it for three weeks. Our website was shut since we couldn’t ship anything. Oh, and the conventions we were hoping to sell our left-over stock at were all cancelled. 

Things looked bleak.

Then I saw a post on LinkedIn for advertising grants worth £3,000 for small businesses affected by COVID-19.

It took ten minutes to apply. I wrote them a sob story. All true of course.

And we won!

Our ad runs this week in the Metro newspaper in London and south-east England.

Never thought we'd do a print ad

I’ve no idea what to expect. It’s completely untargetted but they print over 400,000 copies. Four hundred. Thousand.

I’ve spent the week making some first edition stock in case we get some orders.

Well, That Blew Up.

As I mentioned last week, this week we launched our mini-Kickstarter on Tuesday. It's for a few new ships for our FlickFleet fans and we hoped it would bring in a few more new backers through the magic of the Kickstarter machine.

We set a crazy-low target (we're just buying the bits for a pretty small run of a few ships, so we didn't need much), but even with that we were running the numbers of backers we would need in our head trying to work out if we would be successful. We'd look pretty stupid setting a £500 target and falling to reach it.

We needn't have worried. We funded in 15 minutes. Within 48 hours we'd blasted through all the Stretch Goals most of which we considered a real stretch.

As I wrote this post last night we were almost 1,400% funded and inches away from a sixth Stretch Goal that we had hastily added on later, and still not even halfway through the short campaign:

 That was totally unexpected!

We did several things that are strong advised against on this campaign: no video, no additional reviewers, no advertising, so it could have easily fallen flat. But it hasn't and we're delighted, surprised and delighted.

Considering how well it's doing, we have now started doing some Facebook advertising as well, and that's been surprisingly successful too.

Wonders never cease!

Final Stretch

We’ve less than a week from the end of the FlickFleet campaign now and I’ve been spending the week tweaking components, the Kickstarter page and our Facebook and BGG ads ahead of a big push in the final 48 hours.

One of the things I struggle with is advertising, it’s not something I have any formal training in and sales and marketing don’t come naturally to me, so it’s been difficult. I’m tracking where our pledges come from and so far Facebook ads are doing ok (we’ve had 6 backers for £205 vs. a spend of £181, but we’ve also had three people buy the game from our website via that route too). Of course that’s only counting people who clicked on the ad and immediately backed, if they did any research or searched KS for the project later I have no way of tracking that.

One of our ads

Our BGG ads had 73,700 impressions early in the campaign and only led to 130 clicks to the KS campaign. As yet, no-one has immediately backed, so I’ve no idea whether that has led to anything at all :-(

I’m really hoping we can unlock some stretch goals for our backers and would love to get to around 400-500 backers so we can get the boxes made for us, but that’s looking pretty unlikely now unless the final 48 is absolutely incredible.

Please share the project if you can!

More Advertising

Until now my advertising has been limited to three places:

• BoardGameGeek
• Boardgame News
• In the Greater Games Industry Catalog

Each of these has their pros and cons as you'd expect. BoardGameGeek has a huge number of hits each month and is mostly targeted at the customer. The downside is that one of their revenue streams is to get people to pay money to 'join' the site, and this allows them to block all adverts from the site (I do this!). Since the most hardcore users are likely to be the ones who join, they're the least likely to see my ads, but the most likely to buy games :-( Plus, it's expensive.

Boardgame News comes in a bit cheaper, and in previous campaigns I've had more enquiries from people who saw an ad there than those who saw the same ad on BGG. Again, it's mostly targeted at customers, and the more hardcore ones at that.

The Greater Games Industry Catalog is as you'd expect from the name targeted at industry - shops and distributors. It's pretty cheap to get a page ad in there and they give you a listing every quarter for free so that's good. I've no idea if advertising in there has helped at all though - I've not had anyone mention they've seen my ads in there.

Now that I've got a pretty good distribution network, my next aim is to get more shops stocking and customers buying my games. How to reach that audience? A good question.

A couple of my distributors offer services to their suppliers to market games to their customers (the shops). So customers of mine want me to be a customer of theirs too. Weird.

Alliance Game Distributors the largest distributor in the US have a monthly trade magazine, Games Trade Magazine which they send out to their customers - the US shops. I can give them a wad of cash to place an advert for one or more of my games in the magazine, which would hopefully lead to more sales to the shops and then more customers noticing the games in the stores. It's pretty expensive though.

ACD Distribution, another large US distributor are offering me the chance to place flyers in every order they ship for a few weeks. I can even make the flyers like posters so they serve a triple purpose: raising awareness of my games with the store staff, giving the store owners something to decorate their store with and raising awareness of my games with customers in the store. It's a bit cheaper than the Alliance option and it hits both the shops and the customers. Sounds good. But to be most effective the posters need to be put up in the stores and I've no control over whether or not they will.

Just to make things even more bewildering, I've no experience designing adverts or posters so I've no idea how to make them look good, or even what information to include. I've asked for a back issue of GTM to get a better idea.

Any suggestions of which route is the best to go down, or what information to include?

Advertising In German

Now that all my distributors have got stock, my sales have slowed down. I need to make sure that people are buying my games from shops/online stores, so that they re-stock from their distributors, who in turn re-stock from me.

The long-delayed BoardGameGeek competition will hopefully help, bring the games to more people's attention, and hopefully leading to some sales. Speaking to distributors in Europe, BGG is fairly popular there so hopefully that will help boost sales in Europe - not just North America and the UK.

One of the biggest markets for board games is in Germany though. Lots of modern eurogames are designed and made in Germany, where board games seem to be a very popular pastime. The Spiel games fair is held in Germany and I get my games made in Germany too.

I've a couple of German distributors, who both report that sales of my games have been fairly slow. How can I make better use of the opportunities available in the German market? Advertising on BGG is probably not the best way of going about it. Speaking to one of my German distributors, he recommended advertising on Spielbox one of the big German games websites. I've contacted Spielbox, and it looks like putting a banner on their forums for a month might be both affordable and worthwhile. So I've got to make some banners for my games in German. I've got the tag lines for It's Alive! and Carpe Astra in German already (Michael translated them for the Essen posters), but I'm not sure I'll have room for them on such a small banner (234 x 60) I might just have to go with the title and a background.

The next problem is what to target the ads at? Usually a website banner ad can be clicked, which takes you to a relevant site. I've always pointed the ads I've done on BGG and Boardgame News at the relevant page of my website. But that's in English. Do I do the same, and risk putting off German-speaking visitors? Do I make a German version of that page on my website? Do I point them at a page of Spielbox? That would work for It's Alive! (Michael did a review of it there) but not for Carpe Astra, for which there is no information on Spielbox.

Decisions, decisions. Anyone familiar with Spielbox care to weigh in?

Playtest Central

The adverts have been tweaked slightly following the numerous excellent suggestions I received (thanks!) and sent off. I'm going to run the 'Pre-order before 15th August' It's Alive! one for a week, I'm not sure what to do about the Carpe Astra one yet, it might be a bit too early as there's not much info available yet.

In addition to the adverts I've also been playtesting a lot. Tuesday I played four 2-player games of Carpe Astra solo, trying out Michael's idea. I'm liking it more and more. Then yesterday evening I held the inaugural Reiver Games playtest night. I'm going to try to do them every Wednesday night to try to get through the massive stack of games I've received. Last night only Lisa and Chris could make it, but we played Sumeria and tried out a new one: Codename: Pharaoh (guess what that's about). Pharaoh took a while to get going as I think I misunderstood the rules a few times - they could do with being clearer. Writing a good set of rules is one of the hardest things to do, so I don't knock the designer for the problems I had. I had several questions, the answers for which may well be in the rulebook, but I couldn't find them.

Today my mate Dunk came round, and we played: Carpe Astra, Sumeria Codename: Match (x3) and Codename: Backyard. I really like Backyard, but I think the scoring needs work and the card balance could do with some tweaking too. I'll knock something together.

Dunk also asked me how Jorvik & Artist were going. Despite having given up my job I still struggle to find the time to work on my own designs! Jorvik & Artist are on the back-burner for now while I concentrate on getting It's Alive! and Carpe Astra out.

In other news, I got an email from the manufacturer to let me know that I'll receive some finished bits for It's Alive! tomorrow. These are printed and constructed for me to proof - not finished games. The finished games are due to arrive next week (according to the schedule of a few weeks ago), don't know whether that's still on course - I'll ask the manufacturer tomorrow.