Brandon the Game Dev

In order to self-publish a board game, you will have a lot of responsibilities. These responsibilities include marketing, sales, fulfillment, accounting, and…oh yeah…designing the game. It is a lot to organize and do no matter how many people are involved. Some people find it most effective to work in teams and some people prefer working alone. Famously, I fall into the latter category.

I’ll be making a post about dealing with team dynamics in the near future, but for the time being, let’s just talk about what it’s like to work alone in the board game industry. I want to give you a feeling for what’s it’s like to manage a company of one from firsthand experience.

There are a lot of advantages that come with working alone. You get complete creative control. On contentious decisions, you always get to make the final call. You can be completely agile in your decision-making – quitting something old or starting something new whenever you feel like it. There is no need to negotiate or ask for permission. When it comes to money, you walk away with all the profits if you work alone.

Of course, working alone comes with its fair share of downfalls, many of which are absolutely devastating if you are not ready for them. The immense solitude of working alone can degrade very easily into loneliness. There is no one to run your ideas by. No one will call you out on your character flaws or errors in judgment. No one to proofread your work. There is no one to hold you accountable. There is no one to lean on for emotional support. On top of all this, there are so many demands.

It’s a real mixed bag. I’ve learned a lot about maximizing the good and minimizing the bad over the last couple of years. I’ve got lots of little pieces of advice for you if you choose to go the solo developer route. If you don’t, you’ll probably still find them insightful.

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Make wise use of your creative control. Working alone lets you pursue passion projects that other people wouldn’t care about as much. This can be good and bad since unchecked passion may or may not appeal to customers, depending on how you present it. If you ground yourself in pragmatic concern for what gamers like, though, you’re free to do what you want and make money doing it. If you have a clear sense of what you’re trying to accomplish, there is nothing stopping you from going in that direction. You just have to make sure you are using your creative control wisely to achieve those objectives.

Use your ability to make clean, quick decisions to your advantage. This is by far the biggest advantage that any solo developer can have. There is no groupthink and no meetings eternally dragged out by hemming and hawing over possibilities. There is no analysis paralysis, except by your own hand. A solo developer can think fast and turn their business strategy on a dime if needed. If you have a good sense of judgment, valuable data, and the readiness to make a quick decision, this can be beneficial. If you have problems making clean, quick decisions, then you will lose one of the primary advantages of working alone.

Learn about business accounting and personal finance since you’ll be handling all the money. I’ve talked about how it’s expensive to create games. Since you’ll be shouldering that burden alone, I strongly recommend you get good at business accounting so you don’t make reckless decisions with your own money. I also recommend you take care of your personal finances so that you can make good use of the sales money, if you get it, when it comes in. There is hardly a distinction between company profits and personal revenue when you work alone, so it’s really important that you be rigorous about accounting.

Find people to run ideas by. Want to know a hard truth? You cannot realistically evaluate the feasibility of your own board game ideas. You can’t evaluate the logistics and you can’t evaluate the economics alone. Sure, you can get a bunch of data and compile into a spreadsheet, but you risk codifying your own mental biases into a formula that looks nice and has a sheen of truthiness. That means having others you can rely on – friends, family, play-testers, social media followers – is critical.

You may function well as a solo developer, but you will not function well as an island. Our brains were made to make snap emotional judgments that helped us find food and safe places to sleep way back in the hunter-gatherer days. That’s why you need someone who doesn’t have a strong emotional stake in your success to mitigate your passions. This problem can still hit teams, but it doesn’t hit them quite as hard.

Find people who will check your work and give you honest negative feedback. A crowd at large may help you vet ideas in the earliest, most high-level stages, but they won’t help you refine them. You need good play-testers and good friends of your business who are willing to look at the details and help you. That means you need to meet people online or at cons. One of the great sorrows of working alone as a game developer is that your ability to play-test and refine is limited by the lack of different opinions.

Make yourself accountable to somebody or something. I have the hardest time getting out of bed when the alarm goes off at 6:30, but I don’t have the same trouble running 4-5 times per week or publishing 2 blog posts per week. What gives? If I stumble on my blog post schedule, somebody’s going to notice. Somebody will call me out on social media because they know my schedule. Likewise, while nobody cares about my workout routine, I log all these runs in Runkeeper. I’ll feel like a doofus if I open up the app one day and see a big drop off in my weekly mileage. Waking up when the alarm goes off, though, is low stakes because nobody’s watching, nothing is being tracked, and nobody would call me out unless I showed up to work after 8:00.

If you work on a team, you have deadlines that you have to meet. If you work alone, you’re the only person you have to answer to. Because we all suffer from internal biases, we like to imagine ourselves as being more consistent than we are so we let ourselves off easy when we don’t meet the deadline. My advice to you, should you go into solo game development, is to either track your progress or attract a crowd. Either one will keep you on your toes.

Delegate to freelancers. Even if you do everything yourself, you don’t want to do everything yourself. When it comes to art, certain types of marketing, and other specialty jobs, you should feel comfortable hiring some help if you need it and you’ve got the cash. Your most limited resources as a solo game developer are time and energy. You can come into more money, but you’ll never have more than 24 hours in a day. As far as energy goes, even wise lifestyle choices regarding sleep, exercise, a healthy diet, and good time management will only buy you so much time before you slip into tired mode.

Use automation where it makes sense. Lastly, if you work alone, computers become your friend. You can pay $10/month for Buffer to schedule your social media. You can make a spreadsheet to identify weaknesses in your business so decision-making isn’t so time-consuming. If you’re really tech-savvy, you can write batch jobs and Python scripts to do repetitive digital tasks. If you can save time without cutting corners through wise use of technology, you should do it. Always remain open to learning new computer tricks.

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Personally, I feel like working alone is a blast if you have the right mindset going in. It’s not for everyone, though. I hope this article has given you a clearer idea of what to expect if you’ve considered working alone.

As always, feel free to share your thoughts in the comments below. Particularly, I’m interested to see if you have an interesting anecdote about working alone.

Selling is one of the most nerve-wracking and technical parts of getting a small business off the ground. You must absolutely master it to achieve the financial success you desire when self-publishing a game. When you’ve put in the hard work, it’s only natural to want to reap the benefits.

This crash course is broken into six parts:

1. The Fundamentals
2. Your Emotions
3. Targeting the Right People
4. Keeping Momentum After Launch
5. Sales Techniques
6. Tracking & Optimizing

The Fundamentals

Let’s get a few basic things out the way first. Selling is hard to learn even in the best conditions. Yet so many people end up making it harder on themselves by making a few simple mistakes. These mistakes are dead simple, but easy-to-miss: creating a sales system that doesn’t work, having a fulfillment network that can’t ship on time, or even making a product that’s not that good.

First things first: make sure your game is great. If your game is brilliant, it’ll be way easier to sell than if it’s so-so. The reviews will be better. The play-throughs with customers will be better. More people will talk about it. Perhaps most importantly, you’ll be more confident when you’re selling something. That psychological boost is huge – you won’t feel like a huckster if you completely believe in your game.

User Experience

Whether you sell your game online through your site, online through another site, offline through distributors, or face-to-face at conventions, your process needs to be seamless. If I go on your website, I need to be able to find and read all the relevant information, put the game in my cart, enter my information, and check out without a hassle. Whether you use something like Celery or create your own shopping cart from scratch, the selling system needs to be flawlessly executed from both a technical and a user experience standpoint. Use your own system to make purchases! Double check, triple check, if you must!

Back-End Logistics

As soon as those orders come in, you need to centralize the notifications to go to one inbox. You need to then either manually or automatically field those orders to your fulfillment companies in a timely manner. If you’re fulfilling the orders yourself, you need to be able to get the package in the mail today or the day after. You need to have a well-defined process to get your game to anyone who’s able to buy it as fast as possible without exorbitant costs or damages. You need to be able to work refunds into this process, too. (To learn more about setting up a fulfillment network, see A Crash Course on Board Game Fulfillment.)

I know this reads like several paragraphs of obvious advice, but the simple truth is that there are more ways to screw up sales than there are to get it right. Screw up any one of these three things and you’re going to have an awfully tough time with sales. Likewise, if you get it right, you’ll be able to benefit because you’ll have better control over…

Your Emotions

Let’s not sugarcoat it. Selling puts us in a vulnerable position that, for many people, can drudge up fears of rejection, social anxieties, insecurities, and memories of being cheated by shady salespeople. You need to have a good frame of mind when you’re going in. Sometimes it’s not the lack of knowledge or poor technique that costs us the sale but rather some fear of getting started rationalized away as something else – procrastination shrouded in the dressing of logic.

Remember These 3 Things

1. There is nothing wrong with selling a good product. People buy, sell, and trade things all the time. It is the bedrock upon which our economy is built.
2. There is nothing wrong with asking for money. If someone buys your product, they are making a choice. There is no reason to feel guilt about asking for money. If you do not deceive them or misrepresent your game, you are not taking away anybody’s agency.
3. You will be rejected far more than accepted. Most people just won’t want what you’re selling, but you will still come out okay. You have to be mentally tough when you’re selling something, because even for the best salesperson, you’ll get like 80 no to 20 yes.

Targeting the Right People

If you’re self-publishing, you probably don’t have a whole lot of resources to work with. That means that even more so than established companies, you’ll need a clear sense of target market. Each game you make will have a different target audience and you need to know how to find them and speak to them. Find the right crowd, create the right message, and selling will be a lot easier.

To give you a sense of what your game is like and who it will attract, imagine your game’s location on this graph. You want to find people whose tastes align with where your game falls on the graph.

If your game is thematic, you also want to make sure your theme is a good match for the audience you’re targeting. If you take the exact same game and give it a zombie theme, you might scare off people who would have preferred a more family-friendly theme. It works the opposite way around, too.

You need to make sure you have strong, targeted ways of reaching out to the audience who like games like yours. When growing your social media following, make sure you’re catering people who like games like yours. This makes it way easier to spread the word because 10 super-fans count for more than 1,000 people who are barely paying attention.

Keeping Momentum After Launch

It’s one thing to be able to hype up your game during a Kickstarter campaign. Those are inherently exciting events that put a lot of eyes on new game developers in a short amount of time. Yet even in the midst of launching your game – whether you do so through Kickstarter or another means – you need to be considering “the after.” What happens once that campaign is over? How do you keep the hype going when you don’t have a flashy call-to-action in the form of a Kickstarter campaign?

There are two methods to bring in sales without direct selling. In order for them to work, you need to get the fundamentals I listed above right and you need to have a well-defined target audience.

Community Building

The first method involves building a community. Make a place for people to hang out – a mailing list, a Facebook group, a Discord server…you get the idea. Ideally, the community should be related to your game but not pigeonholed exclusively to the discussion of your game because people would get bored quickly if it were. Having an active community keeps momentum in a passive, unobtrusive way.

Distribution

The second method involves perfecting your distribution model. This can mean getting your game in local gaming stores, online stores, subscription boxes, or convention booths. Find people who sell games like yours in high quantities and start asking them if they are willing to carry your game. They’ll pay you a significantly reduced price since they’ll be marking up the price to take some of the profit themselves, but that is not necessarily bad for you. Choose distributors on a case-by-case basis. Make sure that a) they can sell your game to your well-defined target audience, and b) you’re getting good money from the deal.

Sales Techniques

It’s all well and good to make a great product, focus on the right people, and get a community and/or distributor to carry some of the weight for you. Yet you would be remiss if you thought you could make it without some amount of direct selling. Selling is an unavoidable part of doing business. Fortunately, the two basic forms of selling in the board game industry are dead simple: play the game with as many people as you can and ask people directly if they want to buy it.

Playing your game with somebody is a great way to get them to buy it. In-person is the best way to do this, but you can also use online tools such as Tabletop Simulator to sell board games to people far away from you. A lot of people just don’t see the value in buying yet another board game until they play it and see that they enjoy it.

Sales Funnels

Sadly, playing your game isn’t the most scale-able sales tactic. If you want to succeed in the long run with sales, you need to create a robust sales funnel. A sales funnel goes something like this:

• Leads – these are new people who you have not talked to yet
• Prospects – these are people who you’ve talked to and who might care about your game
• Opportunities – these are people who are interested in your game
• Customers  – these are people who have bought your game

With a sales funnel, you have four objectives: generate new leads, qualify leads by interest to make them prospects, talk to prospects until they become interested – opportunities, and hard sell to the opportunities. You’ll notice that only one of these actually involves asking people to buy directly. You’ll hard sell a lot, asking directly “would you like to buy X”, but only after you have a conversation and figure out what they like.

What’s a Sales Funnel Actually Like?

Here is where sales gets really hard. There is no one-size-fits-all methodology for generating leads, qualifying leads, or getting people interested. The part that most people think is the hard part – asking people “would you like to buy X” and giving them a link – is actually pretty easy. It just makes you tense up like the idea of jumping into cold water. By the time you get to the opportunity stage, you should be getting at least a third of people to open their wallets by asking questions.

To give you a sense of what my sales funnel looks like, I use Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram to generate leads. If they follow me, I consider them a prospect. I reach out to them and if they reply with an interested response, I consider them opportunities. Then I ask them to either buy my game or join my mailing list.

Invisible Rejection

Rejection in sales doesn’t often look like a “no.” Oftentimes, rejection is when a lead never responds to your “hello” message. It looks like prospects hearing more about your game and not being interested after all. Rejection looks like opportunities who disappear when you ask them the “buy” question. To this, all I can say is keep selling even as you get rejected a ton.

Before I conclude this section, I’d like to point out one thing you didn’t see: dropping prices or running sales. While these methods can be great for converting stubborn opportunities into customers, I don’t recommend slashing prices as your modus operandi. Dropping prices is like eating a whole funnel cake – only very occasionally a good idea. The simple fact is that board gamers are not all that price sensitive – just look at the tags on the most well-liked board games.

Tracking & Optimizing

I can give you a full course on theory and technique all day long. I could open up my business notes and tell you everything I do. Yet because your situation is undoubtedly distinct from mine, it might not do you that much good. You need to write down your methods and track your successes and failures. Get in the habit of making notes about your own behaviors and techniques and how they relate to financial data.

Every once in a while – whether it be every week, every month, or every quarter – you need to review your notes. You need to do so dispassionately so you can see the whole truth without your emotions clouding it. If you notice that one day your pitch message is different than the others and it succeeded, you should start using the more successful pitch message and seeing if it’s not just a fluke. Mindfully responding to your unique environment could be the difference in breaking even and being wildly successful.

Final Thoughts

Selling is hard to master. I’m still learning something new every day and I’ll share with you as I know more. It is through rigor, emotional stability, thoughtful messaging, responsiveness to our environments, a high rejection tolerance, and a good old work ethic that we can all become proficient in selling. You don’t have to be Mr. or Ms. Charisma.

If you have any questions or comments, I encourage you to comment below 🙂

Success is not the endgame of Kickstarter projects. Many people think that when a project is funded, that’s it – it’s a victory. This couldn’t be farther than the truth. As many as 84% of Kickstarter projects fulfill rewards late. That is because new entrepreneurs don’t know how to get products from point A to point B. Fulfillment is more complex than people give it credit for, and you can see the painful impacts of this. The silver lining here being that if you fulfill on time, you will impress your backers and they will remember you.

What’s Fulfillment?

I think I said it best in my older fulfillment guide, How To Prepare for the Cost of Board Game Fulfillment.

For a moment, consider all the variables that go into fulfilling a Kickstarter campaign. Your manufacturer has to receive parts from their suppliers. They have to send the product to you or your distributors in bulk. Then they have to separate the rewards and send them to individuals. The whole time, your rewards or their component parts are zipping back and forth in boats, cars, planes, and trains. They cross country lines multiple times, go across oceans, fly thousands of miles, and are handled by multiple different companies. Your rewards are subject to all kinds of laws and taxes that you can’t possibly understand all at once. No one can.

That realization sink in yet? Good. Don’t let it dishearten you, because it’s not actually that hard to deal with. You just need to respect the complexity and variability of what you’re doing. That’s the beginning of understanding.

5 Concepts

When I was fulfilling my first Kickstarter campaign, War Co., I did so a little bit early and a little bit under budget. I’m going to teach you how to do the same. This guide will teach you the major elements that go into creating a simple, scale-able, cost-effective fulfillment network. As with the previous guide, this is just to get you started when you have no idea when to begin. You’ll need to ask questions, solve problems, and do your own research.

This guide is split up into 5 concepts:

1. Warehousing your inventory
2. Shipping from your manufacturer to your warehouse
3. Dealing with customs
4. Fulfilling from the warehouse
5. Customers and customs

Warehousing Your Inventory

Manufacturing takes a little while, but it has the distinct benefit of happening in one place. That place may be overseas, most likely in China, but you know for a fact that your game is in that one place at one time. It won’t stay that way forever, though. Like children leaving their parents’ home, your game will need to find a new home in a distant land. That’s where warehousing comes in.

Broadly speaking, in order to proceed after manufacturing, you need two things: a warehouse to send inventory to and a way to get the inventory there. A warehouse could even be your home for small print runs, but I’d advise you not to do that unless you’ve got space to spare, you’re printing a card game or compact board game, and most of your customers are in your own country. Ideally, you want to find a warehousing company that fulfills inventory as well.

Splitting Inventory Between Warehouses

A lot of people choose to split their inventory between multiple warehousing and fulfillment companies. You could send Europe-bound stock to Games Quest, Canada-bound stock to Snakes & Lattes, America-bound stock to Fulfillrite, and Australia-bound stock to Aetherworks. (Do your own homework on fulfillment companies. This is just an example that happens to include people I’ve worked with or heard good things about.)

You must understand, though, that there is a trade-off here. If you use fewer warehousing companies, the shipping cost may go up since you can’t always pick a nearby warehouse for a customer. There are also customs concerns, which I’ll cover a few sections farther down. If you use more warehousing companies, you’ll have to pay more people and juggle more back-and-forth communication when you have orders. It’s your choice.

Shipping From Your Manufacturer to Your Warehouse

After you determine which warehouse or warehouses to send to, you’ve got three broad ways to get your inventory there. If you’re shipping from one part of a country to another part of the country, you can send it via ground: full truckload (FTL), less-than-truckload (LTL), or rail. None of these are very likely since you’ll probably end up printing your game overseas. That leaves the other two methods of shipping: air and sea.

Air shipping is very fast, typically shipping in a few weeks, but it is very expensive because it takes a lot of jet fuel to get your heavy board games off the ground. On the other hand, you have sea shipping. Sea shipping takes 2-3 months, but it’s also very inexpensive. This is what I recommend in most cases. It’s not always for the weak-hearted, though, because sea shipping is typically untracked and you have no idea where your inventory is most of the time.

Find a manufacturer who will handle this part of the logistics for you. You can arrange things on your own, but the trouble is more than it’s worth for a small business and the room for catastrophic error is extremely high. Board game Kickstarters and small print runs are very common at this point, so you’ve got lots of options. You just need to do your homework – don’t get into deals with people who make fulfillment difficult.

Dealing with Customs

Regardless of whether you’re dealing with one warehouse or multiple warehouses, you’re going to have to deal with customs. I’m using “customs” to refer to the various forms of import taxes that get stuck on top of your bill after your send your stock from a printing company to a warehouse in another country. Try to find a manufacturer who rolls this into the price. Don’t try to be your own customs agent. Make sure you ask if customs are included in the price.

Whatever your game costs to print, you’ll probably have to pay about 20% extra to move it from the printing company to the warehouse(s). The actual percentage is different depending on the departure and destination countries, but it’s almost always applied to both the cost of the goods (your inventory) and the cost of shipping the goods (the sea or air shipping).

Fulfilling from the Warehouse

If you’ve Kickstarted your game, you’ll need to handle two types of fulfillment. That is initial campaign fulfillment and ongoing fulfillment for sales. For initial fulfillment, you’ll probably be asked by each warehouse to fill out a CSV or Excel spreadsheet with a list of your backers, their addresses, and their orders. Listen to what your fulfillment company tells you.

One word of advice that could save you a massive headache: ask for your backers’ phone numbers in the survey early. Many fulfillment companies do not ship without a phone number.

As for ongoing fulfillment, you need a way to keep in touch with each warehouse. That way, you can tell them to ship stock as soon as you get an order. Ideally, you’d be able to integrate your sales system with their fulfillment system using technology, but this is not a priority for a small business. This is something to worry about after scaling up.

Customers and Customs

Customers hate being charged customs. You know that you’ll have to pay customs and/or import taxes when you ship from your manufacturer to your warehouse. What you may not know is that customers frequently have to pay customs any time you ship a product from a warehouse in one country to a customer in another. Customers really don’t like receiving your game and being asked for more money at the door by the deliverer. The only reliable way to avoid this is to have a fulfillment company who has a warehouse in that customer’s region.

In general, you want to make sure Americans, Canadians, Europeans, and Australians don’t get charged customs. There are some companies who can ship to all these regions without customers getting charged extra. This is something you need to research extensively before you plan a Kickstarter campaign or launch a game through other means. This is how you earn the “_______-Friendly Shipping” badge that you see a lot of on Kickstarter.

Final Thoughts

That’s a lot to take in! Now if you’re looking for pragmatic advice, I’d like to turn your attention to two more articles that I wrote a while back.

• How To Prepare for the Cost of Board Game Fulfillment
• 3 Simple How-To Guides for Board Game Fulfillment

As always, I encourage comments. If you have any specific questions, feel free to ask below!