Expo

The UK Games Expo was great.

We did almost as well as last year.

Met loads of fans of FlickFleet.

Our stand drew a crowd as always!

Made some new FlickFleet fans.

Hung out with Paul and friends.

Met Marc, the CEO of Grand Gamers Guild, who I've known online only for 20 years!

And had some interesting conversations.

I’m knackered now.

And I put my back out on Sunday morning.

Which made teardown interesting.

Need to rest up a bit now!

Then crack on.

I’m buzzing with ideas!

Venture

We had a fantastic weekend at the NETE in Gateshead.

We were pretty busy!

Did more than twice what I’d hoped for.

Others did less well. 

Several traders left on Saturday evening or during the day on Sunday.

Gareth is not going to run it again :(

Years ago I’d toyed with the idea of starting a con in Newcastle.

Then Gareth started this.

I’m now considering taking it over.

Making a few changes.

I’ve a few weeks to make a decision…

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…

Growth

Last week I talked about how I’m chasing growth.

Not for the reason you might expect though.

Not to win capitalism.

Or sell the company to Asmodee.

But to get to the point where it’s really working.

Currently it almost is.

Almost.

We pay Paul a (meagre) salary.

We’ve grown every year so far.

Except this year

We’ve been profitable 5 out of 6 years.

But we’re not stable yet.

Web sales need to be greater than overheads.

So we can survive between crowdfunding campaigns.

Sometimes they are.

Sometimes they aren’t.

And then we’re bleeding cash.

The last couple of years we’ve had to lend the company money to do things.

Or stay afloat.

We haven’t this year.

But at one point we had less than £150 in the bank.

With bills to pay.

I want to grow.

So that doesn’t happen any more.

That’s why.

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.

Catch-up

Things are flat out at the moment.

Paul is speedily shipping Gamefound rewards.

So I've got to do the bookkeeping for those shipped pledges.

We've had a run of website orders.

So I've got to do the bookkeeping for those too.

It’s not over yet!

And there's a whole heap of post-Expo tasks to do too.

Plus there's a possible game changer that's looming with a deadline of the 19th.

There's loads to do!

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. 

FIVE

This month Eurydice Games Ltd turned five.

Six if you count the first year when I ran it by myself.

Almost as old as Daughter the Second.

I remember doing the initial graphic design for FlickFleet with her as a sleeping baby in one arm.

It's been fun watching it grow.

Get bigger.

Learn new things.

Same for Daughter the Second.

I’m excited to see what it grows up to be.

Much like Daughter the Second.

Road trip!

This week though, it is preparation for Tabletop Scotland.

It’s in Perth (Scotland, not Australia obviously!), this weekend.

It’s another weekend away with Paul.

Another road trip.

I’m really looking forward it it.

Visitors

This week I fulfilled our Rocky ‘Roid campaign. It’s available from our website now.

Now available!

And spent a lot of time working on the website.

My goal at the moment is still financial stability.

The company needs to make enough cash every month to cover our overheads.

It’s never reliably done that.

We’ve survived by running crowdfunding campaigns.

And living off those.

For the last two months we’ve managed it though.

Website sales alone have been enough.

And I haven’t started running any ads yet.

It’s all been off the back of some great reviews.

The review traffic is drying up now though.

Need to get more visitors to the website.

So I’ve been doing some SEO work.

And starting to think about the ads.

Maturity

Daughter the Second is five.

She can read to herself at bedtime. Do maths. Even speak a little German.

She’s maturing rapidly.

We got our logo re-done a couple of years ago

Eurydice Games is five too.

It’s a very immature business.

We’ve got as far as we have due to being very tight.

I do the books. In Google Sheets. It’s free. 

I also do the marketing, advertising, business planning, website. All badly. But for free. Or near enough.

I do lots of work. Lots of unnecessary work. Lots of bad work. Because I can kludge it for free.

It works. Kinda.

We’ve survived five years. Grown rapidly.

It’s now time to start thinking about our maturity. 

Spending a little money to do a better job. Or an easier job. Or pay a professional to do it.

I’m spending a lot of time on this at the moment.

Investigating an accounting package.

Approaching professionals to redo our website. Properly.

Speaking to professionals about advertising.

Hopefully it’ll free up some of my time for game design.

Six

A week or so ago we asked for some free support from a bank of over 200 experienced business owners.

I hoped we might get one or two takers.

Paul didn’t expect any.

I found out this week that six people volunteered.

Six!

We now need to review them and see which ones we’d like to work with.

This is awesome. 

Guidance

When I started Eurydice Games I tried to set up a Advisory Board.

Photo by Nadir sYzYgY on Unsplash

Friends with relevant experience.

People who would hold us accountable and give us ideas and support.

It slowly died out.

A couple of months ago I found out about The Experience Bank.

Experienced business leaders from the North-East of England who want to give back.

Free business advice.

From successful business owners.

Last week I finally got round to creating a request.

We’ll see if we get any takers…

Opportunities

It’s been an interesting week.

Thanks to the amazing success of our last Kickstarter, we might be able to employ Paul now that his day job contract is coming to an end.

Money will be tight though.

We came up with an idea to help with that.

A mini-pledge manager.

Can we generate enough extra pledges to pay Paul and fund the next Kickstarter?

Can we get the next Kickstarter ready in time - before we run out of money?

We’ve also been offered some potential free business support.

Experienced entrepreneurs giving us free advice.

We just need to make an interesting pitch.

And see if we get any interest from people we like.

Trello

Towards the end of last year I lost my way.

Went off the boil a bit.

Slowed down.

Missed things.

I used to use Trello and Evernote to organise myself. Then I switched to Notion. Then I kind of gave up on that.

I need to get organised

I’ve gone back to Trello.

I’m tracking things I need to do.

To move Eurydice forwards. To better things.

I’m making good progress again.

Scaling

For the last two years the vast majority of our sales have been through our three FlickFleet Kickstarters. And the subsequent pledge managers.

Like over 95%.

Kickstarter FTW!

Our Kickstarters have been huge. And getting huger. For us.

But they are still small fry in the Kickstarter tabletop games space (£18,000 versus $10,000,000).

We have only one retail stockist as our small hand-made runs have too little margin to sell to retailers, let alone distributors.

We sell some through the website, but only a little.

If we want to continue growing, and I'm convinced FlickFleet has great potential, we need to do better in all of these channels.

How can we get more website sales? Get the cost down enough to sell into retail? Have Kickstarters that are 10 times more successful?

I'm thinking about these questions a lot.

On the Road Again

Last week in the US was a partial success from a Eurydice Games point of view. I arrived on Monday afternoon and after being up since 10pm the night before (US time) went to the office, to an early dinner and then to bed (at 6:30pm!). Which was just as well, since I was up at 1:30am on Tuesday to do a podcast Interview with Jack Eddy from The Cardboard Herald at 2am (which was 10pm for him in Alaska!). It was a great chat that lasted over an hour and Jack tells me it will be available in a few weeks. Hopefully the jet lag, lack of sleep and early start don't make me sound too stupid!

I had hoped to find a Games group that I could join on Wednesday night, but despite asking on twitter, Google+, BGG and Meetup I was unable to find a group in time. I awoke at 4:30 (I don't travel well!) on Thursday, my last day in Massachusetts to a message from Chip Beauvais (designer of Universal Rule) telling me about a group that would have been perfect for the previous evening :-/ I'll definitely join them on my next trip to Massachusetts (I get there three or four times a year).

Thursday I flew down to Raleigh/Durham for further work meetings on Friday. But I had Thursday evening free. This was fortuitous since I had thought that W. Eric Martin (editor of BGG News) lived in Massachusetts so I'd looked him up on BGG only to find he lives near Raleigh! I'd met Eric a few times during my Reiver Games days and was keen to show him Zombology and get his feedback on my FlickFleet prototype. He's started a series of short video interviews of board game creatives too, so I agreed to another interview and we were both happy. It was a great evening. Eric turned up with his very professional looking video equipment and then after a short video interview we chatted about Zombology and played a couple of games of FlickFleet. Eric also had some great ideas about FlickFleet too.

He shoots! (photo courtesy of W. Eric Martin)

I got back on Saturday morning, and this afternoon I'm off again to Manchester this time for an early meeting tomorrow. I'm going to swing by Tabletop Manchester and hopefully get to play Zombology with a few people and maybe even get a few sales - I'll also be taking FlickFleet too.

I need to play more games of Zombology with people - it's going to be critical to helping me hit my targets and sell the games, which I need to do to fund the publishing of FlickFleet later.