2018-19 Our First Yearly Report

We've just completed our first financial year as a limited company. Inspired by Stonemaier Games and Steve Jackson Games, here's a report of how we got on in our first* year, following Jamey's template mostly.

*I ran Eurydice Games as a sole trader in the previous year, we only became a limited company when Paul joined last summer.

2018-19 Revenue and Personnel

94% of our income came from the FlickFleet Kickstarter campaign.

• Revenue: £12.8 thousand
• Full-time employees: 0 (Paul and I both work about 10 hours a week in our spare time)
• New games: 1
• New expansions: 0
• Kickstarter campaigns: 1

Total income £12,846.56 (~1/1000th of Stonemaier/Steve Jackson)

Last year (when I only had Zombology for sale), our income was £1,217.21, so we've grown ten-fold over my previous incarnation! We were profitable again, but only because we're not paying ourselves salaries or renting an office or warehouse space. We would need to be far bigger to support those costs. We have a small loan from me and cash got unbelievably tight as we finished fulfilling the Kickstarter (the pre-orders since then have given us a little wiggle room), but we will need to lend the company some more money to fund our next Kickstarter - this time we're actually going to properly advertise it, which costs money we don't currently have.

Games in Print

The numbers below are all as of the end of our financial year.

• FlickFleet: 289 in circulation (BGG Average Rating: 8.4 from 29 ratings)
• Zombology: 220 in circulation (BGG Average Rating: 7.1 from 22 ratings)

FlickFleet has been a huge success for us (both in terms of backer response, reviews and sales). Hence the plan to reprint it and an expansion through another Kickstarter. We've no idea how viable that will be, but with only 319 backers of the first Kickstarter we believe there are a lot more people who would really like it if they heard about it, hence the second Kickstarter and an actual advertising spend on this one!

Social Media and Other Metrics

• Quarterly newsletter subscribers: 289 (58% open rate)
• Twitter followers: 3,214
• Instagram followers: 71
• Facebook fans: 68

Most of Jamey's stats don't apply to us, and of those that do it's clear we're in a very different league! Our mailing list has more than doubled since the first FlickFleet Kickstarter, which is pretty good, and it's clear that I don't use Facebook or Instagram effectively :-(

Biggest Changes, Observations, and Mistakes

• Kickstarter was a game-changer for us. It let us make a game that required almost £10,000 of investment without the capital to pull that off and also gave us access to a massive marketplace (over 1/3 of backers found us through Kickstarter).
• The cashflow situation was incredibly tight - I need to be much better at estimating shipping prices and sizing print runs to avoid the same problem next year.
• Retail was a channel I intended to avoid (our margins are way too tight for retail and distribution), but I ended up selling Zombology through a single UK retailer with four stores in the north of England. We delivered games by hand to avoid shipping costs and hiked the retail price so that it was just cheaper than buying it (including shipping) from our website. It was phenomenally successful. Those four stores bought 40% of the print run and have sold almost 60 copies. I'll bet there are a lot of professionally manufactured games that they haven't sold 10 of, let alone 60. Being able to interact with the teams personally and teach them the game made a huge difference.
• Our hand-crafted runs let us make tiny print runs at a profit (but at a considerable cost in personal time). They let us get games out in small numbers and yet still be profitable and not end up with thousands of copies in a warehouse somewhere costing us money every week. It's not a scaleable method, but I'm hoping it'll let us get started and slowly scale up...

Looking Ahead to 2019-20

• Our second Kickstarter campaign launches in just under a week. We've set a lower target (we don't need another laser-cutter!), but I'm hoping with the advertising spend and additional very positive reviews we can do better than last time. I'm really proud of FlickFleet (is it too early to call it the best game I'll ever make?) and I think it has huge potential, the struggle will be reaching that potential with a very small marketing budget, against the wealth of competition on Kickstarter and elsewhere.

I'm happy to answer questions on any of this - I hope you find it interesting!

The Offer That Will Not Die!

At the beginning of January I offered free worldwide shipping on games bought from my website, as an effort to boost sales and to raise awareness of my games and company.

Due to some technical problems at PayPal, I've been unable to cancel the deal at the end of January like I planned, so it's still running on my website at the moment, and it will remain so until PayPal fix the problem with their buttons feature. I would say that this could be your last chance to take advantage of the offer, but it might finish Monday or it might finish in 2011!

Was the offer successful? I think it was. I sold nearly thirty games that I doubt I would have sold otherwise, either through my website or through retailers and distributors.

My big concern was that the offer would spark a rush of sales from countries where I already had distribution, effectively hurting those retailers and distributors who are already my customers. The good news is that only five of those sales were from countries where I already had distribution (four from the UK and one from Hawaii). The rest came predominantly from Australia (half of all the sales), the Far East and Norway.

One of my other reasons for the offer was that I hoped that getting the games into the hands of gamers would hopefully lead to some more sales - Aaron buys the game and plays it with Bob and Carol, Bob thinks it's okay, but Carol loves it and buys her own copy (which she later plays with Dave and Ellie ...). In one case this definitely happened, which is a great feeling. Aaron (real names have been changed!) bought a copy of Sumeria. A week later he bought another copy - he said he loved it and he was buying a copy for a friend. It's this kind of sale that's the ideal - the game is bought (this applies to all sales by definition), played (some collectors own hundreds of games they've never played), and the people who played it enjoyed it enough to lead to another sale.

In my mind that's a win, now I need to drive more sales, to hopefully lead to more. I'll blog again next week with what my next plan is.

You Never Stop Learning

Technically I've been in the business of making and selling games for over three years. That makes me an old hand now, right? Not really. I've only been 'professional' (not just in the sense that this is now my full-time job, but I'm also getting the games manufactured for me, and selling primarily to distributors and shops rather than direct to customers) for eighteen months and I've only had stock for the last thirteen months. I'm still doing a lot of stuff for the first time. And, as with Essen, when I'm doing stuff for the second time it's often under such different circumstances that it's hard to draw any conclusions from the past experience.

The reason I bring this up is that I've started graphing my sales over time, and it's teaching me new stuff all the time. At the beginning I assumed that sales for a new game would peak when it was released and then decline steadily over time. To some degree this statement has been true, but there have been some interesting deviations from what I expected. It's Alive! didn't sell many copies in its first quarter (but it came out in September near the end of the July - September quarter). In its second quarter (the run-up to Christmas) it did exceptionally well, helped by Essen and a few big stocking orders. Carpe Astra did much better than It's Alive! in its first quarter (the run-up to Christmas) and both did well in the first quarter of this year - when I signed the two biggest US distributors. Sumeria got off to a great start (best first quarter sales of any of my games) but then did less well in its second quarter (which for Sumeria corresponded to the Summer: July - September).

If I look at graphs plotting the sales of each game by quarter, with the x-axis corresponding to quarters since release it's hard to draw any conclusions: they are all over the place with dips and peaks that don't correspond at all (note that the last data point in each case is for this quarter which is less than halfway through):

So length of time since release is clearly not the driving factor behind how many games I'll sell in any given quarter. So what is I wonder? People say that the Summer months are often quiet, with the best sales being in the run-up to Christmas. This seems reasonable, so I've drawn the same data on a different x-axis. This time its still in sales per quarter, but the quarters relate to a single instance in time: 1 is last Summer (July - September when It's Alive! was re-released), 2 is last Autumn (October to December, including Essen, the run-up to Christmas and the release of Carpe Astra) and so on. Suddenly things become clearer:

Despite the fact that this quarter (Autumn) is only half done, all three games are showing a clear boost over the preceding Summer months. There's a noticeable decline from Autumn through Winter and Spring into Summer, before a sharp jump into Autumn again. Sumeria, which came out at a fairly quiet time, shows the same pattern, but with higher sales due to the initial stocking orders. I'm expecting a few more re-stocks before Christmas too, so hopefully the climb for this Autumn will become steeper across the board in the next couple of months.

With so little experience to base my decisions on, it's hard to see whether a game is doing well or badly. Are low sales due to the time of release, or something else? As the years go on I'll have more hard data to base my assumptions on, and can make more informed decisions as a result. The important thing is that rather than just waving a finger in the air and using gut feelings I'm collecting the data I've got so I'm more informed for next time.

BoardGameGeek and Game Ownership

BoardGameGeek allows people to keep track of which games they own. It's a useful feature that I use myself, and when meeting up with someone else you can always say 'Look at my BGG collection - is there anything of mine you fancy playing?' which is pretty cool too.

I know exactly how many games I've sold to distributors, but I don't know how many of those the distributors have sold to shops, nor how many of those the shops have sold to gamers. They same follows with direct sales to shops. A tiny fraction of my sales are direct to a gamer, so I know those have gone to gamers, but that's not much as a fraction of total sales.

Why am I interested? A game sold to a distributor that ends up sitting in their warehouse for months isn't doing me any favours at all. The distributor will be less inclined to buy more stock as it's costing them money (in the initial outlay to me and warehousing space) but not making them any. Similarly a game that ends up sitting on the shelf for a long time in a shop won't convince the shop to get more stock in. In the ideal world the game is in the hands of a gamer who loves it and plays it regularly with their friends.

It's hard to work out where the games are. I can ask my distributors how much stock they have left, but that still leaves me unsure whether the games are in the hands of shops or gamers. In the case of direct sales to shops things are a little better as I can ask them how many they've got left, but in that case again it's only a small proportion of the total sales at my end.

Here's where BGG's stats come in handy. The people listed as owning the game are gamers. So I can get some indication of how many of my sales to shops and distributors have reached actual gamers.

Of course, as with anything statistics they can't be relied on as a final number, but they are indicative. There will be people who've bought one of the games and don't have a BGG account, and others who do have BGG account but don't bother keeping track of the games they own. However, almost everyone who lists themselves as own a game will have it (some people might do it by accident or forget to remove it from their collection if they sell or trade it away).

Because I made a couple of small runs of Border Reivers and It's Alive! which almost entirely sold directly to gamers, I've got an idea about the ratio of gamers who list themselves as owning a game to the number of end customers I've sold it to.

If you look at the stats for Border Reivers (100 copies made) then it lists 42 people as owning it - 42% of the copies in circulation. Similarly, when I had sold out of the limited edition of It's Alive! about 110 people listed it as owned of the 300 copies made (37%). So I reckon I can extrapolate that about 40% of the copies in gamers' hands are listed as owned on BGG.

Assuming that 40% figure is evenly vaguely accurate, then approximately half the copies I've sold of the second edition of It's Alive! are in gamers' hands, and it's also about half for Carpe Astra. Sumeria (which is still fairly new) is around one third. Not sure what to do with this information, but it's interesting nonetheless.

Growth

One of the measures of business is sales growth. Especially with new start-up companies, where profit may be many years off, sales growth shows whether your business is working on a fundamental level - are you successfully selling your products/services and are you selling more than you did before?

One of the difficulties of starting a business is keeping track of how things are going. When you don't have years of experience to call on how do you keep track of things? I've had a quiet few months from February to May. Is that normal? Is it a time of year thing? I can't really compare it to last year because during that period last year I was selling hand-made games or completely out of stock.

Yesterday I tried to catch up with my books, which I've fallen a little behind on. At the same time, I thought I'd start tracking a bit more sensibly how my sales are going, both now and historically. I knocked up a quick spreadsheet in OpenOffice Spreadsheet and started pumping my sales figures into it.

It's hard to compare things, since I registered for VAT last year (previous my sales figures would have been all for me, now I have to just consider the non-tax part of it). In addition, I've decided to split the game sales from the shipping costs, starting this financial year, so although both are sales (one is a product, the other a service) from now on my sales figures as I keep track of them will be smaller. However things are looking pretty good. I've done all the figures for last year, and I've got two previous years to compare them to:

In the above graph blue is my first financial year (hand-made Border Reivers), Red is my second (hand-made It's Alive!) and yellow is my third (first full-time year, It's Alive! reprint and Carpe Astra).

It looks pretty good, but there are some things to take into account. For the first two years, I made games by hand, and sold mostly directly. These were short runs and so my sales were pretty small. Last year I started getting games made for me in larger numbers and selling mostly to distributors, hence the hike in sales numbers. My growth for the first quarter of last year was negative, seeing as I ran out of hand-made games to sell halfway through. The second quarter there was no growth, I had two months of nothing to sell, but It's Alive! turned up in September and that was as much sales (after tax) as I'd managed in the whole of the equivalent quarter the previous year. The next two quarters have a sales growth of 1100% and 1200%, but it's not a fair comparison, selling large volumes of professionally manufactured games to distributors as opposed to selling individual copies of hand-made games to gamers.

The first quarter of this year will probably have growth around 750%, but the real test will be the next two quarters. Last year I released It's Alive! in Q2, this year I'll just have the residual sales on the three products I've got out. Q3 last year had: Essen, my best month's sales ever, the release of Carpe Astra and initial stocking orders from most of my European distributors. I'll have to do well to top that, and there's no chance of doing ten times better!

Seeing Some Benefit

Well, I've got both the consignment returns I was waiting for. It's hard to make a judgement on the US returns, since they haven't had Carpe Astra long, and they've just switched from biweekly to monthly billing. But there certainly isn't a large jump as a result of the BoardGameGeek competition and sales calls. In the UK though it's a different story. The UK returns show a large improvement over the previous month, though whether that's down to the sales visits I've been making or the BGG competition it's hard to tell.

I'm going to do some more sales visits next week (ahead of my attendance at the Beers and Pretzels convention next weekend. I also need to concentrate on picking a game for my Essen release. I've a couple of potentials, but nothing certain yet. Playtesting over the next couple of weeks should help to confirm things, if you're going to Beer and Pretzels, stop by my table and ask to play a prototype with me (and while you're at it, why not try Sumeria!).

I'm even considering a few sales trips a bit further afield. There are several shops up North that I could visit, but to do so would probably mean staying the night somewhere, so it's a bit more of a commitment than the local trips I've been doing so far.

Moment of Truth

Today and again Tuesday I'll get some information about whether or not the BoardGameGeek competition lead to a boost in sales.

Most of my distributors place a stocking order of 30-90 games and then I don't hear from them again until they've run out and need some more. Since I competition I've had one of those re-orders but to be honest I've no idea whether that was related to the competition or not.

A couple of my distributors have my game on consignment. They place a large order, and then each month they tell me how many games they've sold. I invoice them for those games only, and then they pay me. This allows me to better track how sales are progressing as I have a monthly history with these distributors and I can see any peaks and troughs in their sales. I can charge more for games on consignment too - since by only paying for a game when they've sold it the distributor is getting an improvement to their cash flow and reduce their risk at the expense of my cash flow.

Will the competition have helped sales? I hope so, and judging by BGG ownership stats I think so, but the consignment returns over the next few days should either confirm or deny it.

A Year in the Boardgames Industry

It's been just over a year since I quit my job as started Reiver Games as a full-time job. There have been some ups and some downs as I'm sure you're aware but if I'm to continue the most important thing is the bottom line: I need to make some money or the dream will die!

I've done a GeekList on BoardGameGeek sumarising this first year. The bottom line is the last entry.

Several things went right this year, but also several things went wrong. I'm really proud of the distribution network I've achieved in this first year, from nothing. Essen was a fantastic show for me, a huge success. But when push comes to shove, the company has had a mediocre first full-time year. With the delays getting It's Alive! manufactured I spent the first five months with only a handful of hand-made copies of It's Alive! to sell, which disappeared pretty quickly. From mid-May to the beginning of September I had absolutely nothing to sell. That I made any money at all those months is due to doing some contracting work for my previous employer. When the games did finally turn up it took me some time to get the distributors on board (several didn't sign up until January - five months after It's Alive! arrive in my warehouse). As a result my sales were a bit disappointing - especially in the last few months of the year.

I had to pay out for the games at (or before) the point of manufacture, so my expenditure has been pretty high. I still hope that I'll make a profit on those runs, but to do so I need to sell a large proportion of them, and that takes time. More time than I had between It's Alive! arriving in September and the end of the tax year in April. As such Reiver Games has made it's first loss this year after two years with a very small profit. Sales were up hugely, selling to distributors and shops rather than individual customers, but the bottom line is that this year I didn't make any money, and I'm going to have to start making some money soon if I'm to carry this on.

With Sumeria arriving shortly I'll have another opportunity to boost sales, but with it comes another huge expenditure on manufacturing. This year I'll have stock all year round, and with more games in my portfolio I'll hopefully be a more attractive prospect for other distributors as I'll look a little more professional. The three distributors who contacted me during the BGG competition will hopefully start stocking my games. I hope the BGG competition will boost awareness enough to lead to a bunch more sales. The bottom line is that I need to be selling more games, more quickly, I'm still not sure how to achieve that.

Pay Day!

The two overdue invoices I had outstanding were both paid today - yeay! One of them was only a couple of days late, but the other (a shop in the UK) was over a month late, so to finally get the money was a relief. I've not had any other late payments, and in the current economic climate I was worried whether this was the shape of things to come, but for the moment at least the worry has abated.

The news that Carpe Astra will be ready early has thrown me a bit. I was expecting a whole month to try to get distributors and shops on board, and the run adverts on BoardGameGeek and Boardgame News. With all the house stuff and the Essen fallout distracting me I find myself with only a week until the game might arrive! I've had to change my plans accordingly. BGG has a minimum of one month for running ads, so I'm just going with one on Boardgame News instead. I figure that once the games have achieved widespread distribution I'll run more ads, but the current one shows: 'Pre-order now' text, so that will only be appropriate for a week or so. I don't want to run the ad after that until I have widespread distribution in the US, as most readers of both sites are from there.

The other big thing I need to do today is my books for last month. In terms of turnover, last month was my most successful month ever, and it puts me well on the way towards my target for this financial year (April-April). The start of the year was a washout, as due to the printing delays on It's Alive! I had nothing to sell for May, June, July or August. It's nice to be back on track. November should be another good month, as I'll get a bump from Carpe Astra pre-orders and hopefully some stocking orders. Let's see if I can reach my target early :-) Either way I don't expect to make a profit this year, what with having to pay for all of the It's Alive! and Carpe Astra print-runs up front.

It's Alive! is Two!

... months old. In the two months since it was released I've offloaded 43% of the print-run. Some of those are on consignment, but the vast majority are honest sales, and most of those have paid me (I only have a couple of overdue invoices at the moment). It feels like I'm getting somewhere :-)

Of course, I've not got a whole heap of time at the moment to do company things (our flat went on the market today!), but it's coming together. Carpe Astra is nearly ready, orders are still coming in for that :-) I've got a bunch of distributors lined up for Carpe Astra, and a few new ones chasing me about stocking It's Alive!

What I really need to do when I've a bit more time is put a concerted effort in to reaching a few new markets for It's Alive! Once I've got the contacts in place then hopefully it'll be easier to maintain a relationship with the distributors and get Carpe Astra and my other games out there.

Anyway, that's all for now, I've got more house stuff to do.

Getting Exciting Now!

A couple of days ago I received a white sample of the Carpe Astra bits. I got a box, the insert and the punchboards, nothing had any print on it and the punchboards weren't die-cut, but it was enough to get me excited. This will be my first game with an insert and my first game that is linen-finished (box and punchboards - not cards). Somehow it feels more professional that way.

Carpe Astra is still on course for the end of November, despite the glitches in the box art that needed fixing (twice). I'm now trying to pimp it to distributors and shops in preparation for getting some stock. I'll put some ads up, probably on my return from Essen.

In other news, I've now finished my books for last financial year, and I'm going to start this year's this afternoon. Last year my sales grew 250% and my profit nearly 1000%, but it's still small fry, and I wasn't taking any wages out of the company. Due to the late arrive of It's Alive! and its knock on delay on Carpe Astra I doubt I'll make any profit this year, but my sales should be significantly up again.

I also got paid by one of my customers yesterday - a day early. Yeay! I've got some tardy customers too who I've got to chase for payment this afternoon.

I'm also trying to find time to do my German lessons. I got a course for my birthday, and I did a few lessons back then, but I've been slack and not done anything since. I'm trying to do a lesson every day between now and Essen to refresh me. I'll still be pretty poor - but it's the thought that counts (I hope!).

Border Reivers Six Month Update

Well, I'm in London for work for a couple of days so this edition of Creation and Play is coming to you live from my hotel room.

I've been very busy with my new job and trying to get stuff ready for Codename: Monster, but in the background Border Reivers has been ticking along nicely. Last week Border Reivers turned six months old, so I thought I'd post an update on how things are going. Hopefully this will be of interest to someone...

I'm making a run of 100 copies of Border Reivers, but I've already given four copies away to people who've helped me, and judging by how it's going so far I'm likely to write off another four copies by clumsily cocking things up - as all the components are glued, and cut by hand there are a wealth of ways to make mistakes. This leaves me with 92 copies for sale from the print run. I'm still well ahead of schedule for selling out within a year (the goal I had set myself at the beginning), and since the free postage to America deal I did in January ahead of my trip to San Francisco sales are pretty steady at their pre-Christmas levels. I've had three or four weeks of steady sales now which is settling my nerves after the dry patch over Christmas.

Border Reivers has also been generating some content on BoardGameGeek, we've had another review (thanks, Dave!), some rules questions, a player guide and it's been added to a popular GeekList (thanks, Jeff!). This feels nice, as people are obviously interested in it. It's also received its lowest rating yet (4/10), so it's not all perfect, but even that wasn't very damning.

I thought people might be interested in a couple of graphs of sales breakdown. These are approximate, since I'm doing this from memory as all my records are at home but they'll be fairly accurate.

First up, sales breakdown by region:

As expected the vast majority of my sales have been to the UK - not surprising really, as I've only been to UK conventions and all my friends, family and colleagues live in the UK. Second comes North America despite the disastrous exchange rate. I've had a lot of interest from North America, but most of it loses interest fairly quickly when they see the price converted into dollars. I've only sold one copy to Europe, and that fairly recently to Germany, which surprises me. I thought I'd get more action from Europe, Germany especially since they're such big games fans. But I guess light, luck-heavy wargames aren't their thing. I've also sold a copy to New Zealand, which with the exception of the International Space Station is pretty much as far away as possible.

The second graph is a breakdown by sales channel:

Despite having only been to two conventions, one of which was pretty small, I've sold about an eighth of my total sales so far at conventions. I've more conventions lined up too, so hopefully I'll be able to maintain this in the future. Border Reivers seems to sell pretty well to people I've explained the game to and played with. Friends, family and work colleagues make up just under a quarter, bless them. These guys might not even play games, but they buy a copy just to help me out in my chosen dream. The BBC MindGames magazine review led to a single sale which was a little disappointing, but it was in America, which was a little bizarre. I added a fairly bland page to Wikipedia, which has led to three sales, tied to the Border Reivers historical page as it is. Eric Martin at BoardGameNews did a little piece on Border Reivers which also led to a handful of sales too. The rest of my sales (half!) come from BoardGameGeek, either directly or indirectly. So in total almost two-thirds of my sales are over the internet from people I've never met. Weird. And yet very cool.

That's enough - I'll not bore you any longer.