Big Lesson: If you’re planning to sell beyond Kickstarter, order at most two times what you’ve already sold.

Had we printed in China, and only printed what we had to, we could have walked away with $23,000 each.

Whelp, now what?

The first problem we ran into was where to keep the things. Amazon.com has a starting max inventory cap of 5,000 products. I pulled out that famous northern charm and got them to give us a free upgrade to 8,000 units. This was lucky because we had 7500 units (Base Deck + PI expansion) to send out right away. Not getting that bump would have created serious delays. A couple hundred copies of the game line the walls of the Guts and Glory office. The rest of them, I’m not actually sure. Somewhere on the edge of space and time.

Which brings us to the second problem. How do we sell these? It was so easy before. Here are some of the things we tried:

Tried: Send free copies of the game to bloggers and members of the media.

Result: None. All the write ups we got were people reaching out to us. The bigger stations returned to sender unopened.

Tried: Facebook Advertisements.

Result: Spent ~$1000 on 30 different ads, ~20 clicks, 0 sales.

Tried: Featured on YouTube Channels with >1,000,000 subscribers.

Result: 3–4 games sold that day

Tried: Created comedic ads with sock puppet presidents playing the game.

Result: A LOT of lost time and frustration. No noticeable boost in sales.

Tried: Went to the Iowa caucus / NH Primary, got on local news, got written up by the Daily Dot.

Result: 75% boost in online sales while we were on the road. It about broken even because we were spending money to be out there. We attribute the boost being more active on social media.

Tried: Write articles ranking the niceness of the Campaign headquarters in Iowa / NH.

Result: Lots of laughs. No so mucho dinero.

Tried: Get a write-up in the Wall Street Journal. (kinda just fell in our lap)

Result: 100% boost in online sales for 3 days.

Tried: Rent a booth at Politicon.

Result: Netted ~$1000.

Tried: Get a space near GenCon.

Result: This was great for us. We were not on the convention floor, but we were close enough to get spillover traffic and could still meet a bunch of people who knew WAY more than us. We heard other small game companies lost money to attend in hopes of making deals.

Tried: Amazon Sponsored Products

Result: Actually works. We spend about $2.70 on ads per sale of the base game.

— EDIT —

Tried: Write a series of tell-alls about your business and hope someone blows it up on Hacker News / Reddit.

Result: Hi everyone! (Read about what happened when this post went viral)

— END EDIT —

Tried: Make more expansions and tell people who already like our game about them.

Result: HOLY SHIT WHY DIDN’T WE DO THIS THE WHOLE TIME.

We fell into a trap. We thought marketing meant we had to come at people sideways to get them to give us money. Turn’s out, the game’s just good and people want to play it. When we started focusing on improving and expanding the game, we not only saw an increase in revenue because of the new expansions, but sales on the rest of our games picked up as well. This was what got us out of debt.

Big Lesson: Use your energy to sell what you’re selling. Don’t use it to promote something that sells what you’re selling.

What’s next?

We still have over 10,000 games in stock, and are quickly running out of places to keep them. Our next Amazon long term storage fee estimate is $6,500. At this point we have to destroy thousands of games, just so we don’t go back in the red on storage fees.

Fortunately, we don’t have to destroy everything, and anything we sell going forward is, finally, profit.

If you’re interested in how this article went viral and what impact that had on our sales you can read: We Told You We Sucked: A Financial Breakdown of Our Biggest Sales Day Ever.