Introduction

I have been thinking about this blog post for a while now.  I've probably given bits and pieces of this advice to over 100 people in the last 10 years in one-on-one conversations and a few panels at small game conventions here and there.  I started Mayday Games back in 2008 and I did my first Kickstarter in 2011.  After nearly 15 years I have seen A LOT and learned so much.  I have also heard a lot of advice and rumors that may well be other people's honest experiences, but that have not been mine at all.  The real spark for this blog post was a recent post on FB that read:



The purpose of this post is to layout as clearly as I can what advice I would give to anyone considering self publishing, starting a board game company via mostly crowdfunding methods, or even to some established players in this industry who just have taken very different paths than I have.  I will say right from the outset that I am a very polarizing figure in the board game space.  I have made some mistakes, errors in judgement, and downright bad/unethical decisions in this more than 15 years being full time in the board game industry.  I deeply regret those decisions and mistakes and I have stepped in it more times than I care to remember.  But I am trying to learn and grow and am not the person I was when I started all this.  Still, in the end I am still standing, our sales are better than ever, and my company is healthy and growing.  So many companies have come and gone or have grown bigger and faster but then lost profitability and ultimately went under and all too many have left crowdfunding backers out their pledge money with no rewards.  I am proud to say that even though I have royally screwed up dozens of times, that not a single backer or customer that I am aware of didn't get the item they purchased or pledged for and that we are careful to always use the funds we get from backers FOR THAT PROJECT first and foremost.  OK, on to the main event.

Before You Start...

Before you even start to develop your game/item beyond a prototype or spend actual money on creating anything more than placeholder art, think long and hard about what you love doing day-to-day in regards to board games.  Do you LOVE designing, playing and experiencing new games, or maybe you like writing the rulebooks or making graphic design choices.  If you decide to self publish you are deciding to start a company with a single product.  You may just want to do that single game and be done, but most of the time the process of getting going is so painful that once you establish that pipeline for a single product, you will feel like you should continue on with more products and become a real company.  You are actually choosing to make your dream be all about customer service, manufacturing quotes, accounts receivable, state sales tax, corporate tax returns, convention logistics, marketing, processing purchase orders and general accounting and shipping.  Do you love the idea of all of those things?  

Yes this is an AI generated image, as are a few others in this post.  If you have a problem with that please avert your eyes.  Seriously though, every word of this post is written by me, a real human, only these few flavor images are AI.

Not many people love both the design/creative side of board gaming AND have a truly good head for business.  I do know some amazing people in this industry who really do make that work, but there are very few of them.  Maybe the best example I know of is Ryan Laukat of Red Raven Games.  He is an amazing man and quite humble and will be embarassed if he finds out I mentioned him by name here, but his games are top notch and as far as I can tell he and his family handle pretty much everything in house.  He and his family are an inspiration to me.  Grandpa Beck may well be another such individual, and there are some truly talented people at the head of so many of these companies. 

Tom Vasel from the Dice Tower had some great expressions about this on an old video of his that I would encourage you to take to heart.  It is about 7 minutes long (starting at 27:11 in this video) but may save you years of going in a direction that you may not enjoy:

So how do I fit into this industry?  I have never designed a single game and likely never will.  I stink at graphic design.  So what am I doing here?  I love board games in general and I LOVE the idea of running my own business.  I have an accounting/business background and am unapologetically a  business owner first and a board gamer second.  I am here to make money for my family and to manage this business and grow it.  I just decided to go into business in an industry that interests me.

Several years ago a guy asked to shadow me for a day just to see what I did and how I had this moderately successful company.  He spent the morning watching me answer some emails to a factory, handling some purchase orders to a distributor and entering their invoice into our accounts receivable google sheet.  I was over the moon with this $10,000+ purchase order and excited to get the product shipped out and process everything.  He was bored and disappointed that I was just doing "business stuff" and left before lunch.  It was probably for the best because I spent some of the afternoon filing quarterly sales tax reports!

I'm not trying to discourage anyone from getting into the business, with crowdfunding and more and more information like this blog post, it is easier than ever to get your game self-published, but it is also so much easier to avoid that route all together and not be looking at 500 copies of your game stuck in your garage or worse in a storage unit 5 years from now.   

I have seen dozens of "companies" with a few products trying to make a big splash at a major convention and talking bravely about their future expansion plans, only to have them never been seen or heard from again.  Often I will see a very simplisitic game with some "roll and move" mechanics or some special educational spin that the owners are just sure are going to take over the market and be the next big thing.  If you don't immediately know why those will draw eye rolls from 95% of your potential customer base at GenCon then you do not understand this market at all.  

It is the easiest thing in the world to pay a factory to make your game and get it to you, because the factory will give you zero feedback on the quality of your actual game, the game play and the rulebook and the play experience.  The factory just wants to produce games for money and they are not going to help you sell anything.   The real secret is SELLING those games.  If you are not super excited about that part of all this then you are not interested in going into business.  In the end I am a sales person for my company, a slave to the bottom line and I love that.  If you are morally opposed to capitalism or don't get excited about the prospect of growing your bottom line, self-publishing may not be for you.  Have I scared you off yet?

How to Start

Step 1: Honest Feedback

OK, so if you are still with me, let me tell you step by step what I would do in your shoes if you have a game you truly believe in and are committed to making it happen!  First and foremost, you need to get independent feedback on your game.  If you ask your mom or your on gaming friends they will all say how great your game is.  They are almost as biased as you are and aren't going to be able to be objective.  A truly independent play-test group is where you need to go, and even then those people may not give you real feedback unless they think they are talking to someone removed from the design of the game.  If I am showing a new game to someone I alway start by saying that this is a game we are thinking about licensing but that we haven't made the decision yet.  Having them feel like they are part of the decision making process on green-lighting a game gives them permission to speak with sometimes brutal honesty.  

Yes another AI image, couldn't you tell?  Its just for fun/flavor here, I'm not selling anything.

All to often when I see a new game by a new company at a convention for the first time I will stop by and ask them how to play the game.  Usually within 5 minutes I can give you an opinion on whether that game is going to be appealing to our community or not.  But almost never is the designer of the game interested in knowing that, they are only interested in justifying their decision to move forward with their game and to tell me how great it is and why.  I hope no matter what you decide to do, that you will get real feedback from people about the game.  I would ask those people who are playing how many are willing to give you a $10 deposit right then and there to reserve a copy of the game when it is published.  That will give you a REAL feel for just how they feel about the game.  If the response isn't "TAKE MY MONEY" then you may not have the next big thing on your hands that you think you do.

I started Mayday before Crowdfunding existed and I started it with a $50,000 line of credit and a dream and no real way of getting advanced money from my customers or distributors.  Yep, "in my day" we had to do it the old-fashioned way.  Fast forward to 2017 and I was in the midst of a nasty divorce with an ex who owned nearly half of Mayday.  I was still in talks with her on the value of the company and the equitable splitting of assets and that went on for nearly 2 years.  During that time I didn't want to continue to put all of my energy into Mayday as any growth there could still be taken by the divorce.  So I kept running Mayday but I started a brand new company from completely zero and I had very little financial ability to do much of anything, you know, kind of like what you might be going through with your potential crowdfunding project. 

So what did I do?  I started a new company completely seprate from Mayday and with no Mayday resources.  Our first game was called Red Outpost. I didn't design the game, I licensed it from another company that had proven the game was a success in their local market.  That wasn't an easy sell to get this license to the USA for an unknown company, but in the end it worked out for both of us.  Not only did I not develop it myself, I had to pay them licensing fees on every copy sold.  But I loved the idea of the game and the gameplay and was convinced it would do well.  So lets get into the nitty gritty of exactly what I did to make that game, step by step.  I'm assuming you all are at nearly this point with your own project.  You believe in it and are committed and have third-party confirmation that it is a good game.

Step 2: Graphics & Art

I did have the benefit of a finished rulebook and art for Red Outpost (kickstarter link HERE).  If you don't have that you need to make the artwork and get the game into "print ready" format for the factory.  In my case I really just needed to go through the rulebook, create a logo for the company and create a UPC/SKU for it to sell it later. For you, you will need at least a mostly finished rulebook and some nice looking images/art.  If you are super cheap you can go somewhere like Fiverr.com and hire someone, or look on BoardGameGeek at art styles from other games you like and try to contract with artists to do the design for you, whatever you decide, you need a pretty polished rulebook and set of art to use on the crowdfunding campaign AND you need a very close to final set of components to send to factories to quote the game for you. You will also need a graphic designer to help you put everything into the proper format to send it to the factory when the time comes. 

Once you have your art and rulebook you can then go to Kickstarter or Gamefound or Backerkit, whatever your chosen platform is.  I personally prefer Kickstarter for its easy of use and built-in following of gamers.  I have done a few projects on Gamefound but I didn't feel they brought anything that different to the process and to be honest I have found their backend site for creaters to be very frustrating to use.  It just hasn't been as intuitive for me, though I know plenty of others who prefer them.  

Step 3: Prelaunch

Before you go creating a live campaign, you need to build your audience.  For kickstarter you can go through and put in the bare bones of your campaign and then at the end (after the financial section) there is a promotion spot where you can create a pre-launch notification page.  This is where you can start to drive people to in order to have them be notified when the campaign is live.  These prelaunch pages are the ultimate metric of just how ready your project is for launch.  I personally try to never launch a campaign without at least 1000 people signed up for notification on our prelauch page.   I have a prelaunch page up for Wolf Street that only has 270 people signed up, I won't launch it until it has 1000, or at least that is the plan.  You can check it out before the launch HERE, but after the launch that link will just take you to the campaign.    I also feel it is important to include a link to the draft version of the actual kickstarter page on the bottom of the pre-launch page so potential backers can look more closely at the potential campaign and provide any feedback they might have about it.  I have often found spelling errors, shipping cost issues or other things that were pointed out by pre-launch followers.  Here is a screenshot of the prelaunch page if it isn't around any more:

So how do you get followers?  It isn't easy, especially if you are just starting out.  For Red Outpost I couldn't use Mayday Games' existing newsletter subscribers or risk any cross-contamination of my Mayday brand for fear of havinng this new company classified as an extension of Mayday Games and taking nearly half of the new company with my divorce.  

I started posting about the game on my own social media but that didn't get me very far.  I needed physical copies of the game to send to reviewers and influencers, but I didn't have any copies, so what could I do?  Step 4 will tie back into this step in the end.  

For the graphics on the campaign, I took them all from the rulebook and components I already had art for. Take a look at the kickstarter video.  I did it myself with windows movie maker (free on my laptop) and all that same art with some random images I found off the internet that looked like they fit what I was going for.  I just wrote a script of what I wanted for the voiceover and hired a guy with a russian accent off of FIVER for $50 to do the audio for it.  I am quite proud of the result for $50 and about 4 hours of my effort in Movie Maker:

Step 4: Manufacturing Partners

I need to say at this point that I really have a bit of a leg up on the manufacturing process as I have been living in China off and on since 2011, speak decent mandarin and my 2nd wife (of 6+ years) is also Chinese.  I moved to China in 2011 to be closer to the manufacturing process and to talk to factories directly rather than through middlemen and sourcing agents.  I didn't speak a lick of Mandarin and had no idea what I was doing, but I have to say, for me it has been worth it to go through all of this.  But don't worry, you don't need to come to China and learn Mandarin to get to where I am with manufacturing.

I'm going to get a bit controversial here and let you in on some secrets.  I first started publishing games back in 2008-09 and it was all through third-party sourcing agents.  There simply wasn't a lot of information out there about potential manufacturing partners at the time.  There were no big booths of manufacturers at game conventions like there are now and many of the companies that had existing factories weren't keen to give away their factory contacts.  So, I found third-party sourcing agents to help me.  At that time, some of our games were costing me nearly 3 times as much per copy as those SAME games that we are still printing today.  I was using a Hong Kong-based sourcing agent who was the nicest guy, but when I met him in Hong Kong he was driving an insanely expensive car and took me out to the nicest restaurants in town.  He was trying to impress me, but I couldn't help but wonder how he could afford such a lifestyle in Hong Kong, and it made me realize that it was off of the backs of suckers like me. 

Now for the controversial bit.  Even today there are a shockingly large number of major players in the industry that still use third-party sourcing agents.  There is even one company that started out strictly as a sourcing agent but was so sucessful that they started calling themselves an actual factory.  They literally were taking quotes from mainland China factories, marking them up a flat 25% and then passing quotes onto customers.  There are still several US-based and Canadian-based companies that make their livelihoods off of basically marking up a quote from China and being the middleman. 

There is one major "factory" that may well own its own factory today or at least partially own it, but their prices are still SIGNIFICANTLY higher than a direct factory would be, and there are some MAJOR players in our industry who still use these factories and pay way above the typical factory rates.  I know of one publisher that must be doing at least 4-5 million USD in business with this "factory" and I am convinced they are spending at least $1 million USD per year MORE on manufacturing than they need to.  It drives me crazy to know just how much they are overpaying.  

As an accountant who watches the bottom line, I find that wasteful and dare I say a little lazy.  It is amazing because some of these companies are very-well respected and are viewed as some of the wisest voices in our industry, yet from my perspective they are giving so much of their bottom line to this "factory," please don't do that!  How can you avoid it, simple: competition.  Get multiple quotes for each game.  You should NEVER throw all of your business blindly to one factory.  In this day and age and with all the competition among competent factories it just makes no sense. So here is what I do.  For EVERY new game/project we do, we quoted it out to at least 3-5 factories and sometimes more. 

I keep a google sheet with a tab for every game we quote and I record the amount of time it takes for them to get back to us as well as the cost per unit.  I give all of these factories feedback about their quote and I take the lowest.  I don't ask other factories to match/beat a price.  I'm not trying to nickle and dime the factory to death or cause a bidding war, I just ask them to give me their best price upfront.  I tell each factory where their quote came in so they know.  But I have done business with all of these factories over the years and trust all of them to be able to do the project I am quoting for.  Many of them will come back and say they can match or beat the lowest price after the fact, but I just tell them to do better next time.  I really don't like having to go back and forth with factories about pricing.

Here is an example of a recent game, without revealing the actual factory names or who came in the lowest:

You can see the per/unit cost on Factory 1 included a $1,050 USD setup fee, so it is spread out per unit in the 2nd column of each # of units.  Just look at the difference in price among these factories though!  For this same game a sourcing agent would likely be getting the quote from the factory around $6.75 at 2,000 units and marking it up to around $8.44 per unit (25% mark up).  Imagine paying 25% more per game than the average and almost double what factory 1 is quoting.   I thought it was hilarious to get a reply back from factory #8 that they knew they wouldn't be competitive so they didn't even bother to quote us!  

There have also been rumors in the industry in recent years about larger companies that have employees overseeing the manufacturing process getting kickbacks from the factories.  I will never give up control of the quotation process to anyone else for this reason.  Imagine if I as the owner of the company was paying someone $50,000/year to oversee manufacturing and suddenly factory 4 above offered my employee $1/unit kickback to select their factory and just hide Factory #1's quote from me?  Keep in mind those companies that are large enough to employ someone full-time to oversee manufacturing may well be doing 10,000+ copies at a time.  That kind of cash is certainly tempting to the employee and I have heard from multiple factories that they are losing business because they refuse to offer such kickbacks.  Being the owner there is no kickback that would matter to me, it is all my money anyway.

If you are interested in getting quotes from factories you can easily google for lists of companies or look at other people's blogs to find out what factories they have used.  I have personally done business with over 20 factories over the years and have 12 or so that I found to be of great quality and at least good enough prices to use them a time or two over the years, here are some of them in alphabetical order so I don't show any bias, though I will say 3 of these factories are my GO TO, that I'm 90% sure will come in the cheapest AND deliver the best product for me.

DoFine, Eastar, Gameland, Hopes, Longpack, Longshore, Magicraft, Meijia, Warmer, Whatz, Wingo

There are other factories out there which I'm sure are great, this is a just a partial list of factories I have done business with personally that produced good results for me.  I have other factories for other producst like backpacks, crokinole bags, wooden accessories, and crokinole boards.  Some of these factories do some things better than others and I consider all of that in selecting a partner for a particular product.

But how do you get a quote you ask? You need a very detailed list of all of your components, the exact size, quantity and thickness/material you want for your game.  If you don't know what material you want, just ask the factory to provide you with some input.  Here are the detailed specs of one of our games:

You can see from the above that the factory gave us 3 options with 3 different prices on the quality of cards for this game.  But you need to know the exact specs to be able to quote it.  The factory can help you with all the details if you are unsure about particular components.

So with Red Outpost the factory agreed to provide us with a few advanced copies of the game.  These 5 advanced copies were digitally printed and basically hand made by the factory, and then airmailed to me in the USA.  I then used these copies to send to board game influencers and reviewers.  In most cases I had these people forward on their copy to another reviewer directly so I could get as many eyes on the game in advance of the Kickstarter as possible.  I basically looked at youtube subcription numbers and other influencer info on facebook groups and BoardGameGeek review posts to decide who to send the game out to.  It involved a lot of time and effort on my part to track where every copy was going and ensure none of them got stuck with any one person for too long.

But slowly and steadily reviews and posts and independent feedback started rollling in.  The prelaunch page continued to gain followers and the buzz was building.  But that wasn't enough.  I also did some paid previews and coordinated their launch on their social media to be at the same time as the Kickstarter launch for maximum impact.  

How to Finish

The Strategy

You might have been expecting "The Launch" to be next right? Nope.  You are still not ready to launch a campaign, even with 1000+ followers and buzz building.  You have to think very strategically about your campaign first.  You need to decide how much to charge your backers, what to offer them (stretch goals) and how and when you can deliver the game.  Red Outpost was delivered back in 2020 so I'm willing to pull back the curtain and share actual numbers with you.  I didn't have the ability to produce this game just anywhere, I had to produce it at the factory the rights holder decided on to produce it together with their own copies and other copies being made with other publishers in other parts of the world. 

But thinking strategically about the game, I needed to decide why someone would choose to support the project and what I could present on the kickstarter page to convince people to pull the trigger.  You can look at the project for yourself (HERE) but you will see right at the top of the project page the section "why back now".  If there isn't a strong reason to back the campaign then why would someone do it? You need to pitch a "carrot" or an urgency as to why someone should give you their money.  Here are some common reasons, all of which I presented in Red Outpost's campaign:

• 1.      FOMO.  The fear of missing out is real. For Red Outpost this meant a limited edition of the game that was only going to be available on Kickstarter.  Backers could pledge for the game to get some upgrades in their game that wouldn’t ever be available again. 
• 2.       Discounts.  The price on the Kickstarter was cheaper than the MSRP.
• 3.       Early Delivery.  Backers would get their copy before retail/distribution.
• 4.       Stretch Goals.  As more people back the campaign we unlocked new stretch goals for additional value to backers.  This “pile on” mentality means that success encourages more success and existing backers are motivated to share the project with others.

I settled on a $5,000 USD "goal" on the project just because I was fully committed to making this game already and I wanted it to be low so that we could claim "success" early by saying "hey look we funded fast, aren't we successful".   You can go look at update #2 (here) where I proudly say we were funded in just 2 hours.  It is a bit of a silly thing to do, but you have to play the game.  From my experience you typically get about 33% of your funding in your first 2 days of the campaign, then 33% across the middle of the campaign and then the last 1/3 the last 3-4 days of the campaign as things are ending.  So after the first 48 hours I typically triple the numbers to get to a good estimate of what we will end at.  

So, once you have settled on setting up an urgency to your campaign, you need to figure out how the math works for you.  I already had an intial quote of about $7.25 and 7.50 per unit from the license holder for manufacturing at minimum levels (1,000 each of standard and limited versions, respectively).  Assuming we sold 1000 copies at $30 each that would give us $30,000 USD in revenue against $7,500 to produce the game.  But with any kind of volume at all I would be into profit.   

It wasn't easy going back and forth with the license holder and the factory about all the individual details and changes from the standard to the limited edition and hammering out all of those details, but we were able to flesh this out and get a very good idea of what everything would cost before the campaign even went live.  I needed to totally know all of our numbers before I could establish a base MSRP or decide how much to charge backers.  Getting into those details is essential to ensure you are charging enough without charging too much.

The Launch

I like to launch our campaigns on a Tuesday at 10 AM Mountain time and run them for 22 days.  There is plenty of research and people discussing this topic but that is what I generlaly do.  The middle of the campaign where things are generally flat is shorter than with a longer campaign and it is enough time to get backers in the door.  If you have any significant youtube creators or influencers who have something positive to say about your campaign/game then I would recommend you coordinate with them to post their video at the same time as your campaign, that will also generate more traffic to you. 

Don't get too excited if your campaign looks to be going to the moon, it is going to taper off dramatically after 24-48 hours and you will start to wonder what is going wrong.  Don't stress, this is normal. You should consider run ads on BoardGameGeek.com during the campaign or doing some other advertising.  But those ads are not going to drive much traffic to your campaign typically, it is those pre-campaign "followers" and general kickstarter traffic as a result of your initial success that will likely drive most of your traffic.  

One good resource for monitoring your campaign is Kicktraq, you can see daily backers and more for any campaign.  HERE is the Red Outpost data.

Probably the best advice I can give (that I can't seem to take to heart myself) is to UNDER PROMISE and OVER DELIVER.  Add 3-6 months to the time you think you will take to fulfill the project so you can actually deliver on time, or who knows, maybe even early!  But no matter what happens between the time you launch and the time your last backer gets their stuff, you need to post frequent updates on your project to let them know exactly what is going on, even if it isn't good news.  I've learned the hard way that staying silent is the worst thing you can do, just tell your backers what is going on and they will forgive a lot, but if you just don't bother to tell them what is going on they are going to quickly pile on you, and rightly so.  I try to post weekly on any unfulfilled project to let them know what is going on. 

General Shipping/Fulfillment

I will talk about what I am doing now rather than what I did with Red Outpost as there have been significant changes in the world since then.  Shipping into Canada from the USA now involves significant tariffs and shipping to distribution centers to then ship to customers locally is much more expensive compared to shipping directly from China in most cases, so I have changed to this new and easier fulfillment method.  Basically what I am doing with new projects is to ship everything for the USA to the USA on a boat to our own warehouse for our own fulfillment and we are shipping everything to everyone else directly from China.  It is saving us a LOT of hassle/logistics trying to separate every production run into several smaller lots and it is easier to manage for us.  

You can have a look at our most recent campaign HERE and see the shipping costs.  This game (Dead Man's Draw 10-year Anniversary Edition) eighs 333 grams.  I will ship all of the non-USA versions to a 3rd party warehouse in HuiZhou China called "SendFromChina (SFC) and they will package them up and ship them across the world for us at the rates I have stated on the campaign.  You can look at the 4th tab on THIS google sheet to see exactly how much it will cost to ship 1, 2 or 3 copies of each game to where.  How do I know how much it will cost to ship to where?  It is easy, they have a shipping cost calulator right on their website HERE.  

For SFC, there are a few nuances to understand, for EUROPE/UK I will only ship via rates that are DDP (duty prepaid) so we need to make sure those backers pay the VAT tax up front and we pay it to SFC as product ships out to backers.  I don't want backers to have to pay a huge tax/customs bill and so I charge them the approrpriate amount in their shipping charge. This simplifies things so much for us since we only ship to the USA via boat and then to SFC in China.   I never have to deal with any of the international fulfillment directly this way.  But how about the USA?  As a first time creator surely I can't fulfill 1000+ shipments myself? Right?

Actually you can.  And I 100% would if I were you.  It isn't as difficult as you might think and with some planning before shipping from the factory, it can be quite easy.  If you keep your rewards simple and 90% of them are just for copies of your game, you can easily ask your factory to put each game in a shipping box before sending them to you, at least for the copies you want to self-fulfill.  Think about it, who do you think will put your games into boxes for cheaper and where do you think cardboard boxes are cheaper, the USA or China?  Push that labor to China!  

So lets assume you have a medium box about the size of Pandemic (the game), it would typically come in a "master carton" with 6-8 copies of each game inside each box.  That is fine for games you are going to sell to distributors or at tradeshows, but you really want some of your games in ready-to-ship boxes too.  Let's assume you sell 1000 copies of your game on kickstarter and make 2000 copies total, you could tell your factory to pre-package half of your production into mailable cardboard boxes and to include those in a larger "master carton" or even just put them together on pallets.  It is extremely easy to just slap labels on those boxes and have USPS/UPS or Fedex pick them up the same day they arrive to you.  

Specific Shipping In The USA

As you finish your kickstarter campaign and go to the post-campaign survey you will ask all of your backers for their address and phone number, it is very easy to export that information into a shipping software of your choice and batch print all of the labels to everyone.  I use a program called Shipstation but others like Stamps.com work fine too.  I would go out and get a thermal label printer (like this one from Amazon) and some 4x6 inch labels like what you see on your own packages coming to your house every day and just print them all out, slap the labels on the boxes and boom, you are done. 

This is a photo of a container that arrived from China and a Fedex truck right next to it.

I had a monster campaign in 2024 (see photo above) where we got 8 40-foot containers of crokinole boards all within a few weeks of each other.  In most cases we had Fedex drop a 52-foot trailer right next to our newly arrived container and moved the pre-packaged games from the container right into the trailer, just slapping labels on them as we went.  It only took 3 or 4 people to process the entire container in an afternoon this way.  Of course we have a forklift and pallet jacks at the warehouse, but fulfillment of 1000 packages can be done by a couple of people in a day unless you have a really complicated fulfillment process.

You can see how easy it is to unload from our container and put them right into the fedex truck with a couple of pallet jacks and a forklift.

Before you ship a single package you can check Shipstation (or whatever software you are using) and see just what it will cost to ship your exact package and then bulk print all of them out using whatever carrier you want.  All of them (including the post office) will come pick up if you schedule with them in advance.  

If you have a larger shipment coming in you might consider renting a storage unit unless you want to fit your stuff in your garage/basement.  You can rent one out pretty cheaply in most parts of the country and it will be much cheaper than what a third-party fulfillment center will charge you for storage.  Remember, a third-party is going to do the same work that you would have to do yourself, but likely pay union prices and with a good markup for them to make a profit on you too.  Do it yourself and don't overspend on your first campaign.  If you do it right you might even turn a profit!  A profit?  Say it ain't so.

The Payoff

The most common thing I hear on the internet is how unlikely it is that a game that funds on Kickstarter will turn a profit.  I don't doubt that there are TONS of people who lose money on their project and many more who may actually make some money on their project initially but then lose money in the long run by buying too many copies of their game or spending too much on marketing or at conventions, or even just outsourcing too much.   But all of our projects have been profitable, and it's not even close.  I honestly don't get how people can overspend so irresponsibly.  

Let me give you some actual and rarely seen numbers behind this Red Outpost campaign.  In the end we had 3,865 total backers that pledged for a total of $139,146 USD or about $36 per backer on average. 

After Kickstarter fees and dropped backers I recieved $125,319 USD into my checking account a few weeks after the project ended.  Note that this doesn't include shipping as we charged that post-campaign during the Crowdox survey.  There is no reason to collect shipping on the Kickstarter and lose 8% of the shipping to Kickstarter as well! I don't get why people love to have backers pledge for add-ons, all-in packages, upgrades and shipping during the campaign, unless it is just vanity and wanting to show people how cool they are.  Paying Kickstarter 8% of that extra money just to show off seems foolish to me.  Much better to push ALL of that to the back end and collect those funds on the post-campaign survey where you are only paying 3% to Backerkit or whatever survey manager you choose to use.  

That 2024 Kickstarter for Crokinole I mentioned earlier, it raise over $700,000 on Kickstarter but it raised over $500,000 on the backerkit with shipping, upgrades and add-ons!  

Imagine if we had the backers pay that extra $527,000 on the Kickstarter, sure it would have been cool to have a $1.2 million USD project, but we would have paid Kickstarter another $25,000+ in needless fees, forget that, I want that money in my pocket.  

But back to Red Outpost, assuming we break even on the shipping charges, just how did we do on the project?  There were 63 "retailers" who backed the project for at least 6 copies each and lots of backers that backed for 2x or 4x copies of the game so we decided to produce 5,000 total limited edition of the game and 2,500 of the standard version.  The limited edition included UV coating on the board and box, the resources went from cubes to "fish, wheat, coal" shaped tokens, screen printed hammer and sickle printed on all the influence tokens, and larger "special cards" compared to the standard version.  But because we did twice as many of the limited edition, the price per unit on the premium edition was actually cheaper!  Here are the actual prices we paid for the game including the licensing fees:

Yes you are reading that right.  I paid $52,675 USD for 7,500 copies of the game.  I had to deliver about 4,300 copies of the game to backers so I had 3,200 more copies to sell AND I had ($125,319 - $52,675 production cost) $72,644 extra in my bank account from this one project.   I still had to pay about $8,000 for the shipping and import duties.   But that is still $60,000 in profit from this campaign after all expenses plus I had 3,200 extra copies of the game to sell in the future.  Most of those copies I sold over the next few years at $14 wholesale (60% off the $35 MSRP) x 3,200 for another $44,800 in cash.  That is around $100,000 in profit for the game.  

Conclusion

So how can other people lose money on their campaigns?  They produce too many copies, or pay too much to their factories, or spend too much on their other expenses like development, art, graphic design, marketing and fulfillment.  Don't do that!  Control your costs, do as much as you possibly can by yourself.  It is better to err on the side of being cheap and profitable.