487: Student Story – Making 6 Figures Selling Card Games And Board Games With Jesse Funk

00:00
You’re listening to the My Web Quarter Job podcast, the place where I bring on successful bootstrap business owners and delve deeply into what strategies are working and what strategies are not with their businesses. And today I’m thrilled to have Jesse Funk on the show. Jesse has been a student in my Create a Profitable Online Store course for eight or nine years now. He runs two e-commerce stores, one selling children’s games over at davinchesroom.com and a body care brand called solpre.com. He’s been running these businesses, generating a full-time income for about eight years.

00:29
And in this episode, we’re going to talk about the challenges of creating and selling card games and board games online. But before we begin, I want to give a quick shout out to Chase Diamond for sponsoring this episode. Chase is my go-to guy when it comes to email marketing, and he runs a successful email marketing agency over at Structured Agency, which caters to many eight and nine figure e-commerce brands. Now, for those of you who can’t afford to hire an agency, Chase offers a pretty good email marketing course if you want to learn how to do email yourself.

00:57
And this course can be found over at mywifequitterjob.com slash chase. Once again, that’s mywifequitterjob.com slash C-H-A-S-E. I also want to thank Emerge Council for sponsoring this episode. Now, if you sell on Amazon or run any online business for that matter, the most important aspect of your long-term success will be your brand. And this is why I work with Steven Weigler and his team from Emerge Council to protect my brand over at Bumble Bee Linens. Now, what’s unique about Emerge Council.

01:25
is that Steve focuses his legal practice on e-commerce and provides strategic and legal representation to entrepreneurs to protect their intellectual property. For example, if you’ve ever been ripped off or knocked off on Amazon, then Steve can help you fight back and protect yourself. And the students in my class have used Steve for copywriting their designs, policing against counterfeiters and knockoffs, vendor agreements, brand registry, you name it. So if you need IP protection services, go to emergecouncil.com and get a free consult.

01:54
If you tell Steve that I sent you, you’ll get a hundred dollar discount. That’s EmergeCouncil.com, E-M-E-R-G-E-C-O-U and S-E-L. Now onto the show.

02:10
Welcome to the My Wife Could Her Job podcast. Today I’m thrilled to have a longtime student and friend on the show, Jesse Funk. Jesse runs two e-commerce stores, one selling children’s games over at davinci’sroom.com and Solpre, which is a store that sells hydration and body care products for athletes. Jesse’s a great guy and I’ve had the pleasure of seeing him every single year practically at my annual e-commerce conference, the seller summit. And in this episode, Jesse’s gonna tell us.

02:37
The abortion story behind his two companies and how he makes a living selling online. What’s up, Jesse? How’s it going, man? Steve, thanks for having me. Yeah, long time student friend. I don’t know. I’ve been hanging around a long time. I don’t know exactly when. I can tell you how much your course cost when I picked it up, but I don’t know if you want me to say that at this point. I think you joined like eight years ago, I want to say seven or eight years ago. Yeah, so I’ve been doing this full time, I think eight years now. Yeah.

03:06
with so no other source of income. And yeah, I started kind of my entrepreneurial journey. It depends on how you want to look at it. You either say I was a child or you can say I was like 1920. I say that because two stories from when I was a kid. One, I don’t know if they do those like silly fundraisers, you know, when they still do. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I’m sure your kids have done. Yeah. But just like

03:35
So I grew up in kind of a, I’ll say like lower middle class neighborhood. We weren’t like struggling, but we didn’t have tons of stuff. I was always taken care of. had food. You know, my parents did well by me, but there was the, well, would say the rich neighborhood next to us. And so a friend of mine and I decided we were going to do this fundraiser and we wanted to win whatever silly prize, you know, they give the kids whatever it is, sunglasses or.

04:04
whatever silly thing, you know. And so we’re elementary school kids, so maybe third grade. And we decide we’re going to go by ourselves and take our magazines and sell whatever gift wrap paper or whatever it is, the fundraiser is in the quote unquote rich neighborhood. My parents were coming back from somewhere and saw us out and I was in so much trouble for being unsupervised, walking around trying to like sell stuff to neighbors. And then my

04:34
My mom told me a story I don’t even recall about when I was a kid. I guess I made some drawings and then I was trying to like go to the neighbors and like sell my drawings and you know, get them to buy. And so I guess I’ve always had some kind of. It’s a new blood. Yeah. I mean, another kid story I remember there was there was like a mock city thing we did in second or third grade where

05:04
every, so like, was trying to teach kids about the economy. And so as a class, you decided on like, this is our currency, ours were puck bucks because they were hockey themed for some reason. And so we made paper currency, everybody got, you know, the same amount of money to start. And then each kid would have a different shop. You got to decide what that shop would be. Maybe you would make handmade stuff, whatever.

05:31
My mom hooked me up with the good stuff. I got to sell candy. So everybody wanted to buy stuff for me, but I didn’t care about buying anything from anybody else. So at the end, I had like the most Puck Bucks and everybody, because I was like, I mean, I got the candy. That’s what I want. And I got all the Puck Bucks and that’s what I wanted. So like, it was just kind of an early, delayed gratification situation where the teacher was like, okay, you guys have all these Puck Bucks left and she had like an auction. So I could just bid up on everything like a

06:00
like a rich little kid with my fake, fake money on whatever it was she had for auction. So, um, so I guess I began early, uh, but as far as these particular businesses, um, they kind of came after I had tried a number of things. It depends on how you want to look at it in terms of what a try is. Um, so to speak, some things I probably gave up on too early, some things I probably gave up on at the right time.

06:30
but somewhere between six to a dozen different attempts at like product tries or business, know, some things I made a couple thousand bucks, some things made absolutely nothing, some things never even got launched. But the game business started actually in adult party games when Cards Against Humanity was huge and there was nothing else out. So there was this just massive demand and a huge vacuum of space where

07:00
There were not a lot of other options. So I had launched a game called awkward turtle at the time. It’s kind of a play on taboo. It’s like a word guessing game and it’s not like outright dirty. It’s like, um, how people don’t like the word moist. That’s true. hate that word. Right. So it’s stuff. It’s words like that. And, and so I kind of launched, I didn’t originally intend to be like,

07:26
my business is on Amazon. just was like, well, Cards Against Humanity is on Amazon. So I’ll put this on Amazon. And then, you know, it took off because it was in this big vacuum and I made- Can we talk, let’s back up. this first- How do you come up with it? Like I wouldn’t be able to come up it. Are you just a creative person that- Oh yeah, no. So this is why-

07:49
Uh, me and Amanda get along well. So Amanda Wittenborn, that’s episode 269 from Steve’s podcast. If anybody wants to listen to her episode, that’s why Amanda and I get along so well. So we’re both kind of creatives. Um, I did a lot of art stuff in high school. Uh, I play the violin, I write music. Um, so yeah, I kind of combined the creative and analytical things together. I always like to say, I am putting my undergrad degree to work.

08:18
I double majored in math and psychology and everybody was like, what are you gonna do with that? And my senior thesis was on Texas Hold’em poker theory, so I wrote like a 50-page paper on that. So I guess I’d blow my spot up if I had to play poker with you guys anytime. But no, so I’m always taking kind of disparate ideas and bringing them together. So it’s like a game is…

08:48
I mean, a game in many ways is just like building a logical system, but then on the back end, it’s And then you have to go like, where does fun come from? And behind me, I’ve got some like analytical books that talk about what is fun and where does fun come from? And one of the things that is fun is a challenge. Something that can’t be too easy, but not too hard. Like it has to hit this right.

09:17
Yeah. Level of difficulty. And that’s how you have like age grades for games. And you have to like figure out, okay, at this age, in this case, talking about that original game for adults, it can’t be too difficult to guess the word, but it can’t be too easy either. Because if you just breeze through it, then you’re like, well, that sucked. But if it’s too hard, then you’re like, I can’t guess any of these, it still sucks. So you have to hit that sweet spot of

09:45
Okay, I didn’t get this one, but I got the next one. like, you know, it’s, like an achievable challenge. And that that’s a type of fun. So walk me through the process. So you developed the game, like how long do have to play test it before you launch it? Or do you just launch it and see how it goes? Yeah, that’s assuming that I play test. No, so I mean, I do need to do more play testing. I’ve never really had a great formal play test group. So I’ve used my family.

10:14
I’ve used Friends. One of the local board game bars here in Kansas City has always wanted me to come out, but I’m like, especially the games I make now, they’re for children. Like, they’re not really the typical hobby shop, like, kind of games that would make sense in that setting. So I go through it and just kind of, because most of them are so relatively simple, I just debug.

10:43
myself for the most part and then launch it. Sometimes it ends up well, sometimes that means I fall on my face. But then I learned things along the way. One of the things that went wrong with Awkward Turtle, that very first one, is it basically has no replay value. Unless you’ve forgotten the words. Because once you know the words in the deck, then so I did well because there was such a vacuum. But if I was to do it, launch it again today,

11:13
I think it would fall flat because I need a much bigger deck of cards to be competitive. Margins would be thinner. You know, I just don’t know that it would work in this environment because there’s so much competition in that space now. So it was kind of like right place, right time. And a little bit unnerving in that. So I went from what, like the year prior to launching that

11:42
I think my W2 or whatever, guess I was like doing the Craigslist hustle, buying electronics and refurbishing them and sell them and stuff. I think I made $15,000, $18,000 or something in profit that year. And then the following year I made over $100,000 in profit. So it was like a little bit of indication of like, I’ve been trying and trying and trying and trying and then here we are. But also it felt too easy.

12:12
Because it was like, I mean, I from, from concept to launch, we’re talking about like three months. And then all of a sudden it’s just rolling and rolling and rolling in. And I had years of it’s all going to go away. It’s all going to go away. Like I gotta keep, I gotta keep going or it’s all going to go away. And I was right in some sense, like that game makes like 10 bucks a month now. Like it’s cycles. It’s product cycles basically gone. Okay.

12:42
You have like a dozen games now though, right? was looking at- Yeah, yeah, I’ve got a dozen games. my typical, so like one of the things that from the conference and prior to the conference that I had talked about with like my mastermind is like process improvement and getting out of your own way. So I’ve done well to this point, you know.

13:09
like two mid six figure businesses in terms of revenue, but I’m kind of in my own way in that with the games, I can typically only launch one or two SKUs a year. Cause it takes time to think about it. What’s the opportunity? How do I approach it? How do I make something better? That’s the hard part of developing your own IP is, you know, making something original. So my, my process improvement for myself this year, because I want to get to the seven figure and beyond point,

13:40
is to get out of my own way. So mentally, I’ve made the shift from I’m a game designer to I’m the creative director. I don’t design games anymore. So I’m handing off more stuff. I already handed off work to like the artists because they can make much better artwork than I can. But like, hey, you know, get my VA to help me on on product research to do some of that bulk stuff that takes time.

14:09
you know, all still have hands on some of these products a little bit. Um, but then, you know, when we come to new games, it’s higher game designer, there’s freelance game designers. It’ll help you put something together and then I can have them help put it together. I can tweak it if I need to. They can help play test, but then now compared to one to two skews a year for the last, you know, eight years, I have like eight skews in development for this year.

14:38
Nice. So, you know, I’m really trying to speed up how fast I can go. And at this point, I’m really only constrained by capital. Like I can run more projects, but I don’t have more money. So I have to see how they go first before I move on to the next opportunities. Let me ask you this. I think selling games, especially on the Amazon is probably the hardest thing I can think of because people aren’t searching for these new games, right? So how do you even get those initial sales?

15:06
Yeah, well, see, and that’s kind of the trick, right? Let me take a drink of water real quick.

15:13
So I get pitched games from time to time from friends, from strangers. And they go, oh, I this game idea. I want to give it to you. And I think you can make it a success. I’m like, OK, well, I can’t remember if you’ve done a video about this. You probably have, because you’ve done a video about just about everything. But when you’re looking at business, you’re basically talking about two kinds of businesses, demand generation and demand capture.

15:44
I work on demand capture and you’re asking, okay, well, nobody’s searching for these games, but I only build games that people are searching for. And you go, well, how do you develop your own IP if you’re already searching for it? So like, that’s part of the reason I shifted to like education games, because people want like, I have a board game that teaches kids math. People are looking for math games. There’s already demand out there. The trick is figuring out.

16:13
where inside of that big pocket that there’s opportunity like maybe I don’t know but say like let’s Matthew because I can relate to that yes I think parents are really frustrated with I haven’t done this and maybe there’s opportunity here so I’m speaking out of my butt here but like with common core people have had a real tough time with common yeah so maybe there’s opportunity and now I’m gonna have to go look at this after this podcast so maybe there’s opportunity to help

16:42
kids learn Common Core math with a game. And you don’t like, that’s kind of an unearthed niche that maybe nobody’s addressing. But once parents see it, when they’re looking for math games, then they go, oh, I want to buy that. And then consequently, the Amazon algorithm kind of takes over when they go, oh, this is performing much better for this audience type. They’ll start to shove it out to outlier keywords and figure it out.

17:10
And then you’ll like over time, if you’ve done your branding properly for the game, people will start to search volume for that specific game as well. Well, I’m curious, like that turtle game, like what search terms over for that bidding on like taboo or. Yeah, I think I was I was bidding on cards against me at the time because there was nothing else. So it was like it was like on the search volume, people would look for cards against humanity.

17:39
And then the search page, like I was like result within the top 10 results for Cargius humanity because there was nothing else. So there’s just this massive volume plus because I called it awkward turtle. And at the time that was a much bigger cultural reference. It kind of got some of that as well.

17:58
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19:14
Okay, I get it. Okay, so there’s initial, you’re not doing adult games anymore, are you? I mean, so I have like some products aimed at adults, but they’re not adult party games. Right, because those, like today, you just said there’s just so much competition that you couldn’t piggyback on our cards against Yeah, I mean, my biggest successes are always launching into a gap. Okay. Where I go, here’s demand, there’s low competition, and then here’s a product. Finding those gaps is the difficult part.

19:43
And I don’t know that I have like a perfect formula for doing that. If I did, I would probably be making a lot, lot more money. But that’s how I always do the best is go, okay, here’s a gap. And then also I’m going to improve this product by five different features or five different aspects as well. Do you use any tools outside of the ordinary or? I mean, after the conference, I just started using Data Dive, but like I have…

20:12
an OG Jungle Scout account where I paid like a hundred bucks back when Greg started and I don’t pay the monthly. So like I have that, I, tools wise, I mean, I’ve got a lifetime access to Uber suggest to get some of that like trend data off of Amazon in terms of trying to figure out keyword search volume. And like, there, is there an idea? use Google trends. But a lot of it’s like just manual.

20:42
going down rabbit holes of these products, okay, what makes these products unique? Who are they speaking to? What’s their audience? What’s the sales volume? And then kind of making a, I don’t know, a product cloud for lack of a better term. And then figuring out, again, the commonalities, the differentiators, and do I believe there’s a gap? like, I’ll show you after we get done recording, because I don’t want to talk about anything new I don’t have out yet.

21:12
I’ve got a product sitting on my desk that I think is a, again, fits that demand capture side where there are people looking for this kind of product, but the way that I’ve done it, nobody else has done it this way yet. So I think it’s one of those situations where like I told my family, it’ll either do well or it’ll completely fall flat on its face because generally,

21:39
when you see other people doing things and they’re selling well, you go, like people want that. Clearly they’re buying it. But if you launch something that’s different, you could be launching something nobody wants. Right. Or you could be launching something people want, but they just didn’t have yet. Yeah. I mean, I feel like that it’s like that with every game. Right. So we talked about math games earlier. I actually got from that game. So I know exactly.

22:07
So when I used to go on Amazon for these math games, actually social proof played in an order amount of weight in what I buy, right? I wanted to, and I actually read all the reviews. In my case, I looked for Asian people leaving reviews too, because I mean, and then I would get those. So is it about first mover advantage in a lot of cases to get those reviews and build that vote? It seems that way generally, but there have definitely been.

22:37
like competitors come in in my spaces and like take a little bit here and there. Despite, you know, like some of my best games have in the thousands of reviews now. Wow. They’re kind of hard to, to move out of place. But you know, if a theme resonates better with somebody or like, you know, there’s, they approach it slightly differently. And that again, so like,

23:07
My games are set in stone. They have their rules and that’s what they are. So my addition and subtraction game, it’s not focused on common core. So I’ll go back to my example. So if somebody came in and they’re like, well, I have addition and subtraction game and it covers all the same topics, but it covers it by using common core, well, now that differentiator may be more important than first mover advantage. I also think it’s…

23:36
And this is part of the business that I’ve been trying to figure out, but because I have zero corporate background, I just don’t know. I think you get spillover from off-platform promotion. So be it retail, be it ads, whatever it is, I think you get a lot of people searching for products they’ve seen in someplace else, shops or whatever it is.

24:04
And I just don’t have that avenue figured out yet.

24:11
Can I ask you what your best selling game is and why you think it’s the best selling game? Oh, so my best selling game right now is a game called Don’t Go Bananas. So it is a game focused on working with kids to identify and understand their emotions instead of being reactive to them. All right. So I think that’s my best selling game at the moment.

24:41
in part because I’m a little entrenched. It’s been around for a minute. And again, I launched it into a gap. So there was like one competitor at the time, maybe two. And it’s specifically focused on a type of therapy called cognitive behavioral therapy. And so I use some of the principles, like basic principles of CBT to build that game. And that’s a little difficult in that.

25:08
You want to make it a game, you also want to have the parent or teacher or clinician have the ability to work the method. So it’s successful. the one aspect that it was launched into a gap, also because I made a card game and the big competitor at the time was like a $60 board game, while I offered something at a quarter of the price and I could still be profitable.

25:39
You know, if you’re using a tool to help kids, you can pay four times as much or, you know, a quarter of the price and get going. So all those things helped doing my job in terms of a game designer and actually building a game that also serves as a tool leads to those good reviews. And that helps in the longterm because if it’s, if it’s crap, somebody’s going to supplant you at some point. Right.

26:08
So that’s kind of the various factors I see, I guess. And people were looking for cognitive therapy games. Was that like the search term? Yeah, the search term was like, I don’t if it was therapy games or CBT games or whatever it was. like that, yeah. there was, again, demand capture. And I was like, well, with my psychology background, I’m comfortable with understanding the concepts.

26:37
might be used. I aimed originally aimed the game at parents and teachers because I typically build for laypeople, but I have a lot of counselors, clinicians, therapists who buy the game and use it in their practice. And I didn’t anticipate that. Oh, so you didn’t actually market to them specifically call them up right now. It’s just strictly Amazon demand generation. Interesting. So you’re it sounds like you’re very deliberate.

27:04
least like you probably do keyword research and whatnot. look for a gap, some sort of spit on it, then you make it your own. Right. Yeah. So I that, and that’s where like, when people pitch me games, I go like, it sounds like a great game, but it just, doesn’t fit my business model. don’t, I don’t, I’d love to figure out how to do that, how to do demand generation instead of demand capture. Um, it’s just not currently in my skillset. So if I could figure out that component, uh, you know,

27:33
I’ll go a lot faster, lot farther, a lot faster. So I mean, all of that just involves content really, you know, to track the audience and that sort of thing. I am curious though. So once you come up with the game, let’s say in your case, it’s cards. Do you actually have those printed in the U S first, or do you go straight to get them both printed in Asia or something like that? So I’ve used a mixture. So I have U S printing resources and I have Chinese printing resources.

28:04
It depends on what the product is. depends on how many units I’m running, that kind of stuff. I’ll say nowadays, I don’t do anything without just running a thousand copies off and just launching it. A thousand copies is typically the minimum. For Asia or is this US? US definitely. Asia, you can go 500, but you’re going to basically pay

28:32
double your unit cost. Like the actual dollars you need to spend to get 500 or 1000, you need to spend maybe 10 % more to get 1000 versus 500. like, really? Yeah. It all has to do with how printing works. So there’s, there is labor involved in setting up a printing press, setting up the files and all that kind of stuff. And it doesn’t matter how many copies you run. There’s just a setup of labor.

29:01
whether you run one copy or whether you run 100,000 copies. So that labor gets distributed over your units. So when you’re running 500 copies, that’s great, but that labor was the same whether you ran 500 or 1,000. So when you run the 1,000, then you’re hitting a more comfortable minimum and your unit cost will go down. So it’s just a current kind of a reality of printing. There are people that find

29:31
you know, local printers that’ll run smaller units of stuff, but not typically cards. Cards have special card stock that is expensive to buy in the U.S. It’s a specialty item. You’re just not usually going to get less than a thousand. You can, you can. I used to do this and this is what I did with Awkward Turtle. When I launched it, I only ordered like hundred copies. I spent like a thousand, I put a thousand bucks on a credit card.

30:01
knowing I had 15 months to pay it off and zero APR. And I ordered like a hundred copies just to test it. My unit cost was like, God, I don’t even know, eight or $10 a copy. was, you’re never gonna make money at that, but you’re gonna figure out is it, does it sell? And I figured out, okay, it does sell. And I moved on from there. I’m comfortable enough and have enough capital reserve that I go ahead and

30:30
order the thousand now because then that gives me plenty of margin to run breakeven or negative on ads to test out and have the units to run through without going, I’m out of stock. It’s going to be weeks or months before I have more stock. Since it’s so labor intensive, like you mentioned, doesn’t it automatically just make kind of cheaper? I’ll say yes, with exceptions.

31:00
I have a new supplier I’m working with that makes that rule absolutely true. But historically, card games would be cheaper in China and then board games would be cheaper in the US for short runs. So anything less than 10,000 units because of the size and shipping that gets involved. Oh, okay. So the freight is what tips it over the edge. Right.

31:28
So the unit cost itself would be lower, but board games take up lot of space. So then that takes up more volume, your shipping cost goes up, and then now you’re on par with the US printers that print games. if you are, generally, if you’re going to print a board game, you may be better off with the US printer. Like the printer I’ve used for a long time, they’re awesome because I can order in the US.

31:57
The lead time is like eight weeks instead of 12 to 16 weeks. And then they have a storage facility. So I order it, they palletize it, put it in their warehouse, and then they’ll move it for me whenever I need it. So I never have to touch it. I don’t have to arrange another 3PL. I don’t have to do any of that. Interesting. So they are your 3PL. Right. And they charge like $10 a pallet a month. It’s lower than 3PL rates for storage. And they do that in bit because it’s subsidized by their production process. So that’s just a…

32:27
competitive advantage that they’ve built in for themselves. they ship out individual units for you too or no? They’ll ship anywhere between one to as many as I have. Oh, that’s incredible. Yeah. Okay. Can you explain to me what the economics of a card game are? I imagine like the values and your IP, right? So the gross margins must be really high. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah. So that’s part of the reason you see a lot of people launch card games because the margins can be very good, but

32:57
They have a very high failure rate. So Because there’s so like so much competition your IP gonna resonate with people all that kind of stuff. So Say I’m ordering it depends on how many cards we’re talking about. So like this start back a 52 card there, right? I don’t know how many cards you well, I can actually just if you give me it’s like I know we’re like we’re alive, but I can

33:23
there’s actually a card game, cool calculator, can, okay, yeah, real time. Okay, cool. So let’s do like card against humanity. So card against humanity has I think 250 cards in their deck, it’s a big box. It’s more expensive to have those two piece boxes than to have tuck boxes. I typically try to focus on tuck boxes because of that. That is one complaint I get about my my product sometimes is that they’re not in a two piece box. But I can tell you that

33:51
A two-piece box will typically add several dollars onto a short run versus a tuck box is in the cents range. I could see that. 20 to 50 cents. So, okay. So 250 cards. Let’s go a thousand units. So if I want to do, I think cards used for many cards are like regular card size, like playing card size, if I remember right. Is this calculator using? this a?

34:19
Chinese or American? This is for a Chinese printer. Oh, wow. They have a calculator. Nice. Well, it’s the US broker that works with a Chinese printer. So it’s very friendly. So guess free shout out for Print Ninja. I’ve worked with them for very long time. They’re great people. They’ve always taken care of me. So I’m using Print Ninja’s. Nice. Our game cool calculator. Which is nice, because then you can go out and figure out, I can’t afford 250 cards, but I can afford 150 cards.

34:47
is that competitive in this space? like, that helps without doing some of the back and forth with your CSR, which can be a pain in the butt for them. I’ll never tell you that, but it is, so don’t do that. So with Cards Against Humanity, we’re looking at almost $9 a deck for 200, for a thousand units, which actually is better than I anticipated. I was thinking that was kind of high. didn’t. Well, it’s not.

35:16
It’s not for Again, it’s that the more units you run, the more you can offset that upfront labor cost of setting up the presses. What percentage of that $9 is set up for a thousand I couldn’t tell you. Don’t get that break down. So then like, okay, let’s pull… So I’m pulling cars because you may have to be a revenue calculator. Here’s the way you figured out. Why don’t you just put in one unit? We’ll tell you how much it costs.

35:44
You have to do at least $500. Oh, you do? OK, never mind. I’m going to guess the setup cost is. So the actual unit cost is like $6.5 and then shipping is $2,200. OK. That’s boat shipping. So it’s going to be like eight weeks. But I’m guessing some setup for that is going to be in the neighborhood of $4,000 to $5,000 because that’s probably about what you’re going to see for the $500 unit run.

36:13
But then you compare that like it’s like, I think Car’s Use Humanity is $29 now, but originally it was 25 bucks. So it’s only a 3X markup? That seems low. Yeah. So here’s the trick. This is the big pain. So Car’s Use Humanity, 25 bucks, cost of goods sold, $9. I have a net profit margin of $5.81 or 23%. You typically don’t make money at a thousand units.

36:43
Okay. need to, you typically have to order three, four, or 5,000 units. So when you are ordering, you’re ordering predicated on the idea, I’m going to order more if the test goes well and it has a high enough sales volume.

37:03
And that’s one of the difficulties is that, so to test a game like Cards Against Humanity, I’ve got to plop down 9,000 bucks, but I’m not even going to make money on that. If I want to make money on it, I got to order 3000 copies and I can tell you how much they cost here in a second. so without doing the, I won’t do the quote again, but it’s probably going to be on the order of 18 to $20,000 to make that order. Let’s say it’s six.

37:33
Yeah, it’s going to be somewhere between $15,000 and $20,000. That’s a pretty good range. So you just have to be well capitalized and you have to pick your spots when you launch because if you don’t, well, I just burned nine grand and I’m not getting it back. It’s not selling. I’m not making any money on it. But when it does work. Give me your parameters for working, by the way. You could sell out the initial

38:03
thousand units in like a year, is that considered good or how fast would they have to sell? For me, it depends. I because I basically just piled cash for a while, like I live cheap and just piled cash because of that like paranoid, it’s going to go away thing. have. I have more capital reserve than I necessarily have projects, at least until this year that I could get out.

38:32
because my time was my bottleneck. So if I made an order and it took 18 months to sell through it, well, it doesn’t expire. I’m making money on it. I can’t put that money to use anywhere else that it’s going to bring more money back. I’m satisfied with that. In an ideal world, I would turn things over six months or less. I would rather buy a year’s worth of inventory

39:01
get my unit cost really low and make more money per unit and then sit on it, then turn in six months and have a higher unit cost. Sure. I would imagine these cards are heavily holiday sales. Actually, maybe not for the education ones. Not for the educational stuff. But yes, for awkward turtle, it definitely was. And that was a challenge for years. There were years I underordered and I missed out on tens of thousands of dollars of sales at Christmas time. And then years I overordered and then I beat overstocked.

39:31
whole units back. That was another advantage of moving to educational games. It sees a little bump at Christmas, but it’s pretty just steady sailing throughout the year. It doesn’t bring the headaches and logistical challenges that some of that giftable stuff does. I gave my kids a math game once for Christmas and they didn’t like it. Of course you did. I stopped doing that. Congratulations. Your SAT vocabulary 101 book has arrived.

40:00
Oh, right. Like, oh, dang, awesome video game. They open it like, oh. So really, the big money is when if you have a winner. OK, so you order a thousand units. Let’s say you saw six months. What’s your second order look like? I mean, it depends on sales volume. So like, you know, I think Greg’s not doing the videos anymore as far as I can see. But, you know, Greg’s got all those old jungle scout videos where he’s like, I want 300 units a month or whatever. Right, right.

40:27
That’s kind of the metric that sticks in my head because it’s nice and I can go and order 3000 units and that is typically is where you start to get into a cost of goods sold range 3000 up. So that’s kind of what I’m looking for. If I can get two 300 units a month and that’s typically a pretty good winner to me. If it can go beyond that, I’m not gonna complain your cost of goods are gonna go down more and you’re gonna make more money.

40:56
You know, that’s what I’d like. I guess what I’m asking is once you sell out of that thousand units in six months, why not just, mean, the cost of storage is so cheap, why not just buy 10,000 units, just let it ride at ridiculously low prices? Oh yeah, I mean, well, it’s just capital exposure. So it just depends on how you want to allocate your assets. if, now I’m not as flush as I’d like to be.

41:23
But if I’ve got a million bucks in the bank and it’s not doing anything, okay, well, over 10,000 units and no, it’s gonna take me three years to sell through. The trouble with that when you are bootstrapping like I did because I bootstrapped all of this, I didn’t have loans from anybody, it was all of my own money reinvested, all starting off that $1,000 on that credit card, is that, well, if you tie it up,

41:54
well then where’s the money for the new stuff coming from? Where’s the money from living coming from? So it’s just a matter of managing where your money’s tied up. And also, like in the case of Awkward Turtle, like I said, makes like 10 bucks a month now. I still have like 5,000 copies of that. So I’ve several thousand dollars stuck in this game I may never get back out.

42:20
So that’s the risk on the long end is if your product cycle ends before your run stops, then that’s just money you lost. Yeah. I guess you just have to weigh like, cause your new products are risks, Whereas one that’s already selling. Yeah. That’s tough. It’s tough. Yeah. It’s all risk reward. mean, it’s, it’s a little bit quantitative. It’s a little bit qualitative. mean, that’s being an entrepreneur, right? It’s like figuring out.

42:49
what you think your best bet are, making the best decisions you can for risk reward, and living within your own risk tolerance. Let me ask you this question, and maybe we can edit on this one. For your math games, has any of them ended its life cycle yet? Because I think those don’t have life cycles. Not of the ones that have taken off. The ones that never took off, they just pitted along. But I guess I’ll say,

43:20
The one that did take off, has had competitors come in and diminish its sales to about 50 % of its peak. And I’ve been working on trying to gain space back, but it hasn’t died. It has made it more difficult in that sales volumes, if it gets too low, then I can’t justify ordering those three, four, 5,000, 6,000 units I need to have the right cost of goods.

43:50
So even if it doesn’t die, if the sales volume gets too low, then instead of ordering a year’s worth of inventory, I’m now ordering four years of inventory. Got it, yeah. And that’s its own risk. Yeah. Do you register copyrights for all of your games? Generally speaking, yeah. I have trademarks for some of the games. I have trademarks for the brand. mean, copyright’s automatic, but you typically want to register it with Library of Congress.

44:20
So if you are thinking about doing a game, it’s easier to register your copyright with the USPTO, the Copyright Office, and Library of Congress before you publish. Once you publish, you have to send physical copies in. If you do it before, you can send them digital of the artwork. It’s like 50 bucks. It’s very cheap. So much easier to do it pre-launch than post-launch. I’ve done it both ways. It takes much longer to get it back to when you have to have

44:48
So I’ve got copies of Awkward Turtle in the Library of Congress because I had to send out physical copies. yeah, yeah, registering that stuff helps. But generally nowadays, if you have that trademark and stuff, you can you can deal with counterfeiters pretty swiftly. OK. Any like pieces of advice for anyone out there listening who wants to create their own game?

45:15
If you want to create your own game, don’t. There are, I guess I would say, ask yourself the question, am I a game designer or am I an entrepreneur? If your answer is the latter, find a different niche.

45:41
just because there’s easier opportunities. Like one of my mentors always, this phrase stuck in my head, because I’d never heard anybody say it before. He always says, don’t push a rope uphill. Don’t make the work harder for you than you already have. I’m in this business because I kind of stumbled into it and then I kind of figured it out and I’ve already got things going. I don’t know that I would start again, given the environment now, if I didn’t.

46:10
already have the resources that I have at my disposal. Okay, that makes sense. I mean, I always think of like games like Settlers of Catan and how Tickets to Ride, I’m sure those guys are banking it. Well, yeah, and they’ve got, they work with big publishers, those game designers, they work. So that’s the model I’m moving towards is instead of being the game designer, I want to be the publisher. Right. bring the game designers on. But those are games that have done well. There’s thousands and thousands of games that are

46:39
being there in landfills or being recycled that you’ve never heard of that art sellers of Catan and art to get to ride and art cards against humanity. the barrier entry is so low. Yeah. Well, you still need some capital. You need some capital, but as far as like, there’s not really technical know-how. Like, I mean, you design processors, right? Like, I don’t know how to design a processor. can’t.

47:08
I can’t compete with your old employer. can’t just, unless I hire you maybe, but just like, I can’t just go start a processor company, but many, many people can go decide, hey, I’m going to go build a game. And then out of those tons and tons of failures come a few gems that kind of pop up here and there. And they become those sellers of Kutan and Ticket to Ride and that kind of thing. Yeah.

47:33
Yeah, I mean, it’s like the venture capital model, right? It’s the Amazon. You’re investing in a bunch of products and yeah, we’re going to hit some of them. You just don’t stock the losers and you stock the wetters. Yeah, you risk you risk as little as you can to make as much as you can. And I guess I’ll say if you want to go with the game model method, typically my personal risk threshold, I will only risk as much money as I believe I can make in a month.

48:02
in profit, not in revenue. So if I think a product can make $3,000 a month in profit, I’m fine risking $3,000 on an initial run. Interesting. That’s just my personal bend. Yeah. It’s not based on, I have an MBA and it’s this, no, that’s just how I run things. I can’t speak for anybody else. Right. And that’s from based on the calculations, that’s like good for like a three to 500 deck run. Right. Essentially right. Cool.

48:32
Yeah. Well, Jesse, this is enlightening. You know, it’s funny, we see each other at Seller Summit, but we rarely talk about business, ironically. Well, you’re always busy and, you know, so I talked to you a little bit and you talk about business so much. Sometimes it’s just, you talk about other stuff. Yeah. How’s the wife? How’s the kids? How’s all that stuff? So. Yeah, but it’s good to hear more about this business because I’ve always found games really intimidating.

48:58
And you justified some of those fears today, but on the flip side, you know, if you’re creative, it’s a piece of IP that you designed that people can’t really just directly copy you, which makes it attractive on that front. Yeah. Yeah. If you can get established, you’re in good space, but this is the getting established part that’s difficult. Cool. Jesse, if everyone wants to check out your games or your other products, where can they find you?

49:26
Typically, I would say, you know, go to the website DaVinci’s Room, but don’t do that. Just go to Amazon and search for DaVinci’s Room games. I built the website on OpenCart 10 years ago when I had no money. So I haven’t changed it since. We’re working on a Shopify conversion this year, but the website is basically a big dumpster fire. So it looks terrible at the time being. But yeah, so check them out on Amazon. So DaVinci Room games and it should come up with.

49:56
get you the storefront and all the products that’s up there. Nice. I will say this, like if you get your website up, like when I buy math games, for example, I buy them all. Yeah. Typically. And I can be cross sold and I’ve got a collection of them. Yeah. It’s like that. It’s one of those things where, I mean, you know this and talk about it. just like time and attention. You know, most return for the least amount of effort and

50:25
Where am I going to spend my time? just the website has been, I mean, it’s just not good. I don’t do a lot of off Amazon marketing for that particular, for the game company. So at least yet. So it just hasn’t been a big priority. We’re moving that direction, you know, but historically it’s been, Amazon’s been working for me. So I just kind of doubled in on that and let the dumpster fire of a website ride. So. Nice.

50:55
Well Jesse and thanks a lot for coming on the show. Appreciate your time. Yeah, thanks for having me.

51:03
Hope you enjoyed that episode. Now Jesse is one of the most creative people that I’ve ever met and his story just shows that artists can launch successful e-commerce businesses. For more information about this episode, go to mywebquitajob.com slash episode 47. And once again, I want to thank Emerge Council for sponsoring this episode. Now if you sell on Amazon FBA or you own your own online store and you want to protect your intellectual property from theft and fraud, head on over to EmergeCouncil.com and get a free consult. Just mention my name and you get $100 off.

51:33
That’s E-M-E-R-G-E-C-O-U-N-S-E-L.com. I also want to thank Chase Diamond. Chase is my go-to guy when it comes to email marketing. And if you want to learn how to run your own successful email marketing campaigns, check out his class over at mywifequitterjob.com slash chase. That’s mywifequitterjob.com slash C-H-A-S-E. And if you are interested in starting your own eCommerce store, head on over to mywifequitterjob.com and sign up for my free six day mini course. Just type in your email and I’ll send you the course right away.

52:03
Thanks for listening.