This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
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What's up everybody? Welcome to Sida Soul School. Welcome to Throwback Thursday. This is our weekly segment, also known as Where Are They Now? Where we take an in-depth look at someone whose story has evolved considerably since we first featured them.
Perhaps on year one, year two, or year three of the podcast. I can't believe this has been going on for so long. It's actually been going on for 1,363 days. I know that some of our listeners have been with us from the beginning. Thank you so much.
And of course, if you have joined along the way, that's awesome too. We have an amazing community of people all over the world who are all interested in finding financial security. Maybe it's not finding it, it's more like creating it because you don't just discover it, you have to do something for it, okay? But we've got stories every day about people taking action. Recently in this series, we have featured a General Mills employee who starts a cold brew coffee brand and a graphic designer who focused her services on businesses related to dogs.
Now today in our latest feature, we'll hear from a fan of old school board games who has had a tremendous success, huge, huge, tremendous success with multiple six figure crowdfunding campaigns. When I say multiple six figure, I actually mean it two different ways because he has done multiple projects, multiple campaigns that have brought in multiple six figures each time. I think his first one did like $100,000, you know, no small thing. And he just wrapped up a new project that brought in, I believe it's right under a million dollars on Kickstarter. That new game is called Bristol 1350, and it's all about the plague.
It's about surviving the plague and different choices people make and such, which fun fact, this is actually a coincidence. It's not connected to COVID-19. This guy and his team, they were working on the project for two years. And when the time came to actually launch the crowdfunding campaign, they were like, oh, is this appropriate? Are we being sensitive enough?
But they found a way to kind of manage that and just include some messaging about how, you know, as I said, they've been working on it for two years. So anyway, big success there, but let's talk about his whole project. Let's hear from him more specifically. Let's hear from Travis. I'll be back at the end to wrap us up.
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My name is Travis Sancock, and I am from Columbus, Ohio. I own a board game company called Facade Games, and I was featured on episode 444. So I loved playing games growing up. It was kind of my default state with my family, which always had a board game out. And I'd often find myself tweaking the rules to existing games.
Eventually, I made my own game just as a side thing in college, just for fun. And my wife, Holly, put together the design for it. Then around that time, I learned about Kickstarter. And so I figured I'd put it up on the site. Our goal was $6,000, and then it actually ended up raising over 100,000, which was way more than we expected.
And so kind of from that experience, we learned that there might be some interest out there for the type of game we were making. And so we decided to move forward and make another one. I had a lot of side hustles going on at the time. And when this one took off, I kind of viewed it as an opportunity to really take this and run with it. After the success of our second game, it kind of showed us that this was a sustainable thing.
And so I was able to quit my job then, and I've been making board games full-time ever since. So now it's my main hustle. I've always loved history. For a while, I thought I'd be a history teacher growing up. So I've loved that I've been able to find a way to kind of tie that in.
And every time I make a new game, I'm able to jump into history and learn more about a particular subject. Before COVID-19, we manufacture our games in China. And so kind of just a lot of the politics of the trade war with China, it was just something that we had to keep our eyes on. Terrorists kept getting slapped on new products, which basically just makes it more expensive for people like me to make something. 'Cause it's a global economy.
And the reality is, to sell games at the price we wanna sell them, we have to make them abroad. So we were really worried that terrorists would force us to ramp up the price and really hurt. But luckily it didn't quite creep into board games. It was very close. But since then, of course, COVID-19 has affected us.
It's kind of shut down a lot of our distribution channels into physical locations. So we have a distributor that sends games into stores. Those have really slowed down. However, we've more than made up for that through online sales, like through Amazon sales and our website sales. And we've actually, I think done better, the first and second quarter from COVID-19, I think because people are stuck at home looking for something to do.
And board games has provided that answer for a lot of people. So we've been grateful for that. So almost daily, we get emails from people who say they have the next greatest board game idea. I think, you know, everyone's got an idea for something or they'll say, hey, my kid came up with this cool idea or I've always had this idea in the back of my head and I think it could make a million dollars. And so they just email us this idea.
But that's usually what we say is like, you know, this is great, it sounds awesome, but it's still just an idea. And it takes a lot more work to develop that to make it something good. Ideas are great, but only about one in a thousand actually works and to get to that one in a thousand, we found the key is testing, just like a ton of testing. So usually we tell people, you know, print out your idea, get a group together and test it out. And then it's gonna be bad or it's not gonna be perfect.
So then print out another one, test it again and just keep on going. Usually our games aren't fun and mechanically sad until about the hundredth version. So that's usually what we tell people is, you know, go test this a hundred times and then come back to us and we'll see if we can, you know, publish it for you or something like that. But it's a lot of work and a lot of testing. Of course, after you have the game, there's a lot more steps past that to publish a game.
You're gonna need to find an artist and a graphic designer to make it look good. You'll need to communicate with a factory and work through that process of manufacturing. You'll need to raise money through something like Kickstarter and then ultimately you'll need to sell it online and through stores. So we've outlined some of those steps on our website because we do have a lot of people who reach out to us saying like, how do you make a board game? And we've just tried to show like, you know, there's a lot of steps to it that you have to think through and here's kind of our process.
- Awesome, thank you so much, Travis. Really appreciate you helping us out here and sharing your advice to our listeners. We do have a number of folks in our community who are trying to develop various games, board games, or sometimes video games or other interactive experiences. We've had a number of features, people doing card games and such recently. So anyway, I love Travis's comments here about how, you know, ideas are great, but only about one in a thousand actually works.
And so the testing in this case is key, right? Sometimes I tend to make light of testing and say, well, you just gotta try stuff out, which is true. But when it comes to something like this, for a board game to work well, you know, it has to have this perfect balance of, I'm not even sure what the factors are, like how to describe them, but like the perfect balance of skill and luck and chance and, you know, group competition plus cooperation, all these things that game designers know about. And the only way that you get to that is by, you know, trying different iterations over and over. So this is obviously an incredible example of massive crowdfunding success.
He's raised millions of dollars collectively over the course of multiple games. As I mentioned, his new one, Bristol 1350. Go and check that out. If you're interested in crowdfunding at all, just Google Bristol 1350 crowdfunding campaign or Kickstarter, and you will see that page, which is incredibly detailed and elaborate, a ton of work. So when you see the result, you're like, wow, a million dollars.
Well, yes, but, you know, a ton of work and not just the work for that campaign itself, but all of the lessons that he has learned over the years, you know, of doing this, of kind of repeating it and improving along the way. So a marvelous example to follow. Of course, we will link it up in the show notes as well. Now, 2020 is our year of interaction. We are entering the, what is it?
The fourth quarter of 2020, hard to believe, but we're gonna keep rolling here throughout the rest of the year. If you have a question, if you'd like to update us about your Side Hustle, if you'd like to help prevent the next plague, well, just wash your hands and wear a mask. But for the other things, come to sidehustleschool.com/questions. We will be featuring them throughout the year, along with updates from other listeners as they launch their projects. Today's notes, all right, sidehustleschool.com/1363, episode 1,363.
We'll be back tomorrow. Be sure you subscribe. Thank you so much for joining me. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is Side Hustle School.
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- From The Onward Project.
