This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Dungeon Master markets printable game maps. Oh yeah, what's up? Welcome to Side Hustle School. Chris Guillebeau here, your host. In this week's first $1,000 segment, we're gonna hear how a veteran Dungeon Master turned his custom campaign maps into a product for other players.
That would be a Dungeon Master, like a Dungeons and Dragons Master guy, or could be a woman, somebody else, who is designing custom campaign maps, basically creating a scenario that other players can follow. We're gonna hear today about how he turned his homebrew game materials into a commercial product. Over the years, he had made dozens of original maps for his own players, just for fun. They were just sketches or quick Photoshop layouts at first, but then he really got into it and bundled them as themed digital packs, putting them up for sale. In fact, I think it's a perfect example of a hobby that you already spend time on, just adapting it into a sellable product for an audience that appreciates your work.
Isn't that the way? That is the Side Hustle School way. Let's hear it from Drew. I'll come back at the end with a few words of wrap up. [Music]
My name is Drew, and I've been running Dungeons and Dragons campaigns for over a decade.
I love world building and designing environments for my players to explore. And over time, I developed a habit, I guess, of making my own battle maps, usually in Photoshop, using a simple one-inch grid layout and top-down textures. At first, I just made them for my group, printing them on graph paper or projecting them during online games, but other people started asking about them. Friends in other campaigns, people I met in D&D discords, even random users when I shared screenshots online. That gave me the idea to start selling them.
I already had a decent backlog of maps, dungeons, forest clearings, desert ruins, small towns, you know, so I cleaned up the designs, standardized the resolutions, 300 DPI for print, and then bundled them by theme. Each pack had five full-color maps plus a printer-friendly version and one without grid lines. I set up listings on both Etsy and itch.io. I priced each map pack at $8 individually or $20 for a three-pack bundle. Then to target search users, I added keywords like printable D&D maps, battle map PDF, and TTRPG terrain grid.
Next, I posted on a couple of D&D communities where I already participated, nothing spammy, just showing an example map with a link to my store. I also listed them on the itch.io tabletop RPG assets category, which brings in some organic traffic. I made about $300 the first weekend, mostly from the dungeon and forest packs. Then by the third weekend, I passed $1,000 in total revenue, which was also almost all profit. My file delivery was all automated through itch.io and Etsy digital downloads, so I made sure the files were cleanly named and included the quick readme file with printing tips.
The biggest thing I learned was to keep files light and printer friendly. I initially exported the PDFs at very high quality, but some people complained that the files were too big or took forever to download, but after optimizing file sizes, the support emails dropped off completely. One thing I didn't do was build a personal brand or make YouTube content about map making. I might do that later, but this first round was just about seeing if people would buy what I'd already made, and they did. And now I've started working on a winter campaign pack for December.
It's not a full-time job, or really even much of a part-time one, but it's extremely satisfying to know that something I made for my own games is now being used by players around the world. Also, my players now expect much higher quality maps every month, which keeps me motivated. Drew, thanks so much for sharing your story. Really appreciate it. Dungeons and Dragons custom campaign maps, the winter campaign map coming out in a few months.
Look forward to that. Listeners, if you have a question and update about your hustle, well, first of all, thanks for being out there, listeners. I appreciate you so much. But you know where to go, sidehustleschool.com. There's a show notes page for every episode.
There are resources there. You can ask a question, and of course you can download or stream the entire archive history of the show, going all the way back to 2017. New episodes drop every day. Subscribe or follow. My name's Chris Guillebeau.
This is "Side Hustle School." [Music]
from the Onward Project.
