The Actual Retail Price

I absolutely loved The Three Investigators as a kid. I still love them now. This has nothing to do with the subject of the blog post, but I needed an inspiring image!

This is a good news/bad news entry. Maybe not bad news, but challenges ahead...

The good news is: the manual text is very close.

The challenge ahead is what it has always been: costs and financing.

Based on the printing quote I received, The retail price is far above the $40-$50 I was hoping for. One of the big unknowns is shipping costs. These have varied between $3000-$8000 for 2000 units.

There are other costs like marketing, crowd -funding materials, lawyers and fees for crowd-funding, payment collection, distribution/storage, and probably a few more I'm not thinking of. Ideally these are covered in the 3x mark-up from costs. If you want to read an interesting breakdown of costs for a crowd-funded title, I ran across this today: https://boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/123110/kickstarter-games-price-breakdown. I'm still working out the finances, so there may be some surprises yet to come...

One possible way to reduce the cost per unit is to increase the number of units produced, but that requires raising more money, which means finding more customers.

I've read that a good rule of thumb for starting a crowd funding campaign is to have at least 25% of the customers you need coming into the campaign. For me, this would mean getting 500 people to be very interested in purchasing before I started the campaign. I'll be reaching out to you in hopes that you will help me share information about the game when the time comes.