Dan Blacklock realized that there is no easy and convenient way to store and display board games, so he designed adjustable and stackable shelves specifically for board games. After successfully raising over a million dollars through the Kickstarter and CrowdOx platforms, Dan began building BoxThrone as the best option for storing board games. In this episode of Shopify Masters, we talk to Dan about crowdfunding, search engine optimization, and customer experience.
1.2 Million Dollar Fundraising Journey and Market Testing
I saw a problem with the way board games are traditionally stored. What issue did you notice?
Board games are a massive niche hobby that is growing rapidly. Many people play them, and there is no good way to store them. Most people store them in poorly designed IKEA furniture or place them in their closets. I know people who stack them in a pile in the basement. I was one of those people, and I was looking for a shelving solution and couldn’t find anything that suited me. Board games cost a lot of money and are considered an investment. You don’t want them stacked high on top of each other or they’ll be prone to damage. You want them to be easy to access, and you want to store them flat as well; when you store them on their sides, pieces and things can fall out, and most current storage solutions, except BoxThrone, make you store board games on their sides. So I decided I would create a better shelf than these solutions, and I did. You can store all your board games flat, and there’s one game per shelf that’s expandable and stackable, so as your collection grows, you can add more.
Did you have any experience in starting businesses or creating products in the past before BoxThrone?
Not really. I dabbled in dropshipping. I had a store for dog clothes just for fun and tried a few branding things, but they didn’t achieve much success. I don’t have real experience; to be honest, this was my first experience. It was amazing how well the process went.
Why was BoxThrone so successful? Did you notice anything you did differently with BoxThrone compared to previous attempts that contributed to your success?
Yes. It’s about Malcolm Gladwell’s principle of “successful people.” It was just a mix of timing, place, platform, and particularly my experience with board games as well. I launched Kickstarter in November 2017, and I had only started in board games six months prior to that. I was very passionate about it, and I was looking into accessories and how I could become an expert in this hobby at that time. At the same time, board games were just starting on Kickstarter. At that time, you could launch any type of board game product on Kickstarter and achieve good success for yourself. It’s a combination of all those things along with my strong marketing background. I love quirky things. I created this fabulous rustic brand that appealed to several interests of the target audience, and I feel that all these things together led to the success of this venture. It’s a bit cliché to say.
Do you have any advice for other entrepreneurs on how to replicate your success? How can they course-correct or look at things differently based on your experience so they can achieve future success?
Absolutely. It’s all about understanding market trends. First and foremost, you must be in a business you care about. Don’t be just someone chasing money. If you don’t know anything about the business, don’t waste your time because you won’t be passionate enough to take it to the next level. At the same time, you should look for market trends. Have you encountered anything that unexpectedly succeeded and thought, “Who could I serve in this area?” Certainly, you will find success if you jump on that trend before it peaks. I feel that if you do that, you’ll succeed in your business and achieve great success.
Do you
Do you think that there is no need for experience or high competence to achieve success, but rather you just need passion?
Yes. It also depends on personality. In fact, I was playing tabletop games when I was six years old. I played Warhammer 40,000 and things like that with my brother and played Dungeons and Dragons when I was a teenager, so I was somewhat familiar with it, but I didn’t have a regular set of tabletop games. I wasn’t seeking out tabletop games nor was I immersing myself in that field, like joining forums. It helps to be one of those people who fits the industry. For example, if you are someone who loves outdoor activities, but you haven’t taken your interest to the next level, it can be beneficial to be suitable to succeed in this field. You can definitely go from zero to 100 in six months. Specifically for tabletop games, people have become stuck in their ways, they say “this is the tabletop game shelf.” And they were referring to the Kallax from Ikea, that cube shelf which has become the standard. And if you say anything like “look. We can do other things,” the community will attack you, it was scary times when I started this product, we can talk about that later.
When you decided to launch this project on Kickstarter and fund it collectively, what was the completion percentage of BoxThrone at that time?
I started designing the models about six months before I actually launched the campaign. A year prior to that, I had the idea and six months later, I had the actual prototype, and six months after that, I launched, so overall it took about a year.
When the campaign started, what was the goal of the campaign and how much was actually raised?
The goal was only $20,000, and the Kickstarter campaign raised over $900,000. After that, we ran a secondary crowdfunding campaign that raised hundreds of thousands of dollars more. In total, the total amount reached $1.2 million.
Many people think that Kickstarter is just a campaign that starts and ends, then you go into isolation and try to build a business from there, but you ran another campaign afterward. What was the thinking behind that?
There are lots of things you can do after your Kickstarter campaign ends. We have a commitment management system called CrowdOx. You can set up your own CrowdOx system so it’s like a mini Kickstarter. You just tell everyone that you can buy BoxThrone for another 30 days. This is the price, it might be a bit higher than Kickstarter. You can run a secondary Kickstarter campaign like that. Now, there are lots of other options as well. Indiegogo has a platform too where you can run a secondary campaign after your Kickstarter campaign ends.
What is the difference between that first campaign and the second campaign? Do you need to change the offer or messaging to continue capturing attention for the campaign?
Yes. With the Kickstarter campaign, it’s more like early adopters, right? Those people who want to take a chance on the opportunity, they are interested in it, and they feel like they are part of building the product. Now the secondary campaign is more like people who are risk-averse, those are the people who join late or have late commitments, so it seems like the product has already been made in that secondary campaign. It doesn’t build a lot of momentum because there isn’t a big countdown saying “there are three days left before you can buy this product again” like in Kickstarter. It’s a bit like e-commerce in the way it works, so it depends on your messaging. Our messaging and Facebook ads would say “this is the last chance. This is the final week we will have this campaign.” Using effective post-campaign management strategies to convert potential customers
You mentioned
Did you use a service called CrowdOx?
Yes. CrowdOx is a post-campaign management system.
How do you drive traffic from Kickstarter to CrowdOx?
At the end of the campaign, you can change the button at the top to say what you want. Just change it to say “It’s not too late to get BoxThrone. Click here and you will be taken to the late pledge system.” A lot of the traffic came from people who were on the fence about BoxThrone and maybe forgot about it, then came back later saying “Oh no. It’s over.” And they were directed that way. Because if you look at the stats, most visitors come directly from Kickstarter, not from Facebook ads. We were featured in many different places in the media, so people were aware of it towards the end of the campaign when it was almost too late.
How long did the CrowdOx campaign last?
The CrowdOx campaign lasted for 60 days.
What was next for your business after that?
The next step was to make the product. The first prototype I made six months after the idea is the one we featured in all the photos and videos for the campaign and all the marketing materials. In fact, this was not the final product; it was twice as heavy as the final product. We faced many obstacles. After designing the product and getting the funding, we started calculating how much shipping would cost. We did some preliminary things at first, but a lot of things happened while we were getting that money and actually starting manufacturing. The trade war between China and the United States started almost right after we got that money, and one of the things that was tariffed was steel. So the price of steel skyrocketed, and our product has a lot of steel. We had budgeted for one price, and then suddenly we were paying an additional 20 to 30%. Additionally, sea freight costs rose significantly, overall everything was becoming more expensive during that period. We had to find ways to make the system a bit lighter, we modified some things in the product. In fact, we improved it a bit as well. Initially, we had rules made of laminated particle board, and I wasn’t happy with it because it was associated with cheaper materials and cheaper furniture. So we went back and changed it to high-quality ABS plastic; it feels really good and has great coverage. It’s made by a company that makes a lot of Japanese furniture. It’s made with great precision and carries the logo. We went back and made all these little changes.
Did you receive any good feedback from the supporters of the campaign that allowed you to make adjustments to the product?
The tabletop gaming community is very active in this type of project. From day one of making the project public, we had a lot of feedback on everything. From the moment I launched the initial page before
Source: https://www.shopify.com/blog/boxthrone-crowdfunding
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