Geek Musings
4th Quarter Lessons Learned
I’m sitting in our family room watching my son (a.k.a. “Teenage Son” if you follow me on Twitter) play the latest video game he downloaded from Steam. He’s a pretty good video gamer but the way he spins his characters around on screen turns a normally fun-to-watch game into Puke-O-Vision pretty quickly. That’s OK as it usually gives me an out to sneak over to my computer and check on the store or write a paragraph or two for the Geek Blog here on geekfoundry.net.
As 2016 crawls to a slow death this week I’m thinking on a lot of the things swirling ’round in my head that I’ve learned in the past six months about starting, building, and running an online game store.
- Building the store was easy
- Selling enough merchandise to call it a “living” is hard
- The places you don’t expect to gain traction are usually the ones where you do
- Facebook isn’t everything it’s cracked up to be when it comes to promoting your brand or getting people to buy–especially that last part
- Twitter users are the best (Oh dang–did I just start an East Coast-West Coast thing there? Yeah, yeah, I know–they’re both on the West Coast, I’ve seen them in person) when it comes to getting traffic and building a following
- You can’t buy everything at once to stock no matter how shiny the artwork is on the box cover
- Even on the days when you think you don’t need to work you need to work–there’s always something to improve on the site, the marketing, the products, etc. etc. etc.
- You’ve got to have a long-term plan and stick with it
- Having a full-time (or even part-time) job would be helpful while building up a new business (unless you’re loaded)
- You can’t sell some of the best games on the market because brick & mortar store owners cry foul that they spent money setting up spaces for people to come play games and as a result some game manufacturers refuse to sell to “virtual only” retailers (I call b.s.). Not my problem. Not everybody can afford an actual physical store, plus it’s the 21st century. Business models have changed.
- Not everybody can get out to a brick and mortar store
- Not everybody has a local game store in their area
- Not everybody wants to go out into the masses to shop for gifts
- Wrapping and delivering last-minute Christmas gifts directly to a customer’s door is freaking AWESOME (yes, that could have been you this Christmas if you lived in Madison, Wisconsin)
- I need to do more advertising and promotion of the site. I’ve been afraid to turn people off by over-promotion but I think I can dial it up a bit and still be tolerable
- I’ve learned to be more open and accept or at least listen to new ideas about marketing and selling now that I have skin in the game
- I’m still a cracking good book keeper. Balanced my books to.the.penny.
- I feel happier about doing this than any other job I’ve ever had in my life
There are many more things swirling around in my head about lessons learned and I’m looking forward to formulating them into a plan for 2017. I hope you’ll stick around to watch them unfold over the course of the new year. Thanks for reading.
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