Felix: Today I'm joined by Dan Blacklock from BoxThrone. BoxThrone is the world's first made for board games shelving system and was started in 2017 and based out of Calgary, Alberta, Canada. Welcome, Dan.
Dan: Hey, thanks for having me.
Felix: Yeah, so you saw a problem with the way traditional board games are stored. What was the problem that you saw?
Dan: Basically, board games is a massive fast growing niche hobby. So many people are playing them and basically, there isn't a way for people to store them very well. Most people are storing them on crappy IKEA furniture or even just shoving them in their closets. I know of people who just keep them in a pile in their basement. I was one of those people and I was looking for a shelving solution and I couldn't really find something I wanted. Basically, board games are super expensive, it's almost like an investment. So you don't want to stack them too high on top of each other and you'll risk damaging them. You want them to be easy to take off the shelf and you want to store them flat as well, so when you store them sideways all the pieces and stuff fall down and so most of the shelving solutions right now other than BoxThrone have you storing your board games on their sides. Basically just all that, so I was like, oh I'm going to make a better shelf than all of these and so I did it. You store all your board games flat, there's one game on every shelf and it's fully expandable and modular, so as your collection grows you just add on to it.
Felix: Awesome. I definitely feel the pain. I don't have too many board games, but they're usually just shoved and stuffed into one of my cabinets, so I definitely understand the problem that you're talking about. Did you have experience starting businesses or creating products in the past before BoxThrone?
Dan: Not really. I dabbled a bit in drop shipping, I had a dog clothes store just to mess around and tried some branding stuff of that, but it didn't really take off. Not really, honestly, it was my first dip into it. It was kind of surprising how well it went.
Felix: Yeah, that's funny because I think that you followed the path that a lot of people follow when they get started with drop shipping or selling dog products or clothing or some kind of merchandise, but then you started venturing to creating your own products. Why was BoxThrone the one that led to most success? Do you notice anything about what you did differently about the market that allowed you to have success with BoxThrone versus your previous attempts at starting a business?
Dan: Yeah. It kind of taps into Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers a little bit. I feel like it was just this combination of the right timing, the right place, the right platform, me specifically with my experience in board games as well. I launched this in November of 2017, the Kickstarter and I'd only really gotten to board games I think, like six months before that. I was getting really interested in it, looking for accessories and how can I become more of an expert in the hobby at that time. At the same time Kickstarter board games were just starting to take off. At the time you could have launched any kind of Kickstarter board game product and done quite well for yourself. It's a combination of all those things as well as I have a pretty strong marketing background as well, I love nerdy stuff. I created this awesome medieval brand that I think taps into a lot of the target audience interests and I feel like all those things together just fired up this kiln of success. It's kind of a cheesy thing to say.
Felix: Yeah. Looking back on it makes a lot of sense, all these things combined to contribute to your success. Is that possible to replicate, if you were to give advice to someone else out there that maybe has started a drop shipping store, maybe has started merchandise store and hasn't... Maybe got a little traction, but couldn't scale, couldn't see the future in business with that business. How can they either course correct or look at things differently based on the experience that you've had so that they can line up future success stories?
Dan: Yeah, it absolutely is. It's just all about understanding where trends are going. I think first of all, you should be in a business that you're interested in. You shouldn't be just chasing money. If you don't know anything about the business, don't even bother because you're never going to be passionate enough to take it to the next level. At the same time, you have to be looking to where the money is going. Have you come across anything that's surprisingly successful and you're like, "Whoa, I'm kind of interested in this. I wonder if I can do anything in this space?" It absolutely is, whether that's just travel or pet products or board games stuff. I don't know what the next big thing is, but it's all about getting in on the trend when it's kind of just before it peaks and I feel like if you hit that, your business will blow up and take you places.
Felix: Makes sense, sometimes it has to do a lot more with the market, sometimes not so much. I'm sure your product is a great product, but a lot of times you do need the tide to help you out as well. Now, you said that you should be focusing on an industry, on a product that you're passionate about and what's so interesting about your case was that you said you were only into board games for six months. You don't need to necessarily have a ton of experience or expertise or even exposure to the industry, you just need to have that passion. Is that what your experience has shown?


Dan: Yeah. It depends, right? I feel like it's almost like a personality fit as well. I was actually playing tabletop games when I was six. My brother and I would play Warhammer 40,000 and stuff like that and Dungeons and Dragons when I was a teenager, so I was kind of dabbling in it a little bit, but I didn't have a regular board game group. I wasn't researching board games and just involving myself in the space, like going on forums. It helps to be one of those people who would be suited to that industry. Say you're an outdoorsy person, but you've never taken your interest and traveled to the next level. I think it definitely helps to be sort of set up to be successful in the space, whether you have similar interests or just a personality fit, but in terms of just diving in and just going ape on it, you could go from zero to 100 in six months definitely.
Felix: Yeah. I can imagine having someone that is not so involved gives you fresh eyes to not just accept the way things are. It sounds like board games have been around forever, but there's never been a solution like the one you came up with. I'm assuming most people just made do with what they had. I think coming with fresh eyes is definitely something that can be underrated, coming at it from someone that's not necessarily jaded by the existing products already, so I think that that is certainly beneficial in a lot of ways. You mentioned that you first launched it on, sorry. Go ahead.
Dan: Oh, I was just going to say, that's exactly it. With board games in particular, people had become so stuck in their ways, their like, "This is the board game shelf." And it was referring to the Kallax from IKEA, that cube shelf and that became a standard and if you said anything like, "Hey, look. There's other things we can do." The community would just go for your throat, it was scary times when I first started this product, we can talk about that later though.
Felix: Yeah, definitely want to go into the how to communicate the benefits of your new way of storing products, we'll get to that in a second. But I want to first talk about the Kickstarter campaign because that's where it all got started. When you decided to launch this on Kickstarter and Crowdfund it, how much of this was a real thing at that point? How much of BoxThrone was a real thing by the time you opened up a Kickstarter campaign and started filling in the forms?
Dan: I had started prototyping about six months before that, before I actually launched the campaign. I guess about a year before that was when I had the idea and then within six months I had the physical prototype and six months after that I had launched, so about a year.
Felix: Which I think is really important for a Kickstarter, to be actually be able to see something physical out there. When you started the campaign, what was the goal of the campaign and how much did you end up raising?
Dan: The goal I think, was only $20,000 and then the Kickstarter campaign itself raised over $900,000 and then afterwards we did a secondary Crowdfunding campaign which raised another couple $100,000. Basically brought the total to $1.2 million in total.
Felix: That's awesome. Tell us more about that. What was the secondary campaign? I think a lot of people would think, okay Kickstarter, campaign starts, campaign ends and that's it. Then you kind of go into the bunker, then try to build a business from there, but you did another campaign after that. What was the thinking behind that?
Dan: Yeah, there's actually a lot of stuff you can do after you've done your Kickstarter. We basically had this pledge management system called CrowdOx. You can set up your CrowdOx system so that it's also like a mini Kickstarter. You just tell everyone like, "Hey, you can buy the BoxThrone for another 30 day. This is the price," maybe it's a little high in the Kickstarter. It's almost like you can run a secondary Kickstarter like that. Now, there's lots of other options too. Indiegogo has a platform too where you can run, it's called an in demand campaign, so after you finish your Kickstarter you can flip it over to Indiegogo and have a short campaign on there.
Felix: What's the difference between that first one and secondary one? I think a lot of people see Kickstarter and I'd imagine there's some urgency behind trying to get in within those 30 days or however long your campaign is running for to get those rewards. Now all of a sudden there's a secondary campaign, do you have to change the offer, the messaging on there that will keep on riding on that buzz from people paying attention to the campaign?
Dan: Yeah. With the Kickstarter campaign it's more like early adopters, right? These people who are wanting to take a chance on you, they're interested in it, they feel like they're part of building the product. Now a secondary campaign it's more like the people who join it they're more risk averse, you call those late birds or late pledges and so it feels like the products already on the way, like it's already being made in that secondary campaign. It doesn't build as much momentum because you don't have the big countdown timer there saying, "There's only three days left before you can never buy this product again," like Kickstarter does. It's a bit e-commerce in the way it is, so it kind of depends on your messaging. Our messaging and our Facebook ads would say, "This is the last chance. This is the last week we're going to have this campaign up."
Felix: You mentioned you used a service called CrowdOx?
Dan: Yes. CrowdOx, yeah. It's a post campaign management system.


Felix: Got it. How do you drive traffic from that Kickstarter, the attention on there over to CrowdOx? Because you mentioned you raised another couple to few hundred thousand, which is going to require a ton of traffic to see that, so how are you diverting traffic to CrowdOx?
Dan: When you finish a campaign, you can change the button at the top to say whatever you want. We just changed that to say, "It's not too late to get a BoxThrone. Click here and you'll be taken to our late pledge system." A lot of the traffic I think, were people who were on the fence about BoxThrone and maybe forgot about it and then later came back and were like, "Oh, no. It's over." And they were kind of funneled through like that. Because if you look at the stats, most of the visitors actually just came straight from Kickstarter and not from the Facebook ads.
Felix: That's awesome.
Dan: We were featured in a few different places in the media, so people were kind of learning about it close to the end of the campaign when it was almost too late.
Felix: Right, makes sense. You end up raising, at least with Kickstarter over $900,000 and ultimately 1.2 million. Now, once those campaigns close... Well, actually how long did you run the CrowdOx campaign for?
Dan: I ran the CrowdOx one for 60 days.
Felix: Got it. Once that ended, what was the next step for your business?
Dan: The next step was getting it made. That first prototype that I made six months after having the idea was the one that we put in all the photos and all the videos for the campaign and all the marketing material. That actually wasn't the final product, we still had to make tweaks in it. The version that was in those videos, I think it was twice as heavy as the final product was. We basically ran into a lot of snags. After we designed the product and got all the money and then we started calculating like, "Oh, wait. This is how much it costs to ship it?" We'd done some preliminary stuff originally, but a lot of stuff happened between getting that money from Kickstarter and actually manufacturing it. The trade war started between China and the U.S. pretty much right after we got that money and so one of the things that was taxed was steel. So the price of steel goes through the roof and our product is almost all steel. We had budgeted for one price and then all of a sudden we're paying 20 to 30% more. There's that plus freight shipping got a lot more expensive, basically everything was getting more expensive during that time. We had to find ways to make the system a little bit lighter, we just tweaked certain things of the product. We actually improved it a little bit too. Before we had, almost like coated MDF for the bases and I wasn't really happy with it because it's kind of associated with cheaper material, cheaper furniture. So we went back and changed this super high grade ABS plastic, it just feels really nice like the way we coated it. It's actually made by this company that makes a lot of Japanese furniture. It's very precise in the way it's made and has the logo emblazoned there. So yeah, we had to go back and make all these little changes. I've completely forgotten the question.
Felix: I think this makes sense that you went into production next. Now, you mentioned that you made some tweaks to the product, were any of these that came from... I think what I've heard from other Kickstarter campaign creators in the past is that they often get a lot of great feedback from the people that are just commenting, replying to their campaign, that have contributed or maybe emailing them after contribution. Did you get any good feedback that allowed you to make adjustments to the product from the people that backed your campaigns?
Dan: Yeah. The board game community is very active in these kind of projects. Honestly, from day one of even making the project public, we had just so much feedback in every way. The second we launched, the preview landing page way before the campaign we were already getting comments. I posted it on Reddit and people were like, "Oh, I would never use this because you can’t put miniatures on it." We saw that and I'm like, "Oh, why don't I make a little glass shelf too so you can put miniatures on it." And someone's like, "Oh, I can't store my Dungeons and Dragons stuff on this." I'm like, "Okay, I'll just design a drawer real quick." And so we designed a drawer for it as well. I kind of did that with a few different add on ideas with that too. Another one was play mats, the mats that you play on with some board games, they're made of silicone. Someone's like, "Oh, I can't store these in this, they'll fall right through the holes in the shelf." So I'm like, "Oh, okay," so I just quickly designed a hanging play mat holder and that would be designed with... At the time it was all steel, the steel loops and then when we launched the Kickstarter, we took all those ideas and launched Kickstarter. There was another wave of revisions for stuff. Some people were saying that maybe the extra wide shelves that I had included, we had an extra wide version, wasn't long enough to fit this massive board game called Kingdom Death: Monster. Which is, I think it's like 70 centimeters wide. So I'm like, "Okay." As the campaign is going, I call the factory and I'm like, "Hey, can we expand the size of this?" And go back to Kickstarter and tell people, "Hey, the extra wide shelves are now 20% longer." And then go back again and people would be like, "I don't think you should make those play mats with the steel loops. How is it going to stay on there?" So we’d go back and change to nylon straps, just going back and forth with backers and the factory.
Felix: At what point do you say you kind of just close the door and let's just go with these features rather than keep on expanding the scope of the products? I can imagine the feedback would keep on coming and that you could always add more and more things, but how did you know when it was ready to at least go on Kickstarter?
Dan: I was new to everything, so I was just very much caught up in all the excitement. I'm like, "How big can we make this thing?" Everything seemed possible, so I just kept adding stuff to it, which just became more of a nightmare during manufacturing and shipping. At one point, I was designing these metal panels for the side and then I realized how much it would cost to ship those and how much people would acceptably pay for them and I'm like, I think I'm going to stop designing stuff. It's getting so complicated. I have 76 different skews for this product, that's how modular and adaptable it is and so I'm just like, if we add anymore it's just going to become crazy. Basically, I just put a pin in it around maybe three quarters a way through the campaign.
Felix: Now, the campaign. Obviously, super successful. You mentioned that you caught the wave of lots of popularity around board games, specific Kickstarter campaigns, but was there anything specific that you felt that you did well, that you certainly would do again if you were to launch another campaign to help ensure the success or at least help stack the odds in your favor of a successful campaign like the one that you've been able to do?
Dan: Yeah. I am actually launching a second campaign in a couple of months here and it's all within the same branding. The most important thing, I think that was responsible for a lot of the success was having that very engaging branding. For example, the whole brand is based around this character that I made called the Box King who's kind of this lovable, goofy dictator. Basically, the king of the Box Kingdom and the backers or the customers even, now with the Shopify store, they are kings of their own Box Kingdom. So all the communications, all the brand emails that go out to people, we always say like, "Your majesty, we have this new thing in stock." Or, "I just received a raven, blah, blah, blah." And just having very much in character and in theme. People just loved it. I really enjoyed building that world for people, I even would show them stuff like, "We're shipping the BoxThrone now." And I'd design like a medieval galleon with the Box King on the front to make people think that it's a real world I'm getting involved in. I think they really like it, we have a really high open rate on emails. I have about 15,000 people on an email list and I have almost a 50% open rate across it.
Felix: Wow, definitely impressive.
Dan: Yeah. I think that was a big factor of it. I'm doing another campaign in a couple of months and I'm keeping it within that box kingdom framework, but I'm changing the theme a little bit. So instead of the Box King being the main dude in it, I got this Box Genie now and he's a genie and he can make all your storage wishes come true. We'll see how it goes, should be pretty exciting.
Felix: That's cool. It definitely sounds like very immersive branding, which I think something that you specified as leading to not the success of the Kickstarter campaign, but an overall success with your shop, store and your business as a whole. Is this all inside of your head or is there a way to make sure that you're following these branding guidelines especially as you grow bigger and hire more people, making sure that that branding is staying consistent?
Dan: Yeah. I used to work in communications and PR for Berkshire Hathaway Energy company, so I was already pretty well trained in how to basically build a brand and do the brand guidelines and have people stick to it and understanding the rules of what you can do. Also, with the marketing and communications aspect side of the job, I did that for five years, so I knew what I had to do to make that and it really does make a huge difference. You have to sit down and describe what you want the brand to be. How do you want people to feel when they look at your posters or read your emails or see your products or look at your logo even? Every little visual aspect of what people see affects how they feel in terms of the brand. From the colors, from the words you use, from the shapes of the products, from the shapes of the pictures, all those things so you have to be very careful in what you select when you're crafting that world. Once you sit down and define all that, everything else just comes to you. Once you have that framework, the words just flow out of you, the scripts come out of you, you know exactly what you want the videos and the illustrations to look like.
Felix: Makes sense. Now, you mentioned that I want you all back into the manufacturing mode when started running into all these road blocks. You mentioned the cost of steel went up, your product was super heavy, what were the adjustments that... How long did it take you to figure out the right adjustments? How many iterations, your prototypes during the manufacturing process before you were happy with the product that not only fulfilled on the promise that you made to the customers on Kickstarter, but then also didn't eat into your profits too much?
Dan: Yeah. The biggest one was that we changed that wood into that high grade plastic and that saved us a lot of weight in terms of shipping, so that helped a little bit. We made it more efficient, like in the design, we had a lot of wasted space in the columns, they were too thick so we made those a little bit thinner. It was just a strong... We weight tested everything. I guess one of my best memories of making this product was us standing in the factory with this weight pressure machine, it was in a mold factory so they just had tons and tons of giant chunks of heavy metal. We had this shelving system set up and we just kept piling more and more chunks of metal onto it, see how much weight it could take. Eventually, we just ran out of things to put on it, so it was like, okay I think this is good. I think we've designed it to be efficient and strong and light at the same time. There were a lot of other tweaks too, we wanted to have a way to secure it to the wall properly. I wanted more of the branding on there so we have the logo on there. I went to China right after the campaign closed to do this and I was in China for a couple of months and I came back and again for a couple months. I live in China now just iterating our products. It was probably eight maybe seven months from when the campaign closed to when we had the final product shipping. There were a hundred other things that went wrong though in the beginning, should I talk about that now or do you want to talk about that later?
Felix: Yeah, we'd love to hear more about it.
Dan: To begin with, there was the trade war stuff, right? We got the money and then all the tariffs came out, which affected us by the way, it's a steel tariff, it's a steel product so we had to pay 20% more when we import it to the U.S. and the price of steel itself jumped 20 to 30%. And then the U.S. dollar appreciated against the Chinese yuan, which would be great but we had signed a contract before that, so when we signed the contract with the manufacturer, it was a very strong Chinese yuan so it was like one U.S. dollar to six Chinese yuan and then all the trade war started and then it just dropped and it was like one to seven. We tried to negotiate a little bit, but a contracts a contract. I think they maybe pushed it a little bit to 6.2, but it was still getting a bit jammed on it. We basically got a financial hit there. Also, my logistics person... So just for scale, the size of this product is pretty big, right? It's going to be six feet wide and so we had about 16 full containers worth shipping around the world. It's so many containers, so much logistics and to begin with our freight person over estimated the cost of it, basically gave us a bill that was four times the amount it should have been. I just didn't sleep for two days straight. I'm like, "How are we doing to do this? Are we going to ship in portions? We can't finance this, what are we going to do?" And then they came back and were like, "Oh, no. It was my mistake, I miscalculated it." And it was actually 25% of what they quoted so I'm like, "Oh my god." The biggest blunder of all was actually I think with our warehouse, our third party logistics company in the U.S. I won't name any names because I still work with them, they've gotten a lot better now but basically what happened was that we have a very, very customizable product. You can have three blue shelves, four white shelves, two yellow shelves and because I got too excited when I was doing the campaign. When people asked for multiple colors, I was like, "You can have anything you want." So lesson learned there. At the time like, okay we got to make this work. We basically had to create permutations of the different numbers of shelves in the boxes. We had to have a box of two, a box of four, a box of five, a box of six in different colors and then so if you ordered a bunch of different colors we could just ship you two boxes of one shelf, two boxes of three shelves and one box of twenty shelves. I had talked to this 3PL and they said, "Oh, yeah. We can just bind everything together. We can just strap it all together." I'm like, "Okay, that's great." And then you only pay one fee and you get to reduce cost and make it a lot easier, I'm like, "That sounds amazing, let's do it." So we ship all the stuff to it, by the time it gets to them it's maybe a week before Black Friday. First couple of days go by and you start strapping stuff together and shipping it out, I'm like, "Wow. We're shipping out very economically, this is amazing." And then they just stopped. They were just like, "This is taking too long." And shipped everything out individually. 
Felix: Without letting anyone know or?
Dan: Well they let me know and didn't really do anything when I complained about it. I was like, "Hey, can you go back to doing that?" Hmm, no can do. I'm like, this is going to be a problem. I'm talking like, each of these shelves... One shelf, I'll sell it to a customer for $2.50, they were shipping it out for $10 in shipping costs and I had to pay for all the shipping costs. Imagine this on the scale of tens of thousands, we shipped out 50,000 boxes and then each day you see these numbers, just $10 out of you money, $10, $10, $10 non stop and you're like this can't keep up otherwise I'm going to be bankrupt. I'm not even sure how I survived it to be honest. I think it's because we were able to make some compromises with some backers. We'll be like, "Hey, is it okay if we ship you five black shelves, instead of two yellow shelves and two black shelves?" And it's like, "Yeah, sure that's fine." We were able to manage that a little bit better, but yeah the other issue was they wouldn't ship it in multi label. That means that there would be shipping of each product as it's own shipment and we had about 12 boxes per order. You're a customer and you're getting stuff on all different days, you get three boxes on day one, four boxes on day two, two boxes on day four, it's just crazy. It's like a customer service nightmare and I didn't have any employees at that time, so I was handling all this myself and it was a wild time.
Felix: I guess you could swallow a lot of those issues as long as you can get the sign off from your customers that they'll be okay for this kind of experience. What's your advice there when you do have chaos going on in the back end of the business, behind the scenes which can then spill out to the customer experience? How do you manage that with your customers?
Dan: First of all, you should be giving people the best experience you can, right? You need to try and solve the problem in the first place however you can. In this warehouse situation, I would try to find all different kind of compromises. Like, "Hey, can you strap two of these together? Can you do this? Can you take stuff out of the box? Can you do this?" I was given lots of different advice and trying to just chip away at the problem. I think that helped maybe a good chunk of the problem. On the customer service side, I think you just have to communicate with people. People hate not hearing anything or being surprised. You just have to give them a heads up and most people are fine with it, most people are very level headed. So you're like, "Hey, this is actually going to happen." And they're like, "Okay, that's no problem." The biggest advice I could say is actually saying hiring a customer service person, that has changed my business just hiring a customer service person. It gives me so much more time to focus on the actual product and the marketing side of stuff.
Felix: Yeah, so nowadays because of all those headaches from a highly customizable product, is your product still as customizable or have you made changes either in the product selection or the way that you do the supply chain to give you less gray hairs?
Dan: Yeah, we had to make a lot of changes just because I didn't really trust the warehouse anymore, the U.S. warehouse so instead of having everything in 12 different boxes, we basically start packing stuff together. We made stuff less customizable, so now it's like you can get all your frames in one color and all your shelves in another color. Before we were packing the bases and the columns and other stuff separately to make it a little bit easier to ship and we changed that, now we just pack everything together. We could ship out three big boxes instead of 12 little ones now. That made a big difference.
Felix: Do you find that people are either, not necessarily complaining, but are asking to be able to customize their product more now that you've reduced the almost down to the shelves? You're talking about selling many different packages, but at least you have control over the combination or the permutation of them. Do you find that people care to have more control over their customization?
Dan: Honestly, not really. I feel like people don't really miss what they can't have. If you show them, this is what it's like, people won't complain about it. They'll understand it on some level. The only complaints I've had is I've had to discontinue some colors. I had to discontinue the yellow and the green because the numbers just weren't high enough for the minimum order quantities and so we had some people complaining about it, but I created a Facebook group called the BoxThrone design counsel. It was originally designed so people could come and give their design ideas, but in that group it was kind of a marketplace too. Someone would be like, "Hey, I'm looking for 12 green shelves." And someone would be like, "Okay, I'll buy those from you."
Felix: That's super cool to see a little economy pop up over your products. I think that's a good point about how they don't miss what they don't have, but then also you kind of reduce that decision fatigue that your customers have to make when they have to customize the entire thing. I think a lot of entrepreneurs, business owners think that the more personalization, the more customization, the better, but a lot of times customers just want you to tell them what are the options and reduce the decisions for them goes a long way.
Dan: Yeah. That's been exactly our experience too. Especially, in the Kickstarter campaign. I think almost every customer was like, "This is my space, what should I buy?"
Felix: Yeah, looking to you for the expertise. I think as a business owner you should feel comfortable and you should want to step up to tell them, "Hey, this is the best way to but this product," or "this is the best option for you." Once you got the products to those initial backers, what was next? How did you continue to drive new business, new customers to check out your product? What was working for you to go beyond the crowd funding traffic source?
Dan: Basically, I was seeing that the website, like kind of a landing page app was just still getting a lot of hits, so we capitalized it and made the e-Commerce store. I was always going to make a Shopify store anyway, so we made the Shopify store. There were a lot of things that led to discovery of the product, like we are first on Google if you search for board game shelves. I think we're first as well for board game storage, actually own the URL boardgameshelf.com as well, so I've done some URL stuff, SEO stuff to get high up. We got a lot of discovery that way and at the same time people were starting to receive their products from the Kickstarter, so people were putting up videos and I was getting really good reviews. I was actually terrified for a while of, was I going to get bad reviews and this business is done were so afraid of. I'll always remember the moment of the very first email I got and I'm like, "Oh, man. This is it, oh I'm so worried." Is this going to be a guy ripping into the product and calling me a scammer? I opened it up and it was just a glowing review of everything, he just had this massive detailed review of every little thing like, "Oh, I think you guys should add a couple of centimeters over here, I think it would help for this, but everything else is very good." It was just a great email, just really gave us a good confidence boost and from then on we just had so many great reviews. I put a lot of them onto the website itself. That was a lot of momentum, so it just carried over to the Shopify store. There was so many people waiting for it. On day one of the Shopify store, we had $100,000 of revenue on just the first day.
Felix: Wow.
Dan: I think that pushed us into the 1% of Shopify launches or something like that as I saw on the webpage. It was incredible, it was just so much momentum behind it. Then it was just continuing it and keep on building that community and offering new products and expanding to new regions. We have four different websites now, all are for storemyboardgames.com, but it's storemyboardgames.com.co, .UK and .com.AU, basically we want to make people feel included. We don't have some janky currency conversion where it's like they have to pay have to pay 351 pounds and 37 cents. It seems very targeted towards Europeans and Canadians and their market, so I feel like it gets people a bit more excited and involved in the product too.
Felix: Okay. You said a bunch of different things I want to dive into. It sounds like there's two sorts of traffic, one was the SEO that you did and the second was just sounds like a lot of word of mouth. Now, the $100,000 in that first Shopify, was there a campaign leading up to launch day? How did people know that this is day one chance going by? Where was the messaging or marketing coming from that led to such a big boost of traffic in sales in that first day?
Dan: Yeah. Honestly, it was all word of mouth. It was kind of the principle behind the product in the first place. I wanted to make something that people walk into their home and they notice and they start talking about it. You have this massive shelving system solving a problem that a lot of people who are in the board game space have. They would tell their friends and then I had Kickstarter updates telling people, "If you're interested in the launch, go to this website." We had a little landing page on there and you'll be notified on launch. I built the hype up on with the original Kickstarter backers and I guess they were spreading by word of mouth. I didn't do any Facebook ads before the launch and also because it's an expandable system, right? It was a year between the end of the campaign and the launch of the store. Their collections had grown since then and it was an expandable system so they'd want to add on to their system and grow more and double the size of the system. We have a lot of returning customers because of that, I think it's a 25% of my sales are from returning customers, just people expanding the system so all that kind of added up.
Felix: That definitely makes for a good business to have people coming back to buy add ons essentially to your product. You mentioned one of the things that you wanted to do or at least that you've learned is that you want to create something that your customers can brag about to people in their peer groups. Obviously, the product itself has to be brag worthy to begin with, but are there things that you can do to encourage this? The features that you found that by adding into a product or message you can put out there that will encourage people to feel proud or to want to brag about your product to their friends?
Dan: Yeah. The key principle is just to make it as high end as possible, right? I always knew I wanted to make an expensive product because I didn't want to deal with the customer service nightmare of shipping out millions of $20 products to people. I knew I wanted to have a very expensive product that I'd only ship out a few of and so having that expensive product that you try and get the highest quality you can. First of all, it's metal. There isn't a lot of metal shelves that look good in the world generally and the reason I wanted metal was so that it could hold a tremendous amount of weight. I've got photos of people with their BoxThrones 15 feet, 20 feet high, it's crazy because it's so modular and it holds all the weight perfectly. I just really wanted that statement piece that was very high end. And so building up steel allowed you to build up these huge systems, you can't ignore it when you walk in. Same logic with the colors too, so people feel more attached to it because you have the personalized colors. One guy was big into old school Batman, so he made his frames gray and the shelves light blue and it looked really good. People kind of feel more attached to the product and they tell their friends about it. All those kind of things lump in to make it into a statement piece.
Felix: Yeah. Okay, so that covers the word of mouth and how this product spread. Now, when it came to SEO, you mentioned you bought a couple of domains that were specific to what you believe surged traffic for your product. What else did you do specific SEO wise other people can take away to try to improve their rankings on Google?
Dan: I think hitting the Google image search is the most important to be honest. Make sure you have all your alt tags on all your images on your website. On your Shopify store, make sure you have just tons of photos of your products and have them all alt tagged. I feel like that actually makes a big difference. And then at the same time, put those photos on Pinterest. Pinterest is this strangely powerful hidden tool that I don't think a lot of people are using. I'm even running Pinterest ads right now and they're like 10 times I'll rely on them. I do feel like when you do a Google image search, a good 20% of the photos that show up are from Pinterest, at least from my product. I think that matters a lot in SEO, the rest of it I think, is a lot of traffic and so just putting a lot of money into Facebook ads and social media ads.
Felix: Got it. Okay, let's talk about that next, social media ads and Facebook ads. Beyond Facebook, what else do you advertise?
Dan: Facebook is my primary and then I do ads on Pinterest as well because there's a lot of people looking for apartment furniture and so it's just a very good cross over. If you in the Kickstarter campaigns they used to advertise on hobbyist websites like boardgamegeek.com, but it doesn't really have as much of a conversion for non Kickstarters, so like for the Shopify store I only use Facebook and Pinterest and the majority of it is Facebook. I also like Instagram, you have ads on Facebook and it goes to Instagram as well.
Felix: Can you tell me more about your strategy on Facebook? How do you set up your ads and how do your targeting on Facebook to drive traffic that will convert to your website?


Dan: Yeah. The key principle of my website is that I have to actually have pre-order cycles. It's one month now, it used to be two months, it's almost like a mini Kickstarter campaign on the Shopify store, so I have a big countdown bar and it's like, you only have 30 days left to buy this. And then when it goes down to zero that's when I export all the orders to the factory and ship stuff out. It has that fear of missing out aspect on it, so I think that drives a lot of the conversions and I use that a lot in the language as well of the Facebook ads. It's like, "Here's your last chance to buy." The main reason why I had that wave pre-order system is because the storage fees for the stuff is huge because it's giant furniture. I wouldn't be able to store tons and tons of it, that said, I'm looking to ways to make it better. We're trying to reduce our shipping times, I think we should be able to get them down by half in a few months. But it's sort of playing into that urgency cycle.
Felix: Yes, I'm on there right now. It says, 19 days left for at least this product if you get your pre-orders in. You mentioned that you're doing this because of the constraints on the fulfillment side, but it sounds like it's working really well too on the marketing side to drive the urgency getting people to get in. Do you see a big uptick when it gets down to the last couple of days?
Dan: Yeah. Like 80% of the sales actually happen. We used to have these two month pre-order windows and 80% of the sales happened in the last two weeks. Now, I've shortened it to one month and it happens about in the last week, so 80% is just at the end basically.
Felix: And all the marketing when it comes to Facebook ads is about getting in before the pre-order closes?
Dan: Yeah. This one side of the marketing where it's telling people, this is the worlds first made for board game shelving system, the first completely modular metallic adjustable system and then we hit them with the, "Now's your last chance to do it." It's a win, win for everyone really because people want to get into the wave before it ends because we don't set it up in a way that we do it just to funnel people into the website. We have to do it like that, just like we'll fund the financial constraints of it.
Felix: You have a real reason to have this urgency. You mentioned you have two types of messaging, one is almost like education around the first time they've ever seen your product before and then the countdown where you only have 19 days or two or three or one day left before pre-orders close. Is that like a re-targeting ad or do you still send that to top of your funnel?
Dan: The thing with the re-targeting is that I find that it isn't as effective for this product because people who are interested in it will go away and they'll measure their house. They'll go away and look at it and I think it's top of mind for them enough and they're kind of always thinking about once we see that countdown timer and you're like, I'm interested in this product, you'll always think about it. You'll be like, "There's only 10 days to do this. Will this fit?" And then two days later, you'll go back and look at the store and you're like, "There's only eight days left now." I find that the re-targeting actually it's quite pointless to do it, so I actually hit the top of the funnel the hardest.
Felix: Got it. Are you sending on a given ad that someone might see or do they see the messaging around the first product of it's kind and introducing your product and in also the urgency or the urgency comes later?
Dan: No, it's all at once. It's like, here is the product, you have a last chance, just do it. My funnel isn't that deep actually to be honest, it's spread quite wide and maybe it's one thing I can improve. I feel like a lot of people, when they do this some of the marketing is actually is built into the email communications. They'll go on there add a product to see how much the shipping is and then they'll get a really cute abandoned cart email. It's all in the theme like, "Oh, no. Your majesty, you've left the Box King alone in the wilderness. Are you going to save him? There's wolves out there." And that kind of drags people in a little bit and they go back. That's kind of my strategy for it.
Felix: I was going to ask next, when it comes to your marketing to existing customers, you mentioned there's a 25% of your sales come from returning customers. Is there a marketing that drives them back to purchase expansions to modular system or what are ways to get your 25% returning customer rate?
Dan: A lot of that is emails because I basically always ask people to sign up for the email list, pretty much everywhere all over the website. I don't really send that many emails, I send like one every two months so it's really not that often. Usually, when I have those emails I have some good news into it. I don't really send marketing emails like, "Hey, now's your last chance to buy this." I usually have some news about the product or upcoming products or the company. I'm like, "Hey we just added this thing to the store." And so people are always interested to open up the emails and that's almost all returning customers. Just making sure people who have bought your product or engaged by email.
Felix: Now, I want to talk a little bit about the tools you use. You mentioned CrowdOx first of all as a tool you use after crowd funding. What about email or any other tools or apps even that you use on your site to run the business?
Dan: I use Mailchimp right now, but I think I'm going to swap over to Squarespace email. It's a little bit cheaper or even Shopify email, that's pretty cheap too. I'm basically between those, but honestly outside of Shopify apps, pretty much all I use is Mailchimp and Google calendar and just the G Suite, that's basically it.
Felix: What about the apps you use on your website? What are some of those you recommend?
Dan: The biggest difference is Wheelio, the spin to win. When I implemented that I had probably a 20% uptick in sales. I know for that before as well in the show as well. It wasn't a 20% uptick sustained, but it was 20% at the time and now it's about... My store is always growing, so I feel like it's part of the growth just because about 50% of customers have used spin to win Wheelio coupon codes. My email list is blowing up, I get a few 100 emails sign ups every week.
Felix: Gotcha. So the email you get, you collect them through the spin to win Wheelio, basically in exchange for their email address you give a discount code or some kind of prize to the prospective customer and you mentioned that you only send out emails once every couple of months. Do you send out different emails for people that have joined your list through Wheelio versus other ways that they’ve joined your list?
Dan: Yes. I send one email out every two months. I do have a sales funnel in the way that have auto emails going out to new people who sign up. If you sign up, you'll get an email explaining more about BoxThrone and you'll get another one urging people to buy before the end of the wave, but then that's it. And then from then on it's only the news emails and so one of the criticisms I've heard about the spin to win apps is that all the emails are just junk that you get from there. Because you're giving away discounts on the product as prizes, so a lot of people sign up just to get the prize, but if you have a good email funnel set up, those people are going to unsubscribe, like make it very easy to unsubscribe on the first email they get, so you're going to shed all the fat anyway. I think that's part of why I have such a pretty strong email following.
Felix: What do you send typically in that flow? What kind of emails are you sending? What kind of messaging do you send to them?
Dan: The first one is basically an educational email telling them, "Hey, this is BoxThrone and these are the things that you can do and these are the things you can add on." And then the next one is just about, "Hey, this is how the system works. We ship out every two months because of these reasons. Chances are that there aren't too many days left in your wave right now, you should jump aboard." We just have those two, I don't send too many out.
Felix: Got it. All right, BoxThrone which is as at storemyboardgames.com. I'll leave you with this final question, what do you think is the biggest challenge for you as a business or for you to overcome this year?
Dan: Well, I'm launching two more products this year actually. It's not related to the board game shelf, but like I mentioned, it's part of the BoxThrone universe. One is basically like a token storage system that it's just incredibly complicated for me to explain it, but it's basically modular and it can shift into all these different forms and we have these art plates made by famous board game artists and so I've got to sustain the momentum with that while sustaining BoxThrone. And then I'm also launching a third product later as well, and so I really wanted to tie it all together. I want it to feel like it's one big universe, so I'm going to have these mascots for each of the products and keep that going.
Felix: Super cool, very exciting and if anyone wants to follow along, they can probably just join email list at storemyboardgames.com. Thank you so much for coming on and sharing your experience, Dan.
Dan: Great, thanks for having me. It's been awesome.