In this post, I will make another feeble attempt to think like a businessperson. Well, perhaps not quite. Business plans are stereotypically concerned with starting a company, hiring employees, changing the world, and becoming rich. This plan concerns merely generating enough supplementary income to live on. I have realized that life itself requires a business plan, so that counts.
As I have been mentioning to anyone who will listen, I am inspired to earn income by having customers and tip-donors rather than offer a service to clients. My long-term goal is to reach a place where I earn $2,000 a month by going directly to users of my creations, without having to work for a BigCo or a client.
As Escape Artists has a cozy team of about half a dozen, and all our listeners are consuming something that I absolutely love, I consider that part of this plan. I consider a successful webcomic artist or internet musician to be another type of person who lives this way.
My latest scheme is to make games and sell them on my website. What prompted all of this was finding out how easy and inexpensive ceramic is. It also plays to my strengths, both as someone who likes building things with his hands, and using art software. Custom cookie cutters, and rubber stamps based on my own vector illustrations, will make easy and fast replicas. I just press the stamp into a sheet of clay, for an entire game; then cut out the tiles with my custom cookie cutters, which I've already made. The first set is drying now.
I'm used to game designers telling me that the only way to make and sell games is a massive outlay of capital, based on a small business loan, to get a production run of plastic parts in China. What little credit I have is mildly poor, so I used to feel game entrepreneurship was beyond me. It turns out the cost of a 7"x9" rubber stamp made from my vector art is only $35. I'd only ever have to sell one copy to make back the money to start the product line. I'd lose on the cost of my own labor if I only sell one copy, but it's the way I would want to spend time anyway. In the worst-case scenario, I've made beautiful things that previously only existed on paper. I don't see a downside.
I think many of my products will involve Japanese, since I have familiarity with that, and I know people who can help me get in touch with lots of students who might like to buy beautifully-made learning games.
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