What do you think of my kickstarter? Would love feedback. | Hacker News Reader

What do you think of my kickstarter? Would love feedback.

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6 pointsdmd14913 comments

1. $52 retail for a deck of playing cards is prohibitively expensive. $26 is kind of outlandish. Go to ArtsCow and you can print full color custom decks on demand for $10 each

http://www.artscow.com/photo-gifts/playing-cards/playing-car...

ArtsCow even lets you upload your deck for other people to print. I am positive there are much cheaper options if you actually print in bulk

2. The video and description should be shorter and more concise. Successful Kickstarter campaigns usually have very high quality pitches. You are competing with professionals masquerading as hip indie hobbyists.

1. Yea I was planning on experimenting with the price. I'm planning on ordering from china and the primary cost is shipping. What would you think about selling the PDF file for a much lower cost so that customers can print them at a much lower cost (and it's less work for me).

2. Yea I'm not design oriented at all so icant do to much better than that on my own. Were you able to understand what I was going for in this video or was it too long and boring?

2. It was a little long winded and boring

You may also want to check out Game Crafter https://www.thegamecrafter.com/

Game Crafter has a cost estimator that rings up $7.63 to manufacture on demand a deck of 54 cards. Then they will provide a store front and print on demand for 50% of the profit. If you sold your cards for $14.99, that would be 7.36 profit. So $3.68 goes to you and $3.68 goes to Game Crafter.

You can also buy your own decks at cost ($7.63) to sell on your own. Maybe you should buy 10 and send them to Amazon to be sold through Amazon Fulfillment. You reach a larger market and keep more of the profit with very little risk to get started. Link to your Amazon item from your blog and maybe get affiliate money, too.

As for your marketing deficiencies, you should outsource your weaknesses. Not saying you need to pay a lot of money. Maybe you already know someone and you could buy them dinner for rewriting your description or working with you on your video.

Honestly it seems like you have a novel poker deck design and you are taking it a little too seriously. There are lots of novelty poker decks out there for every subject matter. Start small, like with Game Crafter and Amazon, and if it takes off then great. If it doesn't you can always keep it going with little overhead.

EDIT: A mobile app can be a good inexpensive companion product if done right. You can easily make an app to flip though images of cards and work offline. Use something like PhoneGap and you'll be done by Monday. Add ads, a link buy the physical cards, and give it away for free at least initially. Add an offline logbook in version 2. Maybe start charging $0.99 for it after that.

That was actually pretty useful. I really like the game crafter site as it removes risk and saves time (no shipping from, no time doing fulfillment work, etc).

I would love to do the mobile app. Unfortunately I'm not a coder so it would take me quite a while to learn it myself. I outsourced the initial development of my website to India and they're still working on it.

Thanks for the tips.

Here's your problem, put bluntly:

Your cards don't look better than a normal person could design in an afternoon or two, and they cost ~10x what a deck of cards does. You've got a mediocre product you want to sell at a high price.

Here's what to do:

1. Lower your price until you get customers

http://www.printerstudio.com/unique-ideas/custom-playing-car... will sell you 151 decks of cards for $604 ($4 ea). Buy from there and set your initial price at $5.

2. Sell cards that actually add value to a trip

Some ideas:

- fizx's combinatorial directions idea

- base it by city, with city specific adventure ideas

- lose the "play it safe" card copy. If you have any non-family/friend sales yet, figure out who your customer is and use the same kind of language/slang they use with their friends.

- Use adventure ideas that actually put people in the mood to adventure ("Go to a local bookstore and ask an employee about his favorite book" honestly sounds incredibly boring. "Find an attractive girl at the local bookstore and convince her that your favorite book is better than her favorite book" sounds more fun. With thought, you can do better.)

I'm not sure about this idea, both because things that could be replaced by a free web site or cheap mobile app should be, imho, but also because travelers don't want more stuff to carry, and people in general (not just travelers) want fewer, not more, paper products these days.

You might have an interesting starting point here not for a physical product, but for a mobile app or web site that does a bit more than a deck of cards could do. Maybe a site or app for crowdsourced location-specific activity ideas, for example.

Yea I do have a social networking site in the works where travelers can find and create treks for various places c

The reason I'm using the cards is because many travelers carry playing cards with them already. If they are carrying Trekdek cards they can be dual use.

Thanks for the feedback!

I like the concept, and the cards look good enough, however I find the specific tasks boring and limited (to 52).

You might try making the tasks combinatoric.

Thanks for the feedback. Would you mind sharing some examples?

Nobody will ever pay $52 for a deck of cards.

I remember someone posting about these trekdek cards before. I didn't get the point then or now.

Your video is way too long. You should think of kickstarter videos like VC or YC pitches.

Yup was me. I did a post about outsourcing to china that included some pics of the cards.

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