From Hobby to Big Business with Battle Systems

George: 0:00

Hi there. My name is George and I help independent creators launch their products and games on this podcast. Those creators share their journey from an early idea all the way to an actual product and everything in between. Today’s guest is Colin Young. He is the founder and main designer of Battle Systems. They raised over two and a half million dollars across eight crowdfunding campaigns, of which 900,000 came from their last campaign, Maladum Alone. Welcome, Colin.

Colin: 0:25

Hey, how are you doing?

George: 0:26

I am. Great, thanks. Before we dive into your entire business and all the brilliant things you’ve done can you give us a breakdown of what it is exactly that battle Systems is known for? Like the terrain for war games? For those who might not be familiar,

Colin: 0:42

Yeah, of course. So basically if you play any of the big kind of franchise games out there, anything from games workshop through to the many, many sort of skirmish. Miniature games, all these people love to paint small science fiction or fantasy soldiers um, elves versus goblins, et cetera. And they like to put it on a tabletop. Historically these games are played with the miniatures and you’d put’em on a table and you’d lay a tablecloth down green for grass, and if you wanted hills, you’d put books underneath and you’d make hills. And if you wanted to a building, you had to make it yourself People spend a lot of time painting the miniatures and they’ve got these lovely, beautiful miniatures, and then they get put on like a green tablecloth or something, or, they’re using polystyrene blocks or something for houses and it’s, it seems a shame. So I, I was always into these kind of games. So I started basically making a scenery for myself. I shared some of that on Facebook and people were like, oh, this is great. Where do we get this? And it’s you can’t, it’s mine. It’s oh, you make it? And it’s not really.’cause it took me three months to make this thing, you know? That’s where I started doing some downloading. Downloading the files I’d already created to people and just going, yeah, here you go. And we made like a small business outta that which made a profit about 20 pounds or something in a year, but it was just for fun. And then after a while of doing that, obviously. I decided that I needed to hang on a minute. There’s a market here we can manufacture, blah, blah, blah, blah. What we do now, what we started back then is producing these buildings for people so they don’t have to paint them. So everything we do is pre, pre-painted. Precut. All they’ve gotta do is push it out sheets, slot it together, and then they’ve got like a townhouse on for a village or a tavern or maybe a sci-fi building or the interior of a spaceship or something like that. They can paint the miniatures, get it straight to the table and enjoy their games. This is pretty much what we do.

George: 2:34

And were you the actual first person to come up with the idea that this can be something that’s pre-made for these games?

Colin: 2:41

There was another company that they’re not in existence anymore, but we’re doing a similar thing. But by the time I started that, that stuff was no longer available. So there was a good little niche in the market. So I wasn’t the first, but I think I’m the first person to really push this kind of punch board, cardboard printed both sides kind of thing.

George: 3:03

And so going back to 2013 when you had your first campaign. Your first campaign raised over 220,000 pounds, dollars. They’re the same now that seems like a big. Jump that’s a lot of money for someone who just made something that they posted on Facebook and made sort of 20 pounds before what? What happened?

Colin: 3:25

So for clarity, the first downloadable stuff that I did, I think we, it wasn’t a business, it was just like, Hey, I can do this. I can share these files and I can charge a nominal amount. I think I was charging like a 10 pounds for a pack. And then. For 15 quid, you’ve got all these packs, some sort of bundle or something. And I had a day job and I think we made about six thousand pounds that year in that first year. But then by the time you’ve paid for your printers and you’ve, and all this kind of stuff like that, I just remember doing my little,’cause I had a full-time job. So I had to declare this money as additional income. So on my tax return, I stuff. The printers I bought and ink cartridges and all the things that we, we did. And yeah, I just remember having this 20 pounds sitting there. It’s like whe 20 pounds of profit. This is brilliant. But it was good fun and a great learning experience for that first year. So yeah, and then we did the Kickstarter. So. Whilst I was already doing this downloading content, I realized, almost immediately that, when we first launched it, we worked with beast of War now on tabletop and they shared some backstage stuff so we could get some traction. I think I had 500 followers on Facebook. And. About probably halfway through this process, while I was still selling this downloadable stuff, I was like, yeah, this is you, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that this is not a business. And I was like, okay, how can I already, I was making the next thing. I was like, I need something that people don’t have to cut and assemble themselves, so we launched and we sold quite a lot of these sets. And for the first couple of days I was like, wow we’ve done, if I keep doing this is like 30, 40 grand at the end of the year. And of course your market goes down really quick from a business point of view. It’s oh, new thing everyone grabs on. Then it goes really slow. Yeah, you know what, this is nothing at all. So I already started developing what we would then launch on Kickstarter which was the manufactured in China, pre-punched, packaged as a box. No one has to download it or print it. No one has to spend hours cutting it all out, you know? Whilst. Doing that, I started then sharing that on Facebook and sharing this new product and getting people’s, ideas and, could we do this or could we do that? And just kept talking to all the people that wanted this particular scenery. And I was like what do you think? We’ve done this, do you think we need windows in this? Do you think you need, I. And so I was just doing that whilst designing this product, at the same time speaking to China, getting samples and just overcoming all of the manufacturing headaches that you get from from being able to produce a product. Never done this before, you know? Um, and and so yeah, as far as kickstarter’s concerned, I think I spent a lot of time actually building up a community. Which, as is really important. And then Kickstarter itself helps you because it’s like, it’s huge marketing tool for startups as we were. And it is a big jump and if you’re in one of your questions might be, okay, so why the big jump but can’t just be community? It can, these things can happen. I also spent a lot, I started going to shows with my downloadable stuff but also showing off my other, uh, New product Unlaunched at the time, and I met a couple of people that really helped me. First of all I met Ronnie Renton from Mantic Games and he was mantic then and their stuff looked really good. So we started sharing photography and sharing stuff like that. And. Just by talking to him, I was putting together prices and stuff like that, and I remember him kind go going with some cost prices and I was like if I do this, da, this will cost like 27. He’s that’s, you need to get this down to a 10 or 15 quid, so you get a few little quick little business curve things off of that. And I also met Chris Birch from Devious Games, and he was great because he came over and just said, you should put this on Kickstarter. Was that’s, I didn’t even know what Kickstarter was. Mantic introduced me to Kickstarter. And Chris then just said, Hey, look, if you. Kickstarter is a nightmare you make. It’ll just tear you apart. And it does for many people especially back then. The goal kickstarter expect this to happen. It just goes nuts. They make no money. They don’t fund or they fund and then realize they can’t afford to produce the stuff. So He just sat down, he just said. We’ll have a video chat. And he spent three hours just going through all of the things that you know, you should and shouldn’t do for Kickstarter. Like remembering that actually you need to charge people for postage, and all just some real basic stuff. And so he went through all of that with me and that was really great. And I’ve actually done that since paid that forward to startups who are just like, okay yeah, you meet at shows and stuff. I’ll give you three hours of my time. We’ll just sit and I’ll go through the whole thing.’cause it’s a nightmare and Kickstarter can be a real nightmare. So yeah that advice with the build up a community got me from this thing to the£220.000? Funding. I would say that’s probably 70, 80% of the reason we made such a big jump. The rest of it being, it was a really cool product, that no one else did, and everyone was like, oh my God, we’ve been waiting for this for years. And then, you put those two things together and that’s, that that’s the success part.

George: 8:35

Yeah, so a great product and being well prepared and I think it’s great. It’s a great insight to find mentors, find folks who’ve done it before to see if they’re willing to give up a little bit of their time to help you not make the most terrible of mistakes. And was this the point where you quit your day job after raising£220.000?

Colin: 8:54

Oh no, I didn’t. Wow. No. So the thing about Kickstarter is you, that first one you’ll get, okay,£220.000. That is a lot of money. It’s not some of the game stuff at the time, like zombie side had come out and that did a million dollars at the time, probably about 700,000. And there was a few things doing around about a million, and then people would look back and just go,£220. Yeah, you’re not quite this thing and not quite that. Most things on Kickstarter, you never see’cause they don’t fund, so what we’d done was quite spectacular, though maybe not as big as the others. But what you don’t realize is that immediately that money gets spent very quickly on production because from a business side of it you, with Kickstarter, first of all, you need to be able to obviously have enough money to make it. And if your costings are not corrected, you’ve not factored in postage. You’re gonna either not be able to manufacture what you promised. Or you are not going to, when you’ve done, you’ll have no money left over. So you’ve done this huge thing and everyone’s really happy. You’re like, yay. And you’re like, okay, there’s no business because you need to reinvest in the business. So what happens is that you spend a lot of money on production and then you have to obviously then produce the stock for those supporters, those backers as have. You’ve got some money left over like hooray okay, great. There’s some profit. It’s yeah, but. You need to then open a website with, you have to produce more than what you are actually, giving away. So then you have to make stock and have a website. And so then you spend into that money to do that. And then you are like, okay, so there’s really not, there’s no money left to pay you, and then you’re like, okay, hopefully, fingers crossed the Kickstarter the website’s gonna go well, and then that’ll feed in and we’ll do another Kickstarter. So. Um, it was three and a half years before I gave up my day job because you’re only as good as your last Kickstarter. And the next Kickstarter we launched happened to do roughly the same money, but it could have equally just failed. Based on how people took the first product or genre or something new comes out, and so it, yeah, it wasn’t until I think it wasn’t until I actually physically launched my fourth Kickstarter and I was watching the funding come in that I was like, I think after that funding I was like, okay, I’m, I can no longer cope with these products and doing this and doing the design work and doing everything. And then running my day job. And I but at that point I’d managed to just put some money away enough that if at any time the company Battle Systems just did fold or do something, I’d have maybe two years worth of money to be like, okay, I’ve got two years to try and get back into my old job, which I’d spent, a long time, 20 years. At the time. Close to 20 years building up in my old job, so there’s always that fear of yeah. So first year, yeah, we made profit, but we invest back in the company. Second year, there’s some money left over third year, a bit more. We put it over and then I was like, okay, I think we’re all right. I think we’re doing okay. So yeah, three and a half years I think. And then finally I quit my day job.

George: 12:03

Oh man, what a great

Colin: 12:04

And, just to just, it was ama it was an amazing moment, but just to make it clear that, that was, I would say for most of that three and a half years, that was 17 hour days. Mostly across the weekends as well because of working two jobs. So I was often getting up at 5:00 AM to leave at six to driving into London, two and a half to three hour drive standing up in front of a hundred people, doing my day job, presenting to people.

George: 12:33

What was your day job?

Colin: 12:34

as a, my I was a sales trainer, so my job was to train everybody that come through the company on how to sell and also, p and Ls, profit and loss, and, management of staff and management of the business. And so I’d be standing up doing this presentation thing, getting back in my car, then driving back, then changing some nappies and spending some time with the kids for a couple of hours. Then they’d go to bed. Then around about nine o’clock, I would then start work on battle systems, sometimes work till midnight to 1:00 AM in the morning. And then get up again and just go round and round and round in circles. So I lost a couple of stone weight and this is not one of these, Hey, this is just no problem at all. I was, the reason I quit my day job in the end was because if I didn’t, I would just die. It was as simple as that. You can’t physically sustain 17 hour days as I did. And it’s, and I wouldn’t suggest anyone does it that way either, because it’s just not healthy. I just about survived but it was that or nothing. It was that, or take a much bigger risk earlier on, which I wasn’t prepared to do because I had young kids. And you was single? Yeah. I might quit after year and a half, but yeah, three and a half years later I quit because I physically couldn’t take

George: 13:47

I think um, death is a great motivator uh, you know, potentially dying. Um, it, It really helps make decisions easier. Yeah, that, that makes a ton of sense. So I. It is tough. It is, and it is a reality. And I think it’s good that we talk about this because obviously when people look at a Kickstarter or they look at your past Kickstarters, they see, these large numbers,$220,000 here or there, and the latest one will get into that in a second,$900,000. That looks great, right? So people assume you’re rich and your life is very easy, and that is just not always the case.

Colin: 14:23

It’s definitely not, and one other thing I’ve not mentioned, there was just myself doing the product, so I would be making the product and running the business. So I’d do all the artwork, all the design handle, all the manufacturing, the tooling, the and running the business. And then I had my d at that point, friend of th 30 odd years Wayne, who would then handle the website and just, do techie stuff because I’m not like really the. I’ve had to learn techy stuff like Photoshop and stuff in order to do this, but I needed somebody who could just handle that kind of stuff. And we just, and we didn’t pay ourselves for the first three years, so we just, we just did it. Um, And we was like yeah, yeah, yeah. Our ship will come in at some point. To build a business. There was a lot of hard work. There was just two of us. Ours was responsible for all the product and running the company and we weren’t paying ourselves. So yeah, none of that is easy.

George: 15:14

Yeah, it’s it’s such a great contrast as well through your current campaign because that first campaign, the campaign video for that one uh, people go, we will link um, your Kickstarter profile in the show notes. That very first campaign, it’s a video of Colin and Wayne in front of a black sheet maybe, or a black piece of fabric.

Colin: 15:36

Offers Amazon. Yeah. We bought one of these black, the tripods with the black thing and we bought a couple of the lights. And our video was phone filmed on an iPhone. We still filmed even the latest campaign was filmed on an iPhone. And the thing is that I’m also then having to. Edit the videos and learn about video editing and make those videos and do the shots and learn how to use video editing software and stuff like that. So there was we had I would say, I dunno, first three or four years, zero outside actual, you know, we didn’t pay anybody to do anything which is why we managed to save a bit of money.

George: 16:11

It’s just a great video. It’s, It’s so like, honest. It’s just like two guys in front of a black piece of fabric off of Amazon saying, here’s the thing we made. We hope you like it. And that started all, which is a great contrast to Maladum, which is your latest campaign. It just closed, raised over$900,000 and this is actually a full game, right? Not just terrain.

Colin: 16:34

Correct. Yes. So around about I can’t remember about five years into the business. The reason I started the business was because I wanted to make games, but I wasn’t stupid enough to think that I could handle making a game versus making terrain. I knew how to make terrain for myself. I could handle the complexities at all in et cetera. From a business point of. Miniatures was a whole nother level. And then you’ve got rule sets and books and editing. I wouldn’t be able to do all of by myself. So round about five years in, I started working on a game calledCore Space which is really one of our massive drivers for the company and always has been. This is a science fiction game. So Maladum is the fantasy kind of version of that game. And in fact, it’s set in the same universe. So they’re actually, the game are linked. It’s the, the fantasy game with, very kind of dungeon dragons es kind of thing is actually set. Thousands of years in the future of the sci-fi one. It all goes backwards. But anyway, all the cool lore aside we yeah so I’ve always wanted to make games I just wasn’t stupid enough to think that I could just manage all of that. So we started making games about halfway into the business about five years ago, so seven years ago, whatever. Now I know. And so Maladum is just a fantasy version. And the fantasy market is a lot bigger. Some of the differences.

George: 17:50

I was really shocked to see Maladum being your first project on Kickstarter marked as a Project We Love and I know the other one’s not. How come.

Colin: 18:00

Okay. Kickstarter for always seems a little bit of a kind of a vague thing to me in respect of for me, Kickstarter. It is all about, getting the gaming community and driving. But of course the gaming is just one little section of that, and there’s the technology section and all these different things. And yeah I’ve no, I’ve no idea how you get the Games we love thing, I don’t know if it’s some random algorithm thing or there’s actually people there going, oh, this is a game I love, I’m going to choose this you, we try to focus on things with Kickstarter, like what’s the best day to launch and, does the campaign cover people’s paydays and all these kind of technical things. And you can also be like, can we get the, can we get on the, projects we love and can we do this and can we do that? However you can get so wrapped up in that, that you end up not getting wrapped up in the project when there’s very few people working on things. And so it’s better just to say, okay, let’s just make the coolest, best products we possibly can. Let the product do the talking, and then Kickstarter will just do its thing, it’s bums on seats at the end of the day. So that if the pro we focus on the product and then yeah, hopefully we now some of the Kickstarter algorithm stuff as.

George: 19:12

Wait, but so you’ve never spoken to Kickstarter and you don’t know how you got Project we love?

Colin: 19:19

No idea. Yeah. Yeah. It just happens. There’s probably a process.

George: 19:23

I, I used,’cause I used to work at Kickstarter, I used to do that for

Colin: 19:27

No idea. Yeah. Tell me then, how did we get Project We Love? Is there a person there? Because I’m really cynical. I just assume that there’s just some algorithm that goes through and just says, ah, this algorithm works really well for us. Let’s make this a Project We love

George: 19:40

no, not at all. And in fact, it works the other way around.

Colin: 19:44

Okay.

George: 19:44

So Project We Love is an editorial decision. So when, so people work at Kickstarter on the outreach teams they will just browse the site and in most cases people ask for Project we love, like in most cases, a creator like yourself has been in the platform for many years, will know someone on the games team in your case. And say, Hey, person on the games team, we’re launching again. What do you think? And they’ll probably even give you a project we love before you even launch, just based on the fact that you’re like a valued creator. And then that project we love actually helps you in your algorithmic score because when the Kickstarter algorithm looks at which projects to, to surface more, looks at a bunch of different things and project we love being one of them. So it is.Insane to me that you have actually never spoken to someone at Kickstarter.

Colin: 20:37

You’ll be surprised at what we don’t do that we should do from a business point of view, so there’s. There’s, there’s lots of things we do now that, that we hadn’t done for many years, which are gonna, which from a business point of view, can help us. But most of that is born out of just, early on, being two guys who are just like, you don’t, you just don’t have time to figure all this stuff out. Do you know what I mean? There’s zero time in the day and you’re tired and you’re operating at 60% most of the time. So your decision making stuff is not great. And, yeah, I mean there’s now, five of us that, that work.’cause we get to the point where I can no longer do the artwork, so I need someone to help me manage the business. And then we’re like, yeah, we need someone to handle retailers. And then we’re like, oh now basically most of the time I’m the bottleneck of the company. though I own the company it’s my company fully, I just in trouble all the time. I’m constantly being nagged because I’m the bottleneck. I don’t get things done on time because I’m the person who’s effectively designing the products and making making it work. So I’ve also got a guy now John, who helps with artwork and stuff like that. And so every day for me is how do I fit stuff in?

George: 21:54

So the business is now at five people. Maladum has been your biggest campaign yet.

Colin: 22:00

Easily.

George: 22:02

What’s the next 10 years gonna look like?

Colin: 22:04

Wow. I wish I knew because, as per my last question, it’s like when do you get a chance to sit down and actually plan this stuff out? Right now, Maladum being a big thing, I said to you before, Core Space is one of our driving products. We’ve got the terrain side of the business creating a scenery, and we’ve then gotCore Space which is, which is the thing that I love, which is the game I always wanted to get to Kickstarter, but was not, either wise enough or heroic enough or maybe I was just really sensible not to try it, I think was probably the case. Honestly, I just wanna make the games that I love. That’s what I want to do, and I want other people to play those games if they like them. And so from a very kind of non-business side, I wanna carry on making really cool games and products that just. That I just have to make, so I’d make them, even if there was no battle systems, I’d make them for myself. The difference here is this, that I’m getting to share them and there’s a business, and if it’s a business, it allows myself and others to just sit and do this. All, All day, full of energy as a job instead of just as a hobby. So the plan is to carry on doing that. Then the business obviously needs to underpin that and support that. So we’ll continue with Core Space’cause that is just amazing. I love it. It’s, I’m all sci-fi. So that will continue as a driving product and then maladum in the same universe will continue. So lemme give lemme make it a little bit more businessy. So we’ve got core space, that’s our product. We, so we’ll have a box game which is like a starter set. Starter set’s almost the wrong word because it’s, it has everything you need. So you’ll have all the scenery, an entire battle station, a whole load of crew, whole load of enemies. You could, a lot of people buy core space and never need anything else, and they’ll just play it, because it’s absolutely rammed with components, it’s a huge box and then we have expansions for that. So from a retail point of view we can have these releases and, so we’ll have a big core box game, which, 80 quid, something like that. 80 pounds. And then we’ll have 3 35 pound expansions that, you know, that, that feed into the game, which is really cool. And then we’ve got some smaller products, some 20 pound products you sell mountain bikes or push bikes or whatever, you don’t make a lot of money on the bike you make money on the lights and the helmets and stuff. These are really high, 20 times plus return things, whereas the bike you are lucky if you make, you won’t make, you, might, wont, won’t make two times on a bike. Oh, certainly not. When I when I was in a business that was doing bike stuff not much. So it’s the same sort of thing that, especially from a Kickstarter point of view, Kickstarter. And maybe you can tell me, but certainly in the games industry, it’s all about the stretch goals. And that might not be in the tech industry and in the albums or, and all the other things but certainly in the games stretch goals is the big thing. And so you give a hell of a lot of, so if you’ve got a core game you sell at retail, a box game, you might want seven times return on. That sounds amazing. It’s oh wow. Seven times return. Yeah. Yeah. That means that by the time you sell it into retail, dah, if we sell it at the lowest possible price, the big biggest retailer, we might make, 10 to 12 pounds per game profit. If we send it on a website, great. We’re gonna make, 45 pounds or whatever, 35 pounds. Even though the, we’ve got seven times return on the game. The actual by the time you factored in the shipping dah, dah, dah, you know, from a business point of view, everything goes in it’s a lot smaller. And so expansion, so we make more money on, so we might get 10 times return on those. So for Core Space we have this range. No difference. We have the same, so for core space, we start with original core space, plus all the expansions. And then we brought another product out, which we didn’t put to Kickstarter. A smaller product which did very well for us, which was a book and a couple of sets of miniatures. And so else I can’t remember. And we put that out and we do that. That’s really cool. And then we follow up with an another game Core Space that doesn’t. Take away from the first game. It’s not oh, this now replaces this. We can’t use, it’s just a new location for this system. So if you’ve got the original game, you can still buy this, you can combine it together, you can. And so this and the other important thing with Core Space come to with Core Space is that you need to constantly support the product. So we’re constantly putting out new missions for. And just get involved in the community. So this is what we’re doing in core space. Maladum will be the same process. It will be the game. The all the stretch goals that we gave on the Kickstarter we were, are set so that as we hit these stretch goals the supporters, the backers are actually helping us fund these, not just the game, but these new products. So as we give them stretch goals, we giving them in an order that we’ve. Off the top of my head. Once these six stretch goals are hit, it’s great. This now creates this new product, which will help push the business forward. And then as we might work through the next six goals, we’re trying to fund the tooling for the mini, which is really expensive. And it’s but now we’ve got this new product. So by the time we get to the end of the Kickstarter, like core space it’ll be Maladum Core set, maybe three expansions, some other box things extra. We need to support Maladum and push that so for the next 5 to 10 years, we will have these two games evolving, being supported new additions, not replacements, but new additions for Maladum as that comes out. And just keep people playing the game. There are often. Of two ways to do a board game. You have a board game where, which is very simple, quick buy in. It’s just a game and sometimes these make a hell of money. And then that’s it. Nothing else is released for it. It just makes all its money on Kickstarter. Then they go into a print afterwards. They, if they’re lucky, they’ll get a second print, which will be half the size, and then by the time it gets to a print that’s only 25 they they might need then a third print, which won’t get printed because, now they haven’t got the volume because it’s done. There’s no support, there’s no, there’s still YouTube videos for it and so on, but. Makes less money on Kickstarter, but then because we’re constantly supporting it, we’re on our can’t remember seventh or eighth print run now, which is really unusual for a board game. Okay. So we’re not really a board game. We’re halfway between a board game and skirmish game, but because we’re constantly supporting it, so instead of getting all the money on Kickstarter and then the product goes quickly, we get. Less money on Kickstarter. Generally, Maladum seems to be a little bit different. But we are constantly selling and reprinting and in fact, our second one, we was like, no, we’re we watched the retail trends. This is gonna die. All the games. Not die, but all the games, you get this half thing. We’re like so we ordered again and we kept, and then eventually we’re like, we’re just gonna have to order big. So we make our money over five years. What a Kickstarter might do in one, so Core Space I think did 195,000. But if you compare it to a game that might have done. Seven or 800,000 or 900,000, we’ll, we get that on Core Space, but we’ve done it over five years because the products keep, we happen to keep reprinting it all the time. So not sure what I prefer. I think that’s nicer. Little bit more stable. Yeah.

George: 29:33

requires more long-term vision.

Colin: 29:36

Yeah, a hundred percent. Yeah. Yeah. And just more support and stuff like that. But maybe that’s good for a small crew, Of us.’cause we’ve got time to produce new products and stuff.

George: 29:45

and also it, that only works if you really love what you’re doing and you would probably otherwise do it anyways.

Colin: 29:51

Hundred percent. Yeah, Core Space is an example. And Maladum is a. Very similar. It’s built on the same mechanics and rules as core space because core space is successful. There’s a lot of things in core space that I could have not done, but I wanted to because I don’t care because it’s my game. I want it to be this way. I could have saved, normally what happens is you create a game. It’s like, how can we, the first thing is like, how can we get the cost as low as possible? You make the cardboard thin or we do this or let’s get rid of the dashboards that hold the characters things. Because most games don’t have that. We don’t, and I’m the opposite. I’m just like, no, I want dashboards. I want this, I want that. I want the dice to be this. And I was like, we can track this on pen and paper. No, I want individual plastic pegs on everything you. So I’m just, I do care, but I could have made core space. A 10 times return product, but I think it’s probably closer to six because I want it to be premium. I want a near neoprene mat in there, not a paper mat. I want plastic dashboards. I want certain dice. I want the miniatures to not be one cast, where it’s just like every pose is just like this, so it can be pushed once and posed. A lot of my miniatures are doing this, and which means you have to cast the arms and everything separate and have them assembled, and that uses up more mold space. But I don’t care because I want the miniatures to look cool. Yeah. I wanna carry on making those core games and those core miniatures. As long as it’s still profitable to hell with the margin to a certain extent.

George: 31:14

I love it. I think that’s a great note to end on to hell with the margin. As long as it’s cool. If people want to get your amazing, cool products, They should probably go to your website, right? That’s where you at least make a little bit of margin still.

Colin: 31:29

Yeah, it, yeah, I always feel this way, but my business partner who’s probably just bang, he was listening, banging his head, head up against the wall with the whole kind of, to hell with the margin. It’s just what whatcha talking about? But it is the case. Yeah he always says, it doesn’t matter where you buy from. If you buy from a retailer, that’s great.’cause then we get more retailer orders. They’re buying from us anyway. But yeah, in an ideal world, you can go straight to battlesystems.co.uk. We’ve got this amazing website that we put together. I don’t know, it feels like eight months ago. So it’s three years ago. Paid a lot of money for it. So you can totally buy from us there and we’ll ship all over the world. No problem at all.

George: 32:07

All so battlesystems.co.uk. It’s also going to be linked in the show notes. Also Maladum late pledges I believe are still open. So those will

Colin: 32:17

If you Yeah, if you, yeah, and if you can’t find, email us. We’ll get you in. Don’t worry,

George: 32:21

Okay. Alright. See that’s great. Connections. So we will have that email Maladum linked in the show notes and battlesystems.co.uk. Beautiful new website. Colin, thank you so much for sharing your journey. It’s been an absolute pleasure and yeah, continue to make awesome things with with low margins.

Colin: 32:42

Thanks for having me on. I like to talk about all the things that we create. Yeah, message me.

George: 32:47

you. Thank you. Appreciate it.