From Waiting Tables to Tabletop Millions w/ Tiny Epic's Michael Coe

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 to an actual product and everything in between. Today’s guest is Michael Coe, founder of Gamelyn Games. They have raised over 11 million dollars across 27 crowdfunding campaigns with the Tiny Epic series being the most well-known franchise of Gamelyn. Michael, welcome.

Michael: 0:26
Hi, thanks for having me on the show.

George: 0:28
Absolutely. Before we dive into crowdfunding, you’ve been doing this over 10 years. I want to go even deeper into your history. I noticed you have an IMDb page where you are listed as a”future alcoholic” on one of the shows. Were you an actor in the past?

Michael: 0:46
Yeah, I was I grew up acting in school and then parlayed that into some professional acting. And I’m super glad that that”future alcoholic” role wasn’t like a prediction of my actual life. So I’m really glad I was able to separate and not go down like the method acting path.

George: 1:03
Good. Okay. For the record, that was fiction. You were not actually an alcoholic.

Michael: 1:08
That was an exciting time in life. And I was able to, do a couple of shows on the WV with Everwood and a feature film. And that was pretty cool.

George: 1:16
That is awesome. What did your life look like 10 years ago around the time you started your first Kickstarter?

Michael: 1:23
So wow. So at that time I was working at a restaurant so was my wife. She was pregnant with our first child and yeah, we were both servers. I was working at Outback. She was working at Olive Garden. I was doing some bartending and starting to get into front of the house management, there was starting to go down the path of training for front of the house management. And it was really interesting. We didn’t have insurance between the two of us and we made just like a single dollar more than what would allow us to qualify for the state insurance So we were in a kind of in a rough spot not exactly sure how we were gonna handle the delivery of our first child and of course, all the stuff that comes after that. And the restaurant offered me this front of the house management position, which would come with insurance, of course, which would then answer a lot of those concerns that we had. And so I went to my wife and she knew I had been working on some board game designs. And we talked about it and we’re like do I take the management job so that we can have insurance and take care of this baby and do this right or do I throw a game up on Kickstarter and see what happens and hopefully the management position will still be open, if this doesn’t pan out, right? And she’s like you gotta do you, you gotta feel, go with what you feel, go with what in your is in your heart and I’ll support you no matter what you do”, right? She’s never been a wet blanket. And that just gave me tremendous courage. And so I started kickstarting and never looked back.

George: 2:58
That is incredible. So you went from waiting tables to doing over 11 million dollars in revenue on Kickstarter alone. I’m guessing there’s a lot more that’s outside of Kickstarter. So how did you even know where to start at the time? You had an idea for a game, you knew you wanted to kickstart it. What happened next?

Michael: 3:17
Yeah. I just started dabbling with game design concepts. I grew up playing Dungeons Dragons as a kid and into my teens, so I was just familiar with creating just in general in a game space. And I also grew up just an avid video gamer so it was all always part of my language of life. so I had a couple of designs. I was actually in a Dell training class and I just bring this up because it’s anecdotal, but funny, but somebody in the class mentioned that their brother had designed a game and had pitched it to Hasbro and it didn’t end up working out, but I’m sitting there thinking I’ve got a couple of game designs that I’ve been working on I guess this is actually a thing, like people still I wasn’t sure how that all worked. I didn’t know if they just did all their stuff internally Or if they would take pitches, and so it just got my mind going in that direction, right? So then I just started Googling just, how to get a game made and, how to set up a pitch for a game, right? And then through that process, I stumbled across BoardGameGeek. com Kickstarter at that time. It was really quite new still. My first Kickstarter actually dates back to 2012. And or even the end of 2011. So by this time, Kickstarter, really, the board game space was not huge like it is now. I think at that time, the game that had grossed the most amount of money had only grossed like 30 some odd thousand, right? But it was a way that people could get a game made. I just learned up and studied up on what Kickstarter was and how to market myself through boardgamegeek. com. And just started following that path, right? One baby step at a time.

George: 4:55
So that first campaign raised close to$13,000… I’m assuming that wasn’t enough to quit your job right there and then, was it?

Michael: 5:05
No, so what happened is, our very first campaign and I didn’t actually do all the math correct for that campaign, so the funding goal… was not set appropriately to cover all the expenses. Being my first time, I was definitely cutting my teeth on it. My wife and I had worked really hard to pay off a little car that she had, a little Chevy. And so we actually went to our bank and took another loan back out on that car in order to get a few more thousand dollars to finish paying for the production and the fulfillment of the project. So that project put us in the red. And then we, but it was a learning lesson, but yeah, no, that first one didn’t quite cover it. And we had to make some serious choices, which were quite uncomfortable considering our circumstances at the time.

George: 5:51
So then what prompted you to do the next campaign after that?

Michael: 5:55
I figured if I got the attention of a few hundred people, then, maybe they’d be interested to see something new and maybe snowball effect, right? Like just start building on and getting a few more people and hopefully preserve a majority of the previous backers, and so I was like let’s give it another shot. And then the next one did pretty good. And we just toyed around with different ideas. We ran several kind of smaller campaigns just with like trying to innovate with like meeples and other, kinds of things and a couple of games mixed in there. They all just barely allowed us to continue doing that. And I still had to work full time. I ended, I worked full time at the bar and restaurant for three and a half years before I was able to ever just go game on games full time.

George: 6:43
And you had the baby in the meantime?

Michael: 6:45
Oh, yeah. Yeah.

George: 6:47
So the first three years you’re doing these campaigns, they’re working, they’re not huge. You’re working full time, you have a small child now, but then you launch something called Tiny Epic Kingdoms and that raises almost$300,000 which is a huge jump from what you’ve been raising up to that point. So tell us about that moment that basically changed everything.

Michael: 7:11
Yeah, that really did. It was really incredible. At that time, I was getting to a point where I was like, okay, I think that I’ve proven Gamelyn Games as a concept as a publisher. That we can take concept to shelf, right? So I felt, it’s a good time to reach out and see if there’s other designers that, I would find interested, to work with and would be interested to work with me. So I put something out on Twitter and a gentleman by the name of Scott Almes, who is very well known in the gaming industry as a prolific game designer and the game designer of the Tiny Epic series. He reached out to me with a little game called Tiny Epic Planets. And it was just a tiny little game that I could print off, on the computer, and it was really basic, it wasn’t gonna take a lot to put together. And I had known his name from a previous game that he had designed Kings of Air and Steam, which was similar to an airship game that I had designed myself, and so I’d already known him a little bit through that. Just having compared our two titles. So I was really pretty interested to see what he had here. And I printed it out. I played it with my wife that night. And we were both just okay, this is super cool. It’s exactly what we’re looking for, which is a small box game that provides a rich experience, and it doesn’t overstay its welcome, right? Because having grown up a video gamer, but not a software developer, I didn’t go into making video games, right? Instead, the gaming part of me, came out through more of the analog(through board games). But I still, I wanted board games to feel like video games. I wanted them to be a little bit faster and just have a different feel than what I was getting from board games that I would play at the time. And this game, Tiny Epic Planets, just nailed it. Though I am partial to fantasy themes a little bit more than sci fi, so I went back to him that night and I said: Hey, I love your game, I would love to see this set in like a fantasy world where it’s like orcs versus humans and dwarves and elves. And so the next morning, he had already changed everything over. Got it right back to me. So he responded very quickly, which I found to be really interesting and attractive from a partner standpoint of working with a designer. So I printed it back out. We played it with the new version. I offered him a deal on the game, and we agreed to produce the game together, and from there it was really compelling how it ended up evolving into the big Kickstarter that it became and I’ll give you a quick little story about that back when I was a little bit younger and Diablo came out, I was a big Blizzard fanboy, I played a lot of Warcraft games and Diablo, and I remember Diablo had a shareware version, where your buddy would give you the CD, you have access to the first dungeon and nothing else, right? But it was enough to wet your palate. It was enough to be like, okay, I really like this game and now I need to go buy the full game, right? And so I thought about that thinking, what if we did something like that for Tiny Epic Kingdoms? Which is what the game became after it was called Tiny Epic Planets and we switched it over. Became Tiny Epic Kingdoms, and I thought it’s really easy to print out. It’s really not a lot of components. And we could offer an abridged version, like we could do the full game, but maybe not as many factions as the game would have, right? But it would be enough for people to print out and play for free. And if they like the game, then they may be interested in backing the Kickstarter. And at the time, publishers weren’t doing that. There were free print and play games available, but publishers who were preparing for a Kickstarter, were not releasing printable versions of their game prior to Kickstarter. Gamelyn Games is really pretty much the first that did that. And it made a tremendous difference. So I put it up on BoardGameGeek.com and it got a few thousand downloads before we launched the Kickstarter. And there was a lot of conversation about it and just a lot of energy surrounding the game because of that marketing method, essentially. So when we launched the Kickstarter, it was just, it really blew us away and it just totally surprised us and the project ended up doing incredibly well and then from there it was like, okay, we got something here.

George: 11:36
What was that moment when you realized you caught lightning in a bottle? Where were you? When did you realize?

Michael: 11:44
I was sitting in my apartment and my daughter was near me and my wife was just in the other room and we launched the project and I noticed it right away, cause the project jumped right out the gate doing substantially better than any of my previous projects. There’s the funding, pace, I almost fell out of my chair, and I was like, holy smokes, I called my wife over, I’m like, you gotta come see this, you gotta come and check this out, like I couldn’t even keep up with the comments, there were so many comments, and it was really a very surreal experience.

George: 12:16
So when you have a hit, you’ll know?

Michael: 12:18
Oh yeah, you just know it. You’ll know.

George: 12:20
So that was the first big breakthrough. You’ve continued your success with many more campaigns in the Tiny Epic series and others. Let’s jump back to today. What does your company, Gamelyn Games, look like today, 10 years? After you started doing this?

Michael: 12:39
Well we remained a small company and we almost exclusively publish Tiny Epic, though we have branched out and published some other titles. We’ve worked with Reiner Knizia in bringing one of his previous titles back to market. We’ve also recently published the board game for The Last Kingdom, the Netflix show. And we’re a company of, essentially, my wife and I plus three employees. And two of them are old high school friends that I’ve known for over 20 years. As the company started to grow… I needed to get some extra help with different aspects of the business. And so I went back to people I trusted, have known for a long time. I knew they had the skillsets I was looking for and smarter than me in their respective ways. And so I brought them on the team. And I’ve just kept it really small like that. We’ve just got an office now outside the home. So I kind of work from there or work from home depending. And yeah, pretty much every day for us is heads down, developing a new Tiny Epic game or two, and trying to find ways to continue to be innovative and impress our customer base, and try to take small box gaming to the next level. That’s essentially the niche. That we’ve carved out for ourselves and we have a nice spot in that niche now of making compact games that people can throw in a backpack or a large pocket and that the game is going to offer a rich, strategy experience, right?

George: 14:18
We’re going to get to your latest game in a minute. Everyone has insurance in the company now as well?

Michael: 14:25
So not only does everybody have insurance, but Gamelyn pays 100 percent of the insurance premiums for everybody too. I take good care of the peeps who take care of me. Absolutely. Great. Great.

George: 14:37
If you don’t mind, before we get into the new game, your current business… you’re still doing crowdfunding. You’re still doing it on a regular basis, but I assume you also have revenue outside of crowdfunding selling on your website. Talk to us about what your business looks like today in terms of where does your revenue come from? Is it coming from distributors more, direct to consumer? What does that look like?

Michael: 15:01
Sure. Yeah, our games are in over 90 countries. We’re pretty much in every mom and pop shop for hobby game stores across the United States and in many other countries. We are also in mass distribution with Barnes Noble for several of our titles. We have a good presence on Amazon and of course our own website that drives direct sales. And we also sell directly to stores where we have a direct way that they can input orders through our website for distribution orders. So we have a connection in each of the different chains, right? We’ve got that direction to the store themselves also through a distributor and then through other partners that work internationally and our games are translated into multiple languages and sold localized with publishing partners all over the world as well.

George: 15:53
Wow, that’s amazing. I have some questions for you about crowdfunding specifically because you are an expert, 27 campaigns and counting, more than 11 million… so, you know, a thing or two about this. I noticed that some of the campaigns you’ve done are like seven days in duration, some of them are 21, some of them are 31, what’s the difference? Does it matter? And, or what is the optimal duration for a campaign?

Michael: 16:17
Sure, I would say that it’s going to depend on how much marketing you’ve been able to put into the game before launching it. And how well that marketing has gained traction. Now Kickstarter has the preview page where people can follow the project to get notified when the project launches. That’s very helpful. It’s a great way to indicate and show you how your marketing has done so far, which they didn’t have in the past. But that’s going to play into how long you need to run your campaign. If you’ve been very effective at marketing, I would say the ideal project length is probably 17 to 22 days. I think 30 day projects are a thing of the past and I think, unless you’re, new, right? If this is some of your first projects, I think getting that extra week or so, week and a half, is gonna be helpful. I think there’s still a place for these 28 or 30 day projects. Particularly for new project creators, certainly not like 60 days. I know back in the day, some projects run 60 days, but part of it is that when you run a Kickstarter and the way that I see it, and maybe this is because of my acting background, is that you’re on stage, right? It’s like the curtains are open, and now you’re on stage and you really should be involved in the comments every day… and communicating and interacting with your backer community. That’s part of the Kickstarter experience. Even just in general, the crowdfunding experience. And I think that’s what they come to expect from you as a project creator is that level of interaction. And, there’s only so much sometimes that there is to even discuss or interact about when it comes to any project so I found that the kind of the more brief campaigns are nice because as particularly for the Tiny Epic series… at this point, we have a good healthy customer base. We know that the game is going to fund for a certain amount that would cover pretty much all the stretch goals, right? That we could think of to put in the game because one thing is that we don’t want to have stretch goals that just pop out of nowhere, because then it’s going to change the entire plan for fulfilling the game and making sure that we can have an on time delivery. A lot of ideas where backers get to contribute, they’re extremely fun, but it definitely is going to mean that there’s going to be development time and other things that are going to push back that delivery date. And I’ve tried to refine that process so that when I tell backers, hey, look, you’re going to get your game in nine months… they get their game in nine months. And we have a tremendous track record for delivering our projects on time. Part of that has been removing stretch goals from the projects for the most part. Again, just to make sure that I have a fully ready-to-go thing before I crowdfund it. And then when we received the funds and we know that the audience is there for it, we can just get a printing right away. And get the game out as quick as possible and have a very smooth experience for everybody.

George: 19:18
Yeah. So rather than overselling on all these extra things to draw people in, you’re basically taking a longterm approach where you’re under promising, over delivering. And by just having a consistently great experience with the timelines and everything, people will just come back for more. And you’re not relying on gimmicks.

Michael: 19:38
Yeah, that’s exactly right. And that’s the thing, is it starts to feel a little insincere when your project’s at$400,000$500,000, and you’re like, okay if I get another$50,000, I’ll give you five more cards, right? It’s just, it seems a little insincere. But at the same time if you give me$10,000 if the project raises another$10,000 I’ll give you five cards. Then what? By the end of the game, am I giving you 2,000 cards and just try to fit it in a small box, right? There’s got to be a cap somewhere and you need to know your game and you need to not over bloat your game, right, at the same time. So our projects launch with all of the premium components that would have otherwise been stretch goals already included in the offering right out the gate instead of making them stretch goals.

George: 20:22
I like that you’re saying this. I know a lot of people swear by stretch goals. I personally hate it. And when I’m advising creators, I advise against it because what I hate about it also from a backer perspective is that any one person cannot influence the campaign getting another$50,000 in funding, right? So it just seems like it’s either going to happen or not, but there’s nothing people can do. To get you there, necessarily, so yeah I love that you said that stretch goals. Let it be known for the record. I fully agree with you. All right. Thank you.

Michael: 20:52
No, thank you. Cause I get mixed opinions, but I’m pretty sure this is the cleanest and best way to do it.

George: 21:00
I wholeheartedly agree with you. I think the cleaner your campaign is, it is just easier for backers to understand and it’s easier for you to fulfill. And at the end of the day, I agree. I think, like you, that execution and excellence and execution delivery is the best marketing material. You mentioned the Kickstarter prelaunch page briefly, I am looking at one right now with your latest project. Please tell us all about what these 7,838 followers are currently signed up for.

Michael: 21:33
Oh, they’re excited for our newest entry in the Tiny Epic series called Tiny Epicic Cthulhu. So this is… This has been something that has been high on our request list for many years actually, so we’ll periodically put out surveys to our customer base saying hey, what would you like to see next in a Tiny Epic game? And in the Cthulhu Lovecraftian theme has ranked quite high on those charts for a few years now and, you know, we finally got to the table, we do a retreat each year, just our small team with Scott Almes and our regular graphic designer, Ben Shulman, and we brainstorm, where we’re going to go with the series, and came up Tiny Epic Cthulhu. We had some really neat ideas, it’s a cooperative game. Players are taking on the roles of characters very familiar to the Lovecraftian theme: like an investigator, a scientist, a doctor, a priest, right? They’re in this old sleepy town that has been overrun by the horrors of Cthulhu and other great old ones. And it’s upon the characters to work together to figure out how to… kind of unveil the Great Old One translate the Necronomicon, and seal the portals to stop the world from being destroyed, right? That’s the thematic premise of it. And, we’re actually using a really cool spinner in the game as a form to create… just random chaos, right? Which really captures the Cthulhu theme in just how chaotic it is. And the spinner is neat because it provides like four inputs or triggers four different things, right? It’s the front of the spinner, the direction that it’s pointing, also the effect that it’s pointing to on the spinner board, and then also the back of the spinner is obviously pointing somewhere and there’s also information on the spinner there. And so all four of those pieces of information get worked into the game, every spin. And every player is spinning every turn, right? And so there’s four chaotic things happening every turn. And the players have to figure out how to work together to survive all the moving parts of the game and all that chaos.

George: 23:42
When is this launching?

Michael: 23:44
So we’re launching December 5th.

George: 23:46
Okay, and when are you shipping?

Michael: 23:48
So the project will likely be shipping in August or September, probably September of next year is when we’ll expect to deliver to backers.

George: 23:57
I ask that because I, there’s a lot of conflicting thoughts always about launching in December. What are your thoughts on that?

Michael: 24:04
So I’ve seen some really big projects fund quite successfully in the month of December. Generally though I do like to avoid December. But Valentine’s is expensive and so maybe you should avoid February and shoot, there’s expensive holidays all year long, there’s a lot of things going on and so at the end of the day, I think that if you’re a new project creator, you probably need to pay a little bit more attention to things like that but with the experience that we have and the customer base that we have, I believe that something like launching in December and plus our product is at a really affordable price, right? I would not launch a gigantic game in the heart of December. Now, I am actually launching a gigantic game, but it’s going to be at the end of November. So it’s funny that I’m here double speaking, but, the Tiny Epic line, it’s got a$25$30 entry for just the base game, right? So it’s really affordable. So I don’t think that it’s really going to compete. With people’s holiday spendings necessarily.

George: 25:07
We will post a link to that in the description don’t miss out because this is going to be a good one. Will this be the first one where you have some kind of a spinner or that kind of mechanical component to it?

Michael: 25:18
Yeah, so this is the first Tiny Epic game that’ll implement a spinner. Yeah, we always try to have something neat and innovative in each of our games and we’re excited about the spinner. It’s really been a lot of fun in our play tests.

George: 25:31
To wrap things up, what is the one secret to success in crowdfunding that you wish you knew 10 years ago?

Michael: 25:39
Oh, that’s a great question. I wish you had let me know that question was going to land on me. I would have thought of a really good answer for you. I would say that when it comes to crowdfunding… you must get the word out there before you launch the project. I understand, yes, there is a lot of marketing that’s built into the project being live, and that’s an incredible value that you get from crowdfunding, but you have to market the campaign and find your audience before you launch your project. Otherwise, you’re going to be staring at the screen, and it’s going to be crickets, and it’s going to be really quite painful. It’s a tough experience when the project goes really just quiet, right? And build that audience first. Go to conventions, get on BoardGameGeek, find the Facebook groups, share the game, get it out there. Don’t be afraid of other publishers stealing your game. They have so many other ideas of their own it’s actually getting the game itself is like the least expensive and time consuming part of the publishing process, right? Like they, they don’t need to just grab a quick game. So don’t be afraid to get your game out there, show it to people, play it with people and do that as much as you possibly can. Before launching your project. Awesome!

George: 26:59
Michael, thank you so much. Links to everything: the upcoming campaign, your website, it will all be linked in the show notes. If you’re listening, go to your podcast app and check it out in the description. Best of luck on your upcoming launch. And thank you so much for sharing your words of wisdom with us today.

Michael: 27:17
Hey, thank you again for having me on the show. It’s been a lot of fun, George, and have a great day.

George: 27:21
Thank you.