AskPat 628 Episode Transcript

Pat Flynn: Hey, what's up everybody? Pat Flynn here, and welcome to Episode 628. Thank you so much for being here, this is AskPat. This is where I answer your online business questions, five days a week. We have a great question today from Andrew Miller, but before we get to his question, I do want to thank today's sponsor, which I FreshBooks.

FreshBooks is an awesome company, they made cloud accounting super simple, and it's a tool that I use, three million other small businesses use, and as soon as you try it, you'll realize how much time you would save. I think more than anything, yes, it organizes your finances, yes, it helps you get rid of the headaches, but more than all that, it's easy to use and because of that, it saves you time with your day-to-day paperwork and all your expenses and all that stuff. It auto tracks your expenses, which is cool, and the invoicing part of it is probably the best part. If you have any students or clients, where you do any consultations, you can create and set perfectly crafted invoices, literally takes less than 30 seconds. Your clients pay you online, which can really improve how quickly you get paid too, so if you want to take this offer, 30 days for free, just go to freshbooks.com/askpat, and enter “Ask Pat” in the “How did you hear about us” section. Again, that's freshbooks.com/askpat.

Alright, now here's today's question from Andrew.

Andrew: Hey Pat, it's Andrew from andhegames.com. A while back, I Kickstarted a creative game book called The Cloud Dungeon, and it went really well. It was a great Kickstarter campaign, sold lots of books, and lots of ancillary products. I've set up a store, but I'm struggling with creating content for my audience. Most game companies just write about either nothing, or game design and Kickstarter, which does not fit my audience at all, who are mostly parents who play games with their kids. I've created some free games and printables, but those tend to take a while to make, and I'm not really sure what other content I could create. Any ideas would be really helpful, thank you.

Pat Flynn: Hey Andrew, thank you so much for question, I appreciate it. I checked out your game at andhegames.com, that's A-N-D-H-Egames.com. It looks awesome, and I think it's really creative, and I love the video that you did, great story at the beginning, there. I recommend everybody check it out. In terms of content creation in and around this game, now I know you're right, a lot of other gamers, or people who create board games and things like that, they talk about Kickstarter in their content. They talk about the creation of the game, those are all things I think you should also include. I think the behind-the-scenes of those kinds of stuff, is really, really, interesting.

One thing I would like to see from you, or from other people who are creating games where people participate, is stories of people who are customers. Sharing success stories, sharing the fun that your customers have actually playing the game because, when people see, people who aren't playing the game, or even people who have the game already, when they see others playing it, they want to go and play it too, kind of activates our mirror neurons in our brain, which when we see somebody doing something, it gives us the same feelings they do. Take this story that you have, for example, of this person who took this game to his daughter, who was sick, and get his story on a video, get it on a podcast, just get it on blog post and transcribe it, or whatever, and share that story.

Those types of things, of people in real life actually using the game, playing games, maybe even creating their own stuff in and around the game. That stuff goes miles long and that gets to the heart. People feel for that, they can see it and they want to play too, and that features your customers and when your customers see that you're featuring them, they're going to want to share that with their friends and family. People who aren't customers are going to feel like, “Oh, that could be me,” and they're going to want to get it too.

Beyond all the just, behind-the-scenes stuff, in terms of technically how it's put together, and all that stuff, that's all really cool sharing the factory and how it's made or . . . all that stuff is really, really, interesting, and I highly recommend everybody do that's where the inside factory tour. You want to also share people using the game, so maybe there's a way you could go out to everybody who purchased it on Kickstarter, or all of your customers now, and just ask for stories. Ask for stories of how its changed their lives, or how people have enjoyed it when . . . Even get, looks like everybody can create their own unique characters or create their own drawings, I mean, feature some of those things on your blog, or on your show, or on your website, because people want to see how people are using this game because it's so creative people can end up doing whatever they want on it. It seems pretty awesome to share some of those things so people can get inspirations, some ideas from the users.

In essence, I like how you crowdfunded and Kickstarted this campaign of yours. It got this successful and into people's hands. You couldn't crowdsource your content in the same way. Andrew, that's what I would do, that by far would work out better than anything else, and then maybe you could start to develop some more games into the future and talk about the process of that and make sure you get your audience and customers involved with that too. I think you have a great opportunity here to create games similar to this one and really expand this empire here that you have at AndHeGames.

Congratulations, great job, and I look forward to seeing how this works out for you. I want to send you and AskPat t-shirt for having your question featured on the show, like I do everybody whose question gets featured, so you're going to hear from my assistant, Jessica in the next couple weeks, so we can collect your information. We'll send that to you free of charge. I also want to thank everybody else out there who's asking questions. Keep up the great work and keep asking questions. This show wouldn't exist without them.

And I also want to thank FreshBooks, once again if you want to try out FreshBooks, for 30 days for free, go to FreshBooks.com/askpat, and make sure you enter “Ask Pat” in the, “How did you hear about us” section. Again, that's freshbooks.com/askpat, and make sure you enter “Ask Pat.”

Thank you so much, I appreciate you and here's a quote to finish off the day by John Lasker, one of my favorite people over at Kickstarter, he says, “Quality is the best business plan.”

Boom. Cheers, take care, and I'll see you tomorrow. Bye.