In a world not to dissimilar to your own, I’ve worked to organise a new start-up company, that had engineered their own product range, from logistics, to websites, to customer acquisition.

In this world I’ve been in, Amazon reigns supreme as their marketplace to sell your goods and wares.

Amazon charges 15% revenue fee, 15% shipping fee and costs another 15% per product to market on their platform.

That’s nearly a 50% revenue share right there. It usually costs a lot more because a product without reviews on Amazon is like a naked baby in the wilderness. The only thing that can save it is by throwing all your margin away.

On Amazon it is really difficult to earn after taxes, 20% at the end of the day. Most of the people on Amazon are break-even to 10% profit margins and it’s because the middle man chokes the system.

Don’t get me wrong, the process costs. But when Amazon can’t deliver the sales performing the right methodology, with a great product, selling at cut-throat prices, it nearly seems like it isn’t worth it.

I have a keen interest in the gaming space and I have identified that I'm not I'm not alone in this struggle. Indie game developers are also subject to a similar circumstance with the major game retailing marketplace.

The tangibles you're looking for is more sales and the intangibles is a receptive audience that love your games.

I sold (and continue selling) pegboard shelves. The way your problem expressed itself in my life was when I needed to find an audience who was going to love the product I had to offer.

To do this, I needed to bring a custom solution that was adiquatlely able to describe and sell to my core audience. 

I went through the painful process of finding and project managing a small remote dev team to build me a custom website and to execute the best scientific method (know as direct marketing) of advertising with a full customer journey tracking. 

I spent 6 months on a "3-month project" absolutely perfecting everything making sure it was up to scratch.

We devised our Facebook ads after a long consideration of our audience and what they look for in a product.

What we achieved was:

- I write this live. It is Friday morning at 2:30 am on the nose and I have FINALLY brought the website online. Morspace.store is a fully custom website theme that twice as long as it should have only because I was so new to stepping up as project manager because we needed these assets.

- I am operating the single segment facebook green light test right now. Already got 3 of 8 green lights. Only a matter of time now.

What tomorrow has in store for me is to replace a customer image on the website and request a review from the 3 customers who bought Morspace. Then, we look to send our ads to the moon. The double edged sword is that the business math looks a lot easier when you have more expensive items, but you really dread both not selling the product and also overselling the product, because then it take 4 months before new stock comes in. And that delay to the marketing makes things hard because you're always changing momentum.

Being the first person to go through the funnel and be the first person to pay for it out of my own account. I was so relieved that every

I have tested the payment gateways before for my own sake. But once I got the website up and live, I knew I had to be the first person to crisen the website by going through the full funnel be the first website paying customer. This was something special. Quick it was, but the sense of achievement getting it up boiled to late into the night.

More notes for tomorrow.

22nd Jan 2021

It is a midsummers sunny afternoon. The website is up.

Review emails have been sent out, post-purchase and email subscriber funnels have been set into place.
Just waiting for the final 3 of 8 green lights to come through on our single segment test for our Facebook ads.

Next steps - *After all green lights
- Resize and upload product images

- Launch our custom paid advertising system.

Now, I believe this type of journey is possible for indie game developers through a very similar method as the one I have proven that works.

I believe I am the one capable of making the transition from relying on marketplaces to selling direct-to-consumer as I have done it with my pegboard shelving client.

Selling games directly to your consumer brings on a new set of problems that I see a way of working through to make the same transformation.

But, the caveat is that there isn’t a clean-cut process for indie game developers to follow, so I’m looking to build one.