What I learned building 2 viral card games
In 2016 while Donald Trump cannibalized the airways, I decided to take a different approach to politics. I did it with a card game that could finally bring both sides of the aisle together. Over a long weekend in Washington, D.C., I designed and launched the 2016 Election Game, a game like Cards Against Humanity for the 2016 US Presidential Elections. In the following six months, we sold 5,000+ units of the game, went viral multiple times, and learned how to build a manufacturing and distribution supply chain.
Four years later, at the peak of the global pandemic, lightning struck again. Over another long weekend in the peak of the lockdown, I created Done With 2020, a game like Cards Against Humanity for the absurdity of 2020. Using the same manufacturing, distribution, and media contacts, we sold 34,000 units to quarantined people around the world. The game was listed as one of the top e-commerce brands of the year and capitalized on a growing hashtag on Twitter and Instagram #DoneWith2020.
Personally, these were fun side-projects that gave me a creative outlet for my dark sense of humor. That being said, building two viral card games surprisingly taught me a lot about product dynamics which we now apply to our investments at Jaggi.
I saw first hand how two products achieved true product-market-fit: the growth of sales outpaced our ability to deliver supply and we were emotionally overwhelmed (i.e. a good problem to have when running a business). Although it was admittedly dumb luck, I’m a believer that great products can be reverse engineered.
Here’s what I learned about product dynamics building two viral card games:
- The power of product-led growth.
- The importance of a clear conversion strategy.
- Transactional revenue is hard.
The power of product-led growth
Build a product that sells on its own.
For both card games, I noticed that as more customers played the game, more customers we got. Without being aware of it at the time, we had built product-led growth into the game: for each customer who purchased the game there would be 5 to 7 additional people playing it. This drove up awareness of the product and led to an increase in sales over time without additional cost or effort.
Sticking to the gaming theme, products can be inherently singleplayer, multiplayer, or both. A toothbrush is an example of a singleplayer product where you typically do not share it with others. The card games are examples of multiplayer products. Figma, the design platform, is an example of a product that is both: one person can get utility out of using it but they can also collaborate with others to receive even more value.
Now, building a successful product doesn’t require any sort of product-led growth. My philosophy is that running a business is fundamentally hard. Everything you can possibly imagine going wrong does wrong. Having a product that sells itself, in the grand scheme of things, makes things a little easier.
The importance of a clear conversion strategy
All efforts must be directed towards a single and measurable conversion.
For the 2016 Election game, the call-to-action was clear, straightforward and blunt: “Order Now”. The website featured a single page with the sole purpose of directing the customer to purchase it right then and there. The next big challenge became figuring out the conversation rate with early customer data. After the first $2,000 in orders, we realized that the website had a 2% conversion rate. This meant that for every 1,000 people that visited the site, we made about $500. When running ads on social media, we could not spend more than $500 on a cost-per-click campaign that would reach 1,000 people. Understanding the conversion rate helped us ideate the right marketing engine and run profitable campaigns.
This exercise taught me the importance of having a clear and simple call-to-action. Most websites have competing call-to-actions which defeats the purpose of increasing top of funnel leads. If someone is on your website, they must have a clear and direct way of purchasing your product. If they don’t, you are doing something wrong. After you have a sense of the conversion rate, you can build a profitable marketing plan. This seems obvious in theory but tough to stay grounded in execution.
Transactional revenue is hard
Build a product that solves a recurring problem because it’s nearly impossible to predict transactional revenue.
One morning in 2016, I woke up to about $12,000 in sales of the card game. We ended the day with about $20,000 in sales, by far the best day of revenue. I was excited and thought this would continue forever. It didn’t. We did $8,000 in sales the next day and the amounts slowly tapered off over the next few weeks until we got another wave of orders through product-led growth.
In 2020 after launching the new game, I had a list of 5,000 customers of the 2016 Election Game. I naively thought that if they had bought a game from me once that they would buy from me again. I sent all 5,000 customers an email promoting the new game and only two people from that list bought the game. That’s a conversion rate of 0.04%.
This showed me why transactional revenue is so hard: just because you solve a customer’s need one month, doesn’t mean they’ll have the same need another month let alone years later. If you can tap into a recurring pain point instead, you can build a recurring revenue stream and more predictable cash flow.
Although this seems obvious to us now, at the time we wanted to capitalize on the current events of 2016 and 2020. We were excited by the spikes in revenue but didn’t account for the lack of recurring revenue. In psychology this is known as “hot hand fallacy”, the belief that a successful streak is likely to lead to further success. I’ve come to the conclusion that having consistency is more important than a “hot hand”. The ability to predict the future with some level of certainty is key when running a business.
Conclusion
There was no way for me to predict that I would become a part-time game creator. Like with any of my ventures, I try to use them as an opportunity to learn. The card games taught me that my dark sense of humor can me monetized and ultimately taught me a lot about product dynamics that we apply now at Jaggi.
