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Making a Physical Product

b.jonw.com

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Re: Making a Physical Product

#111

Post by roel_v »

nnq wrote: post #62

> I spent a few hours hacking together a little rails app which would play out 100,000 rolls in a few seconds and tell me the chances of everything coming up. Can't people do the math anymore, they have to simulate everything?! And they have to do it with a mtf web framework?! A spreadsheet and some pen and paper to figure out the formulas would've sufficed...

And yet here he is, selling an actual product to actual customers, and you're sitting at your desk with your presumed 'advanced math knowledge' bitching about others not knowing how to do math...

Re: Making a Physical Product

#112

Post by DividesByZero »

padraigm wrote: post #91
DividesByZero wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's true, but I'm sure it would have helped while the author was trying to balance the game out to better understand the sources of particular imbalances, rather than having to guess-and-iterate on them.

The guess-and-iterate method would still be more efficient than trying to work through a stats textbook if the author is not educated in mathematics, though. Anyway, a lot of people don't enjoy learning math (crazy as that concept may seem to me, and, I guess, you) but guessing-and-iterating on a game you're excited about would always be fun.

Very fair. I guess more maths isn't always better after all.

Re: Making a Physical Product

#114

Post by adaml_623 »

brackin wrote: post #7
adaml_623 wrote: post #4

$69 for 1 yr of a .com domain? You need to shop around more. But pretty inspiring! Good looking game!

Maybe he bought it from someone else or paid for multiple years.

It was only registered for 1 year so I was pretty sure it wasn't the latter. And far too cheap to be bought from someone else. But since it was an expiring domain I guess it was money well spent.

Re: Making a Physical Product

#115

Post by damncabbage »

soggypenny wrote: post #94
krschultz wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have a landing page or someplace to signup for more info later?

Yes, indeed! supplybetter.com is our landing page. We're always looking for feedback on our service and site, so feel free to hit us up!

HN auto-links URLs in your post (eg. http://supplybetter.com), but you need to include the http://.

(I find auto-linking lowers click friction for me, personally.)

Re: Making a Physical Product

#116

Post by dcx »

yajoe wrote: post #47

Really cool to see the numbers and congrats on making the product! One nit to emphasize the value in basic accounting knowledge for others when going down the manufacturing route: it's $11.37 _gross_ margin (aka gross profit, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_margin ), not _net_ profit ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Profit_Margin ). While this may sound silly and academic, net confers a sense of finality -- it i…

I really like this analysis as well - can I ask where the "standard advice" comes from? And if it's from an MBA, what school? I haven't seen this kind of quantified strategizing taught before; I've been winging it and would love to pick up some formal knowledge if it exists.

Re: Making a Physical Product

#117

Post by Colliwinks »

MrThousand wrote: post #51
gcheong wrote: post #20

Why make an iPhone app to keep track of planets owned when you could just make a simple paper based scorecard? Or am I missing something about the complexity of the game? An app might be useful but you want the game to be playable by the largest number of peopl possible and there could be some opportunity for recurring revenue from selling the scorecards.

I think the idea of an iOS app sounds great. Why waste paper when you can simply click "new game" on your phone?

Not everyone has an iPhone. Young children do/should not have smartphones. Paper does not require constant updates, maintenance and bugfixes. Paper is cheaper. People want to play physical games without the distraction of devices. People don't want the hassle of downloading an app before they can play a game. If the complexity of scoring requires an app, it's too complicated.

Re: Making a Physical Product

#118

Post by adam-a »

munificent wrote: post #15

"In space, noone can hear you roll! The fate of the galaxy is in your hands, as you race your friends to create (or destroy) planets. Who will be the first to 10? Only the dice know." Ouch, two errors: "noone" -> "no one" "hands, as" -> "hands as"

Harsh to call them errors. Noone is a legitimate spelling, if uncommon[1], and comma usage is basically a subjective artform, although I agree it doesn't read very well in the quoted sentence.

[1] http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/noone

Re: Making a Physical Product

#119

Post by martinced »

yajoe wrote: post #47

Really cool to see the numbers and congrats on making the product! One nit to emphasize the value in basic accounting knowledge for others when going down the manufacturing route: it's $11.37 _gross_ margin (aka gross profit, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_margin ), not _net_ profit ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Profit_Margin ). While this may sound silly and academic, net confers a sense of finality -- it i…

Excellent! The $6 / set for the first run, if he sells all his sets, is precisely what I just had computed.

(I just love the article by the way).

But I've go not idea how he arrived at $11.37 / set, can someone explain this as if I was a five years old? (but a five years old who could compute the net to be $6 in 20 seconds ; )

What I also understand is that if he prints more than the first run, then his $1500 design, $69 domain ($69 for a .com WTF !?) and $150 for coding+shopify integration do not need to be taken into account anymore. So if he sells his entire first set and make +$2000 / $6 net profit per set, then on his second set he would make about $11 / set for the second run. Is that the $11.37 !?

I take it the marginal cost is about $9 (you still need dice, papers, stickers, etc.), but you don't need design + coding + domain name anymore.

(btw I'm a dev, not an economist / accountant / whatever)

Re: Making a Physical Product

#120

Post by robomartin »

samstave wrote: post #107
bigiain wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good analysis. One comment though - if the intention is to get the game onto the shelf in retail stores, there's not enough margin in it at the current cost/pricing. A store is going to require most (or all) of that margin - in most "dice game" type stores, if you want to put a product on the shelf at $20, you're going to need to sell it to the store for somewhere around $14 or they're not going to be interested. See…

Just me being cynical, but this fact is what is wrong with the entire world. Everyone wants to make things as cheap as possible, and then sell them as expensive as possible. Every single thing in our lives is driven by this dynamic and it is a cancer. What is the way out of this that keeps people happy and doesn't destroy us?

I think your view of reality is a little distorted. No offense intended.

Would you be willing to pay $10 for a gallon of gas? Probably not. However, if you were open to paying this much the entire gasoline supply chain would not have to worry as much about their costs. It's action-reaction. Supply and demand.

Put a different way: If government somehow mandated tomorrow that on Monday gasoline will be $10 per gallon, gas company CEO's would be able to relax and not have to optimize their cost structure for some time.

Of course, this does not happen. People shop at Walmart and price shop online. In most businesses with decent competition it is actually very hard to make money without extreme attention to cost optimization. Popular liberal lore is that CEOs optimize cost because they are greedy. That is almost indescribably ridiculous. You optimize costs because if you don't, you die.

You should go through the exercise on Excel to see the effects. Pretend to start a business that will sell five items picked at random from Amazon.

The conditions are simple:

  - You mortgage your house and invest $200K in this 
    new business.
  - You have to compete with Amazon.  
  - You have to pay yourself a reasonable salary.  
  - You have to hire some people (you can't do everything).  
  - You have to pay rent, utilities, marketing costs,
    accounting, insurance, taxes, etc.  
  - You have to grow gross profits 25% per year or more.
  - You also have to pay-off your $200K loan in, say, 
    five years.
Do that on paper and tell me what you learn. Post all your numbers online for us to see and verify.

Now do it in real life and realize it is TEN to ONE-HUNDRED times harder.

Then come to HN and read posts from people who firmly believe business is driven by greed. What would you say to them to have them understand?

Right. Most who have never started and run a business have less than zero clue as to the realities and basic math one must face. They can opine all they want, yet the reality is that they simply don't have a good frame of reference. All they see is the price at the pump. And they always want to pay less.

EDIT: Layout and punctuation. Typed earlier today on an iPad, which is just horrible for entering and editing text. There are times when vim makes so much sense...

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