I know I generally set aside some time to write posts on Sunday but today I spent the whole morning writing documentation. I would feel terrible if I did not sit down and say something for a whole entire week.
I am going to take this opportunity to talk about my Derfdice product. I previously described the problem late last year as the “Joe-the-Elf” problem. It is a problem I have found in my own games and I believe that it is a problem that exists for other game masters. I have found some evidence this is true.
There is a bunch of my personal and professional philosophy wrapped up in this product, which I won’t get into much here. Not today. I want to talk to you about the marketing journey that I am undertaking.
I have to start by saying I do not know much about marketing. I can spell the word and that is basically about it. I have at least two friendly marketing friends who are spending time, out of the goodness of their hearts, to help me learn a little about their craft.
Here is some of the stuff I have learned so far:
If You Use It, You Love It
I am now getting unsolicited feedback from people who are creating tables. A few table creators have made tables that they will start clicking on them and completely lose track of time. Some people are also using these tables in their live games and sharing stories about outcomes from their games.
Product Market Fit
I do not know if I have product market fit… Yet. I have a product—I have yet to see a complete stranger get into said product and independently decide to pay it. I am early enough in development that I happily gave a free year or two of premium access to literally everyone who has communicated to me that they have signed up. I am hopeful with the next round of FTUE changes that I will be ready to see if everyone agrees with the economics for the product I have proposed.
Content is King
I also know that as much as I wanted this to be a pure creator’s platform, it is actually more of a consumer platform than I believed it would be. Derfdice will live and die by the quality of the tables that people can share with other people. I have made a few tables now and ultimately I think that people making their own amazing tables are a smaller subset of users than folks who just want to come and randomly click on prebuilt tables. This may have been obvious to other people—it was not quite so obvious to me.
Socials
I have spent some time trying to get good at Twitter. I am better at it now than ever before and that is not saying much. I created an account specifically for Derfdice and I am now attracting followers and sharing fun stuff. I have created a table of random promotional items that takes advantage of the linking feature to promote awesome homebrew creators and their fine quality items.
I have joined a few Discords to talk about my product—with varying degrees of success. I have sponsored a few prize pools for user competitions with the best of these because the quality of their community is really great.
I am also about to experiment with TikTok. Do not hold your breath for me to get up there and start twerking. I do not wish to hurt my knees or your sensibilities. Enough people have encouraged me to go this direction that something will soon arrive—yes I am vaguebooking.
Video Production
At the gentle urging of my marketing mentors, I have created some video walkthroughs for my product. I acquired new hardware for this exercise and created a “not terrible” tutorial channel. Nearly immediately after, I discovered new words like “subsonics” and “microphone shock mount”. I am going to be doing a before and after comparison on these once I have finished assembling my new toys. I may as well include an Amazon Affiliate link to the Pop Screen too since I ordered all three. These videos are linked to the friendly welcome screens that adorn the front page.
PS: Yes I am actually linking Affiliated Links for products I actually purchased!
I Have Amazing Friends
Even as recently as yesterday I have gotten text messages from people who are evaluating Derfdice with constructive feedback. Sometimes it is hard to test all of the screens on all of the devices. I am super grateful for all of the feedback I have received from people who have checked things out and informed me when there are issues. I am extremely grateful for all of the feedback I have received on the journey so far.
Speaking of the journey, it is only just beginning. I have a few low cost marketing experiments to conduct over the summer and I am still in the process of looking for suckers early access partners from friends and family who may want to play around with a dungeon master’s tool—especially if you are feedback oriented!
I will keep you all posted on the journey. I am probably going to follow up again about some of the marketing experiments I have conducted and maybe share some fun stories. In the meantime feel free to check out the site at www.derfdice.com or check out a few tables I have shared publicly including some that are created in collaboration with dungeon masters.
See you next week for more story telling with about fifteen percent less shameless self promotion!
