My side business is portions of pennies on the dollar of these other guys.
Drew has made it a reality with the website upkeep and what-not. Hopefully, we'll be creating a good football game field apparatus that will sell well by itself.
I average about $10K gross and net $7500-8000 per year.
https://whoanelliecollegefootball.com/
I'd have to "bet on myself" to increase that. I'm capped out as doing it on the side while teaching full-time.
If I had time and an employee, I could expand it quite a bit, but no idea how much.
The plus of keeping it small and on the side is I don't NEED a penny of the income and there is no pressure.
The plus of expanding it would be unknown additional monies, BUT pressure and risk.
Peanuts, for now and for the foreseeable future.
Question: what do you think is your limit on growth? Potential market size, or lack of customer knowledge that your product exists?
I don't know anything about the tabletop gaming market. Obviously we all know a little something about the hardcore CFB fan market. But I don't know how bit the Venn Diagram intersection of those two are...
So consider all of the rest of this pure speculation...My gut feeling is that your TAM (total addressable market) is very small. And probably not sustainable--if you exhaust that market, you might have a little bit of a longer-term business of expansion packs of more teams, but fewer total game sales once you've sold to all the core customer base.
I could be wrong on that. It's a big world and maybe there's 100x of your current sales base out there that would buy your game if they knew it existed and you had the production capacity to meet it. I don't really know.
So the question is, if you could you make the knowledge of the existence of your game more widespread (i.e. advertising), do you think it would cause demand to explode or do you think that the core market is so niche that it wouldn't really increase sales by enough to "bet on yourself"?
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The other question is how much you value that vs what you have... I.e. I get asked often about homebrewing, "so when do you think you're going to open a brewery?" Uhh... Never. It's backbreaking labor, will require me to find investors or go into a ton of debt, and the return is minimal unless you are able to grow and scale--which is hard in a crowded market. And I compare that to a nice white-collar desk job which pays me a ton of money...
And most importantly,
it keeps my hobby my hobby. I'll bet I'd enjoy brewing a LOT less if it were my job. You might enjoy Whoa Nellie a lot less if it were your job.
So while you sound a little down of late about your job, there's a certain value in having a school district job with a pension plan, a 10-month work year, and probably stellar medical benefits (speaking based on my wife's best friend who works for the Long Beach school district--she's got better benefits than my giant multinational corporation plan which is REALLY good)... Maybe these things aren't true in Arizona... Again, I don't know. But sometimes when you get into those situations, it makes sense to stick things out until you hit the benefit windows that open up, and then something like Whoa Nellie becomes a job you can do while you've got pension dollars rolling in...
