083: Making dice boxes that look tasty enough to eat with Andrew of Dodecadonuts

Courtney: 21:56

So between that point and the first couple of conventions, like right how much time passed.

Andrew: 22:02

So I probably made the first one. What are we’re in 2023 now? I probably made the first ones in 2018, right? That’s probably when I made the very first couple of couple of donuts, and so this is right when everybody’s cosplaying jester and my daughter was really heavily into cosplay at the time. So, you know, I made a few and then I kind of was it had always been, I think, really up until like very, very recently I’ve been really seriously considering me pivot. It’s always been like a hobby business, right.

Andrew: 22:32

So I would spend a month or two making a bunch of them and trying to figure out and and it’s like Anything that’s handmade, like this, that is net new, it’s not like I can go. I can’t, like you know, order a bunch of blank boxes from another vendor and then just laser engrave them or something else like that, like their stuff, that I have to basically figure out how they’re gonna work, and then so it’s that I don’t know if you there’s a whole thing about like you fail 10 times on something. So the first ones that I made, like I made them, they looked pretty good, but then I realized that like, oh, like my order was wrong and how I was assembling them. So, like when I sanded, I started sanding the finish off of the magnets that I had put together and I had. There was a lot of experimentation the first few years and just sort of figuring out how to make them. I would make them better every time, you know, because the first few were they were great and I was happy to sell them and I’m very proud of what I made. But every time I make them I get better at making them right. I get better at how do I understanding the mistakes I made in previous rounds of them. So I would make them in batches and those batches started to get bigger and bigger over time. But you know, I would basically make. You know I’d make 50 at the beginning of the year and I’d take them to Kubla Khan. I would sell, you know 10 or 12 and I would put the rest of them up on an Etsy shop and sell them through the rest of the summer of the year and I tend to run out in the fall and then I would be like, okay, well, now I’m gonna make another batch.

Andrew: 24:03

So that’s kind of like the progress of the doughnuts sort of. You know, without getting into the details of like specifically why certain things were failing. But like one of the big reasons to move to like the urethane lid was how do I make them in a way that improves the quality, because it makes it a lot easier to paint. I can do a lot more stuff with the paint jobs when I separate the frosting from the actual doughnut. But it’s also about how can I make them faster and like more efficiently. I was spending 3 to 4 hours per doughnut because I was hand carving the frosting on every doughnut and then I would have to sand forever because I really wanted it to have this really like tight, high gloss kind of finish to it.

Andrew: 24:46

My personal goals regarding quality were like coming into conflict with how many I could make. I’ve had plenty of game stores and stuff like that approach me be like hey, if you can bring this price down at all, we would love to carry them, either on consignment or something else you know. So it really starting like this year really became clear to me that if I wanted to that a, it was possible to bring it, move it beyond just being a hobby business, but also like oh, hey, that there’s. You know, if I can figure out how to like drive this. It could actually be a real business that I could, you know, make a more significant part of my living on, which is kind of the goal. Now, you know, it’s probably a couple years of kind of really treating it as like the hobby business.

Andrew: 25:27

And then, when one of the things I realized at like Kubla Con and I talked a lot with the organizers at Kubla Con because they become friends and they’re everybody’s really interested in the product is, you know, the donuts themselves are fairly expensive. You know, there I sell them for about $125 and up, depending on like the mimic donut clearly is going to be more expensive than a regular donut. And what I realized there was that like I had, like I was doing a really good job of setting kind of the top price at the booth but I didn’t have anything for people who wanted something from me. They were engaged with the brand, they were engaged with me personally. They love the story of the donuts, but they didn’t necessarily have something that they could afford to buy on their budget, you know, which is a little different than like the packs experience was like kind of like through me, honestly, for a little bit of a wrench, because there are a lot of people there.

Andrew: 26:22

I brought 75, almost 80 donuts with me.

Andrew: 26:25

I sold 65 of them. Wow, you know, in four days, like, and I sold relative to that. Like you know, at Kubla Con my experience would be like oh, I’m going to bring 30 donuts. I might sell a third of those. If I was having a very good show, I might sell a third of them.

Andrew: 26:42

But I was sell a bunch of t shirts, I would sell a bunch of stickers, I would sell a bunch of the coffee cups. So I sold plenty of coffee cups at packs, but fewer relative to the total number of donuts that I sold. Like it was a little. It was super interesting just to see kind of the different audiences there and like who was willing to spend and what they saw as like a barrier for pricing, right so, and I’m going to be at Big Bad Con at the end of September and it’ll be interesting to see how that I mean like universally everybody loves the donuts. They really into the, they’re really into it, but it’ll be interesting to see who is able to buy versus, you know, buy or not. So that part of it was really interesting from a learning perspective at packs.

Courtney: 27:28

Well, I also like. What’s kind of interesting too, is that packs is, you know, such a huge event and yet the majority of facts is you’re walking around and playing demos of video games. You’re not buying things on the floor, right, and so you know like obviously there was, there was a decent amount of things to look at on the tabletop floor.

Andrew: 27:47

However, and yet, if you like, when you walk down to the X so up in the tabletop Expo Hall, phone brain was there selling dice and Misty Mountain Gaming was there with a big like triple sized booth selling a bunch of accessories. Phone brain was also down on the Expo Hall on the bottom floor and Misty Mountain was down there selling stuff as well, which I was kind of surprised at. I really thought it would be more segregated and there would be more kind of like video game merch at packs. But I mean, I know it was to my benefit. Anybody who buys dice is super interested in looking at the donuts.

Courtney: 28:27

Oh yeah, for sure. Yeah, it will be interesting to compare that to like Big Bad Con.

Andrew: 28:34

Yeah, yeah, exactly, I’m like. I’m like my expectation for Big Bad Con is it’s not nearly as you know. It’s going to be probably 35, maybe it’ll be 3500 people total for two or three days. Right, it’ll be a lot closer. That’s what Kubla Con size is. It’s about 3500 people, of which only a percentage of them are actually like tabletop people. You see a lot of like. I get a lot. It all. Show the donuts to people. I spend the whole show like basically opening and closing the donuts Again for those listeners. If you don’t want to interact with your potential customers and you just want to sort of sit there and do them, don’t make something that confuses people, because you will spend all day, every day, talking to people trying to explain what it is that you’ve made. For whatever reason, I’ve chosen to create a niche that is really narrow and I’m just like digging even deeper into it.

Courtney: 29:26

I mean honestly, it’s true. Like when I saw the coffee cups I was like, okay, well, for one thing I would absolutely accidentally grab that all of the time.

Andrew: 29:34

Yes, yeah, it’s really funny. There are some universal objections to the donuts. When people, when they see them and they’re like, they look at the donuts and they go, oh, that would make me too hungry, I would want to eat donuts all the time. I don’t know that that’s a bad thing. What’s the other one? I get a lot of? Oh, I own more than one set of dice, so like, they hold eight dice. So if you own more than one set of dice, that’s a problem. Or it’s something like oh, I’m not in the tabletop, I don’t like, I don’t value my dice that much, or whatever. I’m always like telling people like these are the donuts are for they’re like it’s too expensive for what I’m doing. You know, I’m like which is fine, you don’t have an issue with people being concerned about the price.

Andrew: 30:18

But it is always kind of funny to tell people like, well, it’s the opposite of a dice jail. You’re rewarding the dice that are performing well by putting them in the donut. It’s restoring their energy, it’s keeping them well fed and happy. It’s a lot of magical thinking going on around the dice, you know. And then with the coffee cups it’s always like oh, universally, people are like oh, well, it would be great if you could like do this so that you could actually drink your coffee out of one side of the cup and use it as a dice tower, which I’m always like I don’t know that that’s a great idea, and they’re always like, oh well, I would try to drink from it.

Andrew: 30:52

I’m like, well, that’s not that big a deal because it’s an empty coffee cup, right, it doesn’t weigh what a regular coffee cup is. It’s way more of a problem if you start throwing your actual dice into your hot cup of coffee at the table. That’s the real problem is that you’re going to do something like that. But yeah, it is pretty funny Like everybody’s got kind of the same. There’s definitely like a certain, the sales objections from a sales process perspective are always kind of in the same universe. It’s very funny.

Courtney: 31:21

Oh, that wasn’t an objection. I was like oh, that’s hilarious, I know I would do that.

Andrew: 31:24

No, no, I think it’s. I think it’s. I mean that’s that’s part of what I’m always pitching is like, I mean really, guys, like the dream is to show up at your gaming table with a donut and a cup of coffee and watch in the same way that your mind just broke when I dropped a die in out of the donut in the coffee cup and it rolled to the side the way you just went. What the actual everybody at your table is going to do that every time you do this, you know. So that’s, it’s, it’s super funny and it’s, yeah, it’s, it’s very fun.

Andrew: 31:55

I also, I mean, I have to say it’s just a very different. You know, the whole brand sort of sets a whole different mood from a lot of the other accessories you see in the marketplace, which tend to be beautiful wooden products with, you know, dragons laser engraved on stuff, and it’s like there’s just a sort of like they would lean really heavily into the sort of fantasy milieu and it’s fun to make something that is so outside of that. You know, because there’s like there’s definitely a market for a lot more whimsy in this stuff than you necessarily see. You know, you have to pair that with, like, trying to achieve the quality parts of it. But I think you know there’s definitely an opportunity there for people who are thinking about products they want to make or things you know that should give yourself permission to to be a little, have a little fun with it doesn’t have to be a quite so grimdark all the time.

Courtney: 32:51

For sure, yeah. So what point did you start the Etsy store?

Andrew: 32:57

At what point did I start the Etsy store? I started the Etsy store pretty early, honestly, but I had gotten the URL and I was just looking for like an easy way to to. I didn’t really want to like pay for a Shopify subscription. I wasn’t sure if I really wanted to commit to it. It was sort of a low cost, low effort way to get an online presence up and running.

Andrew: 33:20

When I first started, it was in a lot of ways it was great like I was again because it was a hobby business. You know, if I sold something every few months or once a month or whatever, like it was no big deal and a lot of the tools they have are great. The shipping stuff is awesome. You know, I’ve shipped stuff all over the world and it’s easy to deal with, like the customs and all the other stuff that you have to do, because it just goes through their, their shipping centers. When I started doing t shirts, I started using like printify and print full to do and they. Etsy has some nice integrations into your Etsy shop so you can just create listings for these, you know, for designs that you’ve made, and then they go up and I literally don’t have to do anything other than answer a few emails, you know, here and there. So that part of it was great. That’s like literally when I started the Etsy thing and I’ve been on Etsy pretty much ever since as the deck of donuts my the URL dot dot dot com is essentially a redirect into the Etsy shop and what I found was like, especially over like the last year, kind of like during co, but I started putting more effort and I was putting up more designs, I was spending more sort of more engaged with the Etsy shop. I had left full time work and started working as a freelance, freelance creative director, so I had a little more control over my schedule, so I could be a little more engaged with it. And so I started to do that.

Andrew: 34:44

I started to spend more on advertising on Etsy and just trying to experiment with how I can drive a little more engagement, and it was never great but I started to get, I was selling more regularly and that was going on for like a year. And then, like I think at the beginning of this year, I really looked at like how much I was spending on Etsy versus how much I was actually making. And it could be just because I do it for living doesn’t necessarily mean that I’m a great ad guy. But you buy essentially search ads on. You’re buying search ads on Etsy and I had done what I could to kind of optimize that stuff. You know, I wasn’t deeply engaged with it but what I found was I was spending quite a lot on advertising and I was making a profit, but so much was getting eaten up by fees and some of the other stuff that I really found that, like you know, whereas I thought that I was doing, you know I look at my sales and I’d be like, oh man, I made you know 500 bucks this month or I made you know X amount of dollars, you know, over time I’d be like, oh, that’s pretty cool, that’s pretty cool. But then when I looked at the fees I was getting charged on the other side of it, I was like, wait, like 90% of that money is getting eaten up with fees and all the rest of it. And you know and I’ll to be totally fair to Etsy I optimized my shop to like minimize my fees. No, you know, there’s a lot of stuff that I could probably be doing to be more efficient on Etsy. But you know I’m connected.

Andrew: 36:10

You know, in a couple of discords with other creators and I think sort of universally, everyone’s looking at Etsy and it’s very easy to see there’s less and less handcrafted stuff on Etsy. You know there’s less and less kind of it feels like the company is moving away from what I’m trying to sell. As you know, they want more commercially produced stuff at scale that I’m not particularly, then that I wasn’t really set up to sell and you know, the fact of the matter is if I’m going to pay that, if I’m going to pay essentially either through fees to them or like a subscription to Shopify, probably, you know and just talking with other vendors and other people who use it up, I’ll likely be shifting soon to Shopify. They have a lot of the similar integrations that I’m already taking advantage of and then at least if I’m spending money to drive traffic, I’m really just driving traffic for myself. I’m not necessarily driving it for random other competitive listings. So that’s sort of my story with Etsy.

Andrew: 37:08

Again, I don’t really have any complaints with the service itself, you know, and, like I said, it’s been very good in a lot of ways for me when I was getting started, but it definitely feels like it’s pivoted away from what I’m interested in doing and we’ll see, you know I mean I may end it back on it. I’ve had a couple of places recommend that I look at like fair and try to get onto fair as fair as a like a whole sale or site for stores, so particularly for like the stickers and stuff that I make. There’s a couple of people have said like oh yeah, you would do well on fair, but fair is like they’re relatively new and they’re scaling somewhat slowly. So you know you can get on their waiting list but you’re just sort of at the mercy of when they decide to sort of open up for the next chunk of potential vendors.

Courtney: 37:55

So that’s interesting. I hadn’t heard of them, but that sounds like cool concept.

Andrew: 38:02

Yeah, it’s fair. F-a-i-r-ecom it’s basically for it’s super interesting, it’s basically a and they have some TTRPG stuff on there and they sell a lot of. Again, like it’s great for smaller vendors who are trying to sell stickers and other things that are going into like the game store, so like games of Berkeley, their buyer uses fair to like identify stickers and pins and other accessories that they might be able to add to their store. And then you as a vendor, you know you’re just basically, as I understand it, you know you’re basically accepting an order but you’re selling at wholesale prices. You’re not necessarily selling at retail prices. You know you’re not selling direct to consumer.

Andrew: 38:41

Yeah, so you get to sell more, but your prices have to be a little lower, a little less of a margin. Yeah, which is one of the things like at the beginning of the summer I really tried to dig into, like the cost of goods, for what it was actually costing me to make like the donuts and the coffee cups and some of the other things, and trying to really look at how I could again make them more efficiently, make them with not less expensive parts. But, like you know, how can I like tighten up the time in order to maintain the same quality, which is always kind of the goal.

Courtney: 39:17

Yeah, I mean, how long does it take you to make you know a batch of donuts, A batch of donuts.

Andrew: 39:23

So yeah. So now I make them kind of in batches. It’s honestly I have to, kind of I was in a mad scramble to make as many as I could ahead of over the summer. So what happened was, you know, had a good event at KublaCon with the freelance work was a little quiet. So I was like, oh I’ll, I’ll just start.

Andrew: 39:42

I made a spreadsheet and started, you know, pulling together, like here, all the gaming conventions in the US. Here’s their contact information, and I just started like I made a little like sale sheet. I don’t know. I basically, you know, made essentially like a one-pager PDF that just said pictures of the donuts and the description of what I was selling and kind of just generally like, hey, here’s my vibe, and was just kind of both applying, but then also just like when I could find contact information, I would just email people and be like, hey, is this something that would would be in the right vein? You know, trying to get a lot of the conventions were already sort of set in terms of their vendors and stuff like that.

Andrew: 40:20

So the Pax opportunity came from one of those emails that I sent in, not expecting to get into Pax. I certainly didn’t get it. Expect to get in 2023. But then they said, yeah, can you do it? And that was in late May, early June, and so then it was like a mad scramble for me to figure out like, okay, well, I know I can’t make enough donuts the way I had been making them, so it was like a mad scramble to figure out how to like come up with essentially a new way to make them. So I’m like hand injecting urethane and all this other crazy stuff, so that was like figuring out a whole new process. So it wasn’t terribly efficient. The net of it is to say, whereas before it probably took me three to four hours to fully finish a donut individually, now I think I can get it down to about an hour of total work. So, which is great, and it’s not just that I can get it down an hour, but I also feel like the quality and the variety that I can make is better.

Andrew: 41:17

Right, a lot of the stuff that I was doing before that was taking up so much time was like having to mask all these little bits and then paint it, and then, if I painted it and the paint job wasn’t great, you had to like sand it all off and start from scratch again. And now I can be like I can paint something, and if it turns out awesome, I can be like, oh, I’m gonna make more of those. And if it turns out horrible, I can be like, okay, well, I’m gonna put that in the pile of stuff to be thought about some more before I try that paint job again. No, yeah, yeah. So there’s a lot of like experimentation and everything in it. But yeah, that’s the goal. It was kind of the same thing with the coffee cups I started when I first started making the coffee cups in the first. No, I probably made a couple hundred of the coffee cups.

Andrew: 41:58

Now at this point, the first 70 I was printing were just 3D printed. So I’d gotten like a little Ender 3 and I figured out how to get it to print stuff, but it took nine hours to do. Every little tower that went inside took nine hours to make, and so I was printing as fast as I could. But I was like, oh, I gotta make a, I gotta figure out how to do this faster. So I ended up making a mold of that 3D print and then just casting it with.

Andrew: 42:22

I was already doing injection molding for, you know, homemade injection molding for the doughnuts. So I was like, oh well, I bet I could do the same thing for this. And so then I was able once I figured that out, I was able to kind of crank out a bunch of them much more quickly than I had been before, you know. So yeah, technology, technology, it’s amazing, hey, everybody. You know like if you’re gonna work with your thing where your rubber gloves, where your respirator get good ventilation, probably don’t do it in the basement of your house Like I’ve been doing it. So yeah, yeah.

Courtney: 42:58

I was about to say don’t poison yourself.

Andrew: 42:59

Yeah don’t poison yourself. Read the health and safety literature. Where your dust masks while you’re sanding. You want to be a long time where your safety glasses. I managed to just absolutely. I had a chop saw, throw a piece of wood into my face and chop bang up the bridge of my nose while I was working on stuff Because I was doing something a little sketchy and I won’t do that again. So, yeah, that is. You have it in your list of questions. Lessons learned along the way. Where your safety gear folks. Where that eye protection that’s the thing.

Courtney: 43:32

Yeah, that’s the lesson that you don’t want to have learned. Yeah, that’s the lesson that you don’t want to have learned.

Andrew: 43:37

Yeah, don’t go to the emergency room at 10 o’clock on a Thursday night with a big cut across the bridge of your nose because you’ve been trying to cut something that you’re not supposed to. Power tools are fun.

Courtney: 43:48

I feel like I was gonna tell a story to relate, that wasn’t me, it was my mom, but I realized it’s actually bad if any of you are squeamish, so we’ll hold that for after the recording.

Andrew: 43:58

Hold that for after the recording That’ll be for the after show. Everybody, we can talk shop accidents, yeah yeah, you know, I do actually really enjoy making them, even though they’re kind of they’re transitioning from a fully art thing to more of a production thing. But there are like it’s still really interesting and really challenging to make that sort of thing happen. It’s fun.

Courtney: 44:25

Yeah, you mentioned earlier that you are thinking about doing this more full time than you have been.

Andrew: 44:31

Yeah, so advertising is a very odd business but it is somewhat. One of the things that’s true about it is I’ve loved doing it, but I’ve been doing it for 25 years. I also love doing woodworking and doing kind of this stuff and I really enjoy meeting people at the cons. I think one of the things that’s so fun about the donuts is just the reaction people have and just like how much joy that you see in people’s faces when you know, by and large, when they see the donuts like, like I said I’ve said earlier, you know they the reaction is almost universally like really positive. So it’s like really fun to see that it’s a.

Andrew: 45:08

It’s a great sort of like, frankly it’s a great ego boost for me, but it’s also like it’s just really fun to sort of put that sort of energy out in the world. I think probably in 2024, I’m going to try to go to all of the PAX events, like to go to PAX East, go to unplugged and go to PAX West and then also try to hit some of the other. I’m going to try and hit it like a more regular schedule of cons as well. As you know, like I may try to do a Kickstarter or something like that. Just but generally like if I can see if I can get enough activity.

Andrew: 45:42

Both my children are very interested in sort of gaming and game design. My daughter is finishing an illustration degree and wants to get in sort of character design and that sort of thing. My son is very interested in sort of like game mechanics and game design that way. So it’s also a way for me to ideally be away, for me to. You know, probably we’re not going to be a full time gig, but it might be go from something that’s being sort of like five or 10% of my time to more like 50% of my time. So if I can do that and sustain that with the other work that I do, then it’d be a different sort of living that I’m doing now, but it would be, I think, equally satisfying. You know it’s.

Andrew: 46:23

It’s very exciting for me to think about building a business of my own, which is not something so in sort of the advertising marketing field. What I’ve been in is, you know, you sort of drop into somebody else’s business and you sort of help them solve this immediate need to sell a product and sell a story or whatever that is, and so you don’t necessarily have, and one of the things that I like about business is sort of understanding the strategy behind driving those things. And so the idea of being able to kind of engage at that level with something that is my own is very, very interesting. And you know, I mean hell, I’ll do it for a year and if it completely falls apart I’ll do something else. You know that’s there’s no, you might as well go for it, right?

Andrew: 47:12

You know life’s, life’s pretty short. You know, if you have a good idea and I will say like I’m saying that, but I’m saying that having, you know, five years of generally positive reaction to the product that I’m interested in selling, so I’m not like, I’m just like I did one event. Now I’m like, yeah, but I mean like I’ve had a lot of it. I’ve had a lot of good personal experiences and I’ve made a lot of good connections, so that I feel like I’ve been steadily progressing towards this. And now Pax is sort of like a big leap forward. So now it’s like, okay, well, how do I capitalize on that big leap forward?

Courtney: 47:45

Yeah, I feel like now I want to bring you back and like a year and be like okay, yeah please do, please do, and I’ll be homeless and living out of a van.

Andrew: 47:55

Yeah, I’m hawking wooden donuts in the back. Yeah, no, it’s who knows. Yes, I would love to be back in a year. Hopefully it’ll be a massive success. And yeah, but yeah.

Andrew: 48:07

But, honestly, doing this podcast is part of me trying to sit here and go like, okay, how do I make the connections to be able to like leverage all this stuff and, you know, get my name out there and let people know that.

Andrew: 48:19

I think that’s one of the things.

Andrew: 48:20

Again, it’s sort of cobbler shoes, the cobbler shoes phenomenon, and I haven’t really spent that much time trying to do like social media or any sort of real brand building beyond just going to these events and kind of showing the product off. So the next level of this is getting those ducks in a row and actually doing that sort of work, which, again, I know how to do for other people but have never had to do it for myself, and so that’s like a really interesting, sort of like mental pivot that I have to make to sort of do that in a real way and sort of like, you know, super interesting, little challenging, but that’s, it’s all good, you know it’s. I’m again, like you know, just having that experience in advertising, like I have a lot of. I have a very robust skill set that is very well suited for a lot of what I’m trying to do. It’s definitely a lighter lift than somebody who’s like trying to come up with an amazing idea but doesn’t actually have that backstop of skills to capitalize on.

Courtney: 49:19

Yeah, honestly, I feel like most people. When I ask the question I’m about to ask you, I’m like what’s been the most challenging part? They’re like marketing.

Andrew: 49:28

It is, it is, it always is. It’s hard. What has been the most challenging in the past is like figuring out those efficiencies so that I can, like, actually scale the product. So that has been the problem and I feel like I’ve cracked that Right. I’ve finally gotten to a place where I’m like okay, I will continue to improve it, but I can see the path forward to how the product continues to get better and I can make more of them and I can have. You know, whereas before I didn’t know how to like, how would I tell somebody else how you’re going to carve frosting and sand it to a level that I was going to be happy with? It’s just not, there was no way to do that. But now I’m in a place where, like, oh, I figured out this and a jig on this tool and everything. It’s like, oh, I can have my son like sand donuts all day long and they’re going to be great, you know, I know that they’ll be, that he’ll do a good job and it won’t be as reliant on judgment. You know it can be more of a process moving forward.

Andrew: 50:25

For me it’s the big challenge is like okay, how do I, you know, do the advertising? How do I do the marketing? How do I fund it? Like, how do I raise the money to be able to? You know, marketing is expensive. Getting your name out is expensive, so, like, how do I raise the money to do that in a way that is going to support the business and not just be? You know, there’s a joke within the ad world where somebody asks somebody like a business owner is told by his ass by someone about his advertising budget and he says, well, basically, I know 50% of my advertising is wasted, I just don’t know which 50%. It is Right and that’s very true. You know, in the tools, you know how you reach the appropriate audience is very difficult and a lot of the platforms that people had been leveraging, like Twitter and other sort of social media platforms some of them like Twitter, is collapsing in a lot of ways.

Andrew: 51:24

Like, I was very, both in my personal life and in for Dodeca Donuts. I was very active on Twitter and after some of the stuff that Mr Musk did, I decided to. I’m just done with it. So I’ve moved over to like threads and Instagram and all this stuff. But those are totally different modalities, totally different sort of ways of interacting with people. And even just Facebook to Instagram is different sort of interactions than you see from like, you know, threads or Twitter to Instagram, right, they’re just totally different ways. There are different sorts of content are needed in different places.

Andrew: 52:00

Or TikTok you know I’ve done some stuff with TikTok. It’s super fun, but it’s also like I’m not. I’m just I would rather be making the donuts than spending, you know, two days working on a TikTok. You know floss video involving the donuts, like it’s just not going to happen. So I have to. It’s that combination of factors of like how do you find this sort of content that’s going to work for you? And then, of course, there’s just like all the paid stuff, like you know, search, advertising and optimizing for search and everything that all has to be done. So it has to be done and redone. So, yeah, it’s, it’s no fun, it’s not. I mean I shouldn’t say it’s no fun, it can be, you just have to approach it with the right sort of frame in your head.

Courtney: 52:45

It’s a lot and there’s so many platforms.

Andrew: 52:47

It’s a lot, it’s a lot of stuff. Yeah, I mean, you know, yeah, you know. So it’s like so. So, frankly, I look at like going to events like packs and you know like, if I ever end up at GenCon like there are opportunities to sell the product, but as much as anything there are also opportunities just get the name of the product out. And if all I had done was cover my booth fee at packs, packs would have been a success just by virtue of getting in front of so many people that are exactly my target market, versus, you know, the geek craft expo right. That if I had spent you know a big chunk of money to go to an event like that and then nobody had looked, even nobody even understood what TTRPGs were, much less that there is an accessory market for TTRPGs, would have been a huge disappointment, you know. So, like that, like finding your audience thing is interesting.

Courtney: 53:39

So I feel like we’ve touched on this, maybe a little bit already, but what would you say has been just the best part of your journey up till now 100% is the people’s reaction to the product right?

Andrew: 53:51

It’s just. I mean, really I’m a pretty happy person and it’s just. It brings me a lot of personal joy to see people smile and laugh about the product and to see just kind of like even when they’re making me crazy, like seeing little kids who are just freaking obsessed with the donuts and they’re like, oh my gosh, you know, like people popping them open and closing them and just sort of like have you know, having this really fun experience interacting with them. And then people who bought them Now that I’ve been selling them at KublaCon year over year, like people come back to those conventions every year and they come back and they tell me how much they have, how much fun they have with the donut every time they sit down to play their games. They’re like this thing just makes me laugh every time I look at it. So that part of it is just amazing. Yeah, that’s hands down the best part about it.

Courtney: 54:38

Okay, well, I know we didn’t even get to talk about your podcast at all.

Andrew: 54:42

Hey everybody, listen to the dad vantage.

Courtney: 54:47

So if you want to take a minute and talk about, you know, like podcasts or any other kind of cool upcoming projects and stuff you’ve got.

Andrew: 54:53

Yeah, yeah. So really, like you know, for me the coolest projects I’m working on right now are dodeca donuts, you know, and but I also, with another friend of mine, have a separate project called the dad vantage, which is two old school dads embrace new school play. And really, michael, my cohost, and I we’ve worked together for 20 years. We’re just extremely good friends. We started playing. I never realized that he was a gamer and he didn’t realize I was a gamer until like about the time I started doing the donuts and I mentioned that was like, oh yeah, I’m going to be at this game convention. He’s like wait, you game, like it just turned into this whole thing. So we basically sit down and talk about being a parent, being a father and and playing games with your kids. We talk a lot about like how to introduce kids to the kids to the game, how to introduce new players. You know we run through like rules, basics, but we also do a lot of stuff like we come up with tropes of different things. We’ll be like, okay, we’re both going to build an anti hero and what does that look like? And then we will sort of compare and contrast what we’ve built. We started doing some live play episodes more recently where my son has been the DM for a couple of them or vice versa. Now we’re switching it up where my son is now who’s? He’s 20 now, so he’s 21. So he’s he’s playing with us as we play through that. But it’s really it’s very interesting to sort of be able to play with your kids for this long and and watch how they develop, as I mean, he’s a good player and he’s a really good player to develop, as I mean, he’s an amazing DM. So it’s it’s super fun to kind of go through that process. But you can find it on all the, on all the regular places the dad vantage and it’s, yeah, super fun. And then you know, please follow me on tiktok, on the Graham and Facebook and whatnot.

Andrew: 56:43

I am very seriously considering doing a Kickstarter. At the beginning of the year. They have a make 100 event, so I may be trying to do a little bit of a small Kickstarter at the beginning of the year just to sort of feel out what that platform is like. And so, if people are interested in it, hopefully I’ll be there sometime soon. But if you follow me on Instagram or any of those places, I’ll be announcing it whenever. Whenever it does happen, yeah, and then otherwise, you know, go to. I’m at wwwDodecaDonutscom. Right now it goes to the Etsy store, but soon it will go to some somewhere else. And, yeah, just keep track of it. And as soon as I have more donuts to sell, I will be putting them up on the side trying to get how, hopefully, I can take advantage of this holiday season and this buzz I’ve got going on.

Courtney: 57:30

So I will have a link on the show notes.

Andrew: 57:34

Sweet.

Courtney: 57:35

Well, thank you so much for coming on today and just talking about donuts for an hour.

Andrew: 57:41

Yeah, yeah, no well, thanks very much for inviting me. This has been super fun. I love talking about this stuff. I’m a D&D nerd and I’m a business nerd too, so it’s all like it’s like. This is an amazing intersection being able to sort of talk about how those things work together. It’s great.

Courtney: 57:57

Yeah Well, at this point we are going to wrap up the interview portion, but after I hang up I am going to start recording again and we’re going to do a fun little quick question blitz for patrons. So I will be asking some extra questions. Some are gaming related, some are not, but that’ll be over in Patreon exclusive stuff. So if you are interested in listening to that, you can find role play grow on Patreon.

Andrew: 58:24

Do it, do it, yeah.

Courtney: 58:28

He said so I might even get featured on an upcoming episode. See you next time on Roll Play Grow.