EMNCD, Incorporated | Application Preview
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General Information
Business Registration Number: 0013557388
Location: Lancaster, PA, United States
Length of Operation: 1-5
Number of Employees: 1-10 Employees
Annual Gross Income: Less than $100k
Annual Gross Expense: Less than $100k
Open to Loans: YES
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Funding Usage
A respectable grant (say, $300k for a runway of ~2 years) would enable me—the founder, primary product designer, and project manager—to dramatically increase our development tempo and production quality by paying myself a modest founder's salary to operate the business full-time. I would invest the remaining funds in manufacturing, contract contributors, and marketing to expand the business' catalog and brand visibility as a means of establishing revenue and attracting further investment. A considerable grant of $500k or more would fund development of the business' first digital product—a small but precisely-targeted video game—that would access a far larger and higher-margin market. The higher ask here reflects engineering and art costs, which determine the make-or-break metrics of software performance and visual appeal, respectively. With a playable build, I would then seek further funding through the industry's traditional publisher model, or alternatively seek private investment to self-publish the product (the primary cost being marketing).
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Business Plan
Following this winter's release of our second product, I will focus on marketing and sales to grow revenue and brand presence. I will reinvest those earnings into development of the next products, leveraging the audience amassed so far to yield direct-to-consumer, high-margin sales. We'll make our in-person debut at industry conventions, further increasing the brand's visibility and securing more high-margin sales. As we expand our catalog to include accessories, apparel, and other merchandise, I will identify and emphasize the products with the highest demand and margins (I suspect, for example, that our branding will consistently sell apparel, making an expansion into fashion a promising possibility). Finally, I will seek additional funding—whether through art or technology grants or private investment—to scale production of a wider and higher-quality catalog. As a video game developer and tabletop publisher of 11 years, I'm intimately familiar with the consumer values of both markets, positioning me well to offer high-demand products to either or both at once. Most importantly, my experience specifically with startups exposed me to a number of lethal mistakes that I simply won't make—especially over-scoping and over/ego-hiring, which balloon budgets, cannabilize runway, and ultimately kill products. I will run a tight ship focused on maximizing ROI with judicious development priorities and an overhead minimized by my personal sweat-equity and a reliance on remote, contract labor for what I can't do myself. The first full-time employee, for example, will likely be a producer (organizational project manager) to keep the wheels turning smoothly—not an engineer or technical artist, who are expensive and prone to turnover and whose output I will make all efforts to contract on a per-project basis. Additionally, I have a robust professional network from which to hire this contract labor and generate opportunities and partnerships. Finally, I participate in a growing local scene in Lancaster, PA for tabletop gaming and its adjacent cultural interests, which consistently spawns new retailers, venues, and 6k-person conventions downtown and would provide strong regional support for this business' growth.
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Self Identified Competition
Our nearest analogs in the tabletop space are Games Omnivorous in Portugal (gamesomnivorous.com), Feral Indie Studio in Appalachia (feralindiestudio.com), and Lost Pages in the UK (lostpages.co.uk). The types of video games we would make come from a diversity of independent creators, often aggregated by publishers like Devolver Digital (devolverdigital.com), Annapurna Interactive (annapurnainteractive.com/en), and Goblinz Studio (goblinzstudio.com)—each of which would, incidentally, make an excellent publishing partner. I am, to boast in the privacy of this application, a considerably more serious designer than others in tabletop because of my career in video games, which is a far more demanding and higher-stakes industry that suffuses its members with technical skill, monetization strategy, and professional mentorship that tabletop simply lacks. I'm also no less fluent in the tabletop-specific skills of writing, book design, and publishing, given my MFA in Creative Writing (Integrated Media) and start in video games as a writer. With proper resources, I have every reason to succeed—and succeed big.
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Contact Applicant
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