Welcome to another episode of the Toy Business Unboxed Podcast, where we sit down with Nick Kopp, co-founder of Weird Giraffe Games. Nick spent his career as a rocket scientist before spending a decade building a board game company with his wife on nights and weekends. He recently left the aerospace industry entirely to run Weird Giraffe Games full time, and shares what that transition actually looked like behind the scenes. Nick walks through the financial planning, the delegation struggles, and the massive multiplayer game that is helping push his company into a bigger spotlight.
#180: From Rocket Scientist to Board Game Publisher – Toy Business Unboxed
Episode Highlight
- 00:42 Welcome and guest introduction
- 01:15 From rocket scientist to founder
- 03:47 Building a financial runway
- 05:25 Learning to delegate everything
- 06:29 Bringing on a logistics partner
- 18:04 How Reef and Ruins works
- 23:51 Plans for four campaigns
- 25:17 Lessons from twenty Kickstarters
- 29:04 His advice for newcomers
From Rocket Science to a Board Game Side Hustle
Nick spent his entire career in aerospace, driven by a lifelong love of space alongside an entrepreneurial streak instilled by his parents. In 2016, he started Weird Giraffe Games with his wife in his spare time, building board games while still working full time as a rocket scientist. He kept the two worlds strictly separate for years, since his day job had rules requiring a clean split between his business hours and his employer’s time. That balancing act lasted about a decade before Nick finally left his rocket scientist job to run the business full time.
Building a Financial Runway Before Taking the Leap
Nick says the decision to go full time came down to having a real financial plan, not just enthusiasm. Over roughly fifteen years, he and his wife saved up a runway built on conservative assumptions about how much income the business could realistically generate. That planning gave them enough cushion to sustain the business, and their lifestyle, for a year or two even in a worst-case scenario. Only once that safety net was in place did Nick feel confident enough to leave his day job behind.
Learning to Delegate After a Decade of Doing It All
Once Nick went full time, his biggest new challenge was not workload, it was letting go, since he and his wife had mostly handled everything themselves for years. Jason walked him through his own Delegate and Elevate exercise: list out every task you handle, then sort each one into four buckets, from things you hate and are bad at to things you like and are good at. The last bucket is the zone of genius, the handful of tasks only you can do and love doing, and everything outside of it should be delegated, automated, or eliminated. Nick said the framework would help him write clearer job descriptions, especially since he had little management experience working with creatives and logistics partners instead of engineers. He is still learning how to give people what they need to succeed instead of trying to control every detail himself.
Bringing On Partners to Handle Logistics and Scale
Weird Giraffe Games now has more than ten people contributing across different parts of the business. Nick had been personally managing the shipping and logistics from their manufacturer in China, but the company is onboarding AllPlay to take that entire function off his plate. Handing logistics to a partner with deep experience in that space has freed Nick up to focus on the parts of the business only he can do. That shift reflects a broader lesson Nick has taken from the book The Four Hour Work Week, that anything someone else can do should not be sitting on the founder’s plate.
Reef and Ruins, a Game Built for a Hundred Players at Once
Weird Giraffe Games’ newest title, Reef and Ruins, funded on Kickstarter last year and is set to ship to backers in April. Each player gets a personal scoring sheet similar to Yahtzee, and three shared dice are rolled and displayed on a big screen for everyone to see at once. Players independently decide how to apply each roll to their own sheet across sixteen rounds, chaining combos and unlocking new options along the way. Because every player works from the same shared dice rolls, the game can scale up to roughly a hundred people playing simultaneously.
Turning Community Into Tournaments
Nick has delegated running his local board game group to a friend, freeing himself up to focus elsewhere while still staying connected to the local gaming scene. Weird Giraffe Games is now partnering with a group that runs an annual board game convention in the Houston area to host Reef and Ruins tournaments at local stores, building toward a championship at the convention in May. Nick makes it a priority to leave the house daily and get to a game night at least once a week, both for connection and product testing. He says stepping away from the computer, including quiet time at the beach with his wife, is often where their best game ideas actually come from.
A Roadmap of New Crowdfunding Campaigns
Weird Giraffe Games is planning as many as four crowdfunding campaigns this year, starting with a return of Logic and Lore, a game that sold out almost immediately after debuting at Gen Con. The team is bringing it back to Kickstarter alongside a new expansion, and is currently building an email list by offering early sign-ups about fifteen dollars in free upgrades. Nick is also planning a second edition of Way Too Many Cats with more cat-themed content, plus an unannounced 2027 project he believes could help redefine two-player games. Longer term, Nick wants to build product lines the company can support for the next three to five years while bringing on more partners to keep the team focused on making games.
Advice for Newcomers in the Toy and Game Industry
Nick’s advice is to be honest with yourself about whether you actually want to publish a game or simply design one, since those are very different jobs. He says many designers underestimate how much of publishing is manufacturing, logistics, and business operations rather than the creative work itself, often ninety to ninety-five percent of a founder’s time. If design is really the goal, Nick recommends pitching to an existing publisher instead of self-publishing everything from scratch. For those who do want to publish, he points to Weird Giraffe Games’ own blog and Stonemaier Games’ Jamie Stegmaier as resources on what a successful crowdfunding campaign actually requires.
Conclusion
Nick Kopp’s path from rocket scientist to full-time game publisher took a decade of careful planning, saving, and slowly learning to let go of control. From building Weird Giraffe Games’ first products with his wife to onboarding logistics partners and planning four new crowdfunding campaigns, the business has grown well past what one person could run alone. Reef and Ruins and the return of Logic and Lore mark the next phase of that growth. Nick’s story is a reminder that leaving a stable career behind works best with a plan, a runway, and a willingness to hand off the work only you don’t need to do.
Connect with Nick Kopp
If you’re interested in learning more about Weird Giraffe Games or connecting with Nick Kopp you can reach out through the following channels:
- Website: Visit Weird Giraffe Games’ official website for the latest news, game updates, and more
- Instagram: Follow Weird Giraffe Games on Instagram for visual updates, game previews, and creative inspiration
- Facebook: Follow Weird Giraffe Games on Facebook for updates, discussions, and behind-the-scenes content.
- Tiktok: Follow Weird Giraffe Games on TikTok for clips, highlights, and behind-the-scenes content.
Transcript
Jason Hsieh (00:42)
Welcome back to another episode of Toy Business Unboxed Podcast. Today it’s my honor to have Nick, one of the co-founders of Weird Giraffe Games. Nick is a former rocket scientist, a pilot, and also someone I have been helping bring more than 20 crowdfunding campaigns to life. Alongside with his wife and their team, he has spent the last decade turning creative, quirky game ideas into real game on the shelf that you can buy. So thank you so much for joining us on the podcast today, Nick.
Nick Kopp (01:10)
You’re welcome. I’m so happy to be here and talking about what I love, which is making games and doing business.
Jason Hsieh (01:15)
Yeah, so first of all, you have a very unique background. I think you are the first guest that used to be a rocket scientist before you become a publisher. So can you kind of walk us through on your background and what make you realize that you want to become part of the game industry?
Nick Kopp (01:31)
Yeah. So my entire life I’ve been focused on working in the aerospace industry. Yeah. I’ve loved space my entire life and I focused in on that. Another thing that I really love doing is entrepreneurship or business. My parents started their own business and throughout my entire childhood they instilled upon me the like wanting to start a business type kind of thing. So
In 2016 I was able to in my spare time like when I’m not working as a rocket scientist, I worked with my wife to start this company to make board games. I see and then I just had the opportunity in the last few months to quit my rocket scientist job. To do this full time. So I’m doing this full time and it’s been a wild ride to go
Kind of from some of one of the biggest industries in the world that has billions and billions of dollars down to working at my small business making board games. So it’s kind of been a really big learning curve for me to kind of go from that type of industry to working as a small business and doing the hustle.
Jason Hsieh (02:38)
For sure, for sure. Yeah. I think a lot of our guests on the podcast have went through a similar journey, myself included, because I also started as like a part time business, like working 20 hours on top of my 40 hours and try to make it work. But looking back, what was the biggest challenge when you are doing this transition and before you take the leap of fate of growing and scaling the business?
Nick Kopp (02:59)
Yeah. It was definitely a big challenge to do a full time job. Yeah. And then work when I get home on a basically another full time job. And that was a lot of effort. And in the last ten years I’ve been doing that. And I think one of the biggest challenges was separating the two. I because of some rules where I worked, I had to make sure that I completely separated
Yeah, working on my business and the time that I spent on that from my day job. So yeah, yeah. I’m so glad now I don’t have to. I don’t have a day job, so I don’t have to worry about that anymore. So that’s been one of the hardest things.
Jason Hsieh (03:35)
What would you say is that decision point that you say, Okay, enough is enough. Finally I’m gonna do it do this full time, like looking back. Is that a specific moment in time or is that like a story behind it that you can share?
Nick Kopp (03:47)
Yeah, I think there is a lot of things that came into that decision point. I think it’s really important to make sure you have a plan. And make sure you have a financial plan and essentially a runway of how long you could do this, with kind of making very conservative assumptions about the money that can come in from this. Yeah. So what I did was I over the last 15 years or so, we’ve been saving up from my day job and
This business and building up to have the so right now you mentioned we have over 20 different products that that we’ve got on sale so we have a big library of stuff we have yeah a number of different goals where we’re reaching out to potentially make some partnerships to do licensing in other countries. Yeah, yeah and so we have a big plan we have number of different Kickstarter campaigns planned for this year and
The most important part is we have savings that we put away to kind of and we’ve made some conservative assumptions that I could do this for about a year or two. Okay. Assuming we don’t get any more or the business kind of craters and in our lifestyle and in our lives are still okay.
Jason Hsieh (04:51)
Hmm, that’s a very good plan. That’s something I would suggest for someone that’s also thinking about going it into full times. Just like running any businesses, there’s always risk behind it. It’s always good to have some like cushion, like at least some safety net in case you should have at least six months of like saving just in case if the business doesn’t scale or doesn’t make as much money and profit as what you might think. So that’s a very good thing that you did that before you make that and transition.
So what are some of the major challenges now that you’re doing it full time? Do you have a new set of challenges that you’re dealing with now? Yeah.
Nick Kopp (05:25)
I think
The new set of challenges is going from so it’s mainly been mostly just me and my wife doing this full time and we’ve had some help from contractors outside of this, but my major challenge has been letting go delegation. I’ve done before delegating. Now that I want to do it faster and I wanna scale up higher, I need to delegate. I don’t have the time
I can do all the different tasks that are required, but I just don’t have the time to do them all right now today. So I’m learning how to delegate those out to different places. We brought on a number of new partners and employees to help us out with all of this and I’ve just been learning how to work with them. I haven’t really had much management experience and especially
In this world it’s completely different than my management experience in engineering world. So I’ve been learning how to work with creatives and work with logistics type of partners and licensing type of partners and make sure that everybody has what they need to keep going and keep working.
Jason Hsieh (06:26)
For sure, for sure. How big is the team now? So
Nick Kopp (06:29)
Yeah, so right now we’ve got over 10 different people that do some sort of facet. And we’ve also started working with some more major partners to take on major areas of the business. One of the big things that we’ve been doing is I’ve been organizing the logistics and shipping of our products from the manufacturer in China to wherever they need to go. Okay. And we’re working to
Onboard a new partner, we’re going to be working with AllPlay to take care of all of that stuff. So being able to kind of just ship delegate it out completely to a company that has a significant amount of experience and a logistics setup. They know exactly what they’re doing way better than than I do. And it’s been great to be able to let go of some of that stuff.
Jason Hsieh (07:13)
Mm, for sure. Yeah. And one more thing I want to touch on, or I guess elaborate on, is when you talk about delegation. I think that’s something that a lot of the business owner and entrepreneur we all struggle with. I think my philosophy is alone obviously sometimes we want to be a perfectionist and try to do everything correctly ourselves. But it’s actually better for someone else to do it at eighty percent of how much we can do instead of doing everything ourselves because it’s just gonna drive us nuts. Try to do everything.
Nick Kopp (07:38)
Yeah.
I’ve been really struggling with that and trying to take the mindset of if somebody else can do it, they should be doing it, not me. I should be doing the things that only I can do. I think I learned that from what was it, the four hour work week book? Uh-huh. Basically delegate out anything that you can do. And then you’ve got it exactly. I think one of the traps that we as creators who have been doing this for a long time, 10 years.
We’ve been doing it the way that we want to do it. And just because somebody does it different and it may not be up to our standards or up to what we want it to be, doesn’t mean it’s wrong or it’s bad. And them taking that off of your plate is ultimately a good thing because then you can go do something that nobody else can do, like come up with new ideas or develop new business partnerships because you’re talking with new people.
Jason Hsieh (08:27)
Yeah, that’s a very good point. And actually, there’s a very easy exercise I’ll recommend for you to do. And you can do it on a piece of paper or if you prefer spreadsheet, you can do it on a spreadsheet. This is a a business exercise called Delegate and Elevate. This is how you work. First, you list down all the current tasks and responsibility that you have yourself because you might be wearing five, six, seven different hats inside a small company, which I do myself when I was scaling.
But right now I have 22 employees, so I couldn’t do all the tasks myself anymore with the scale of our size. So with this exercise, after you list down all the tasks and responsibility, the next thing you want to do is start putting tasks into four different buckets. The first bucket is all the things you don’t like and you really hate. You don’t want to do them, delegate, eliminate, or just automate those tasks that you really hated and you just couldn’t do it really well. Then the next category is the thing that you don’t like, but you kind of can do it.
You can do it decently, but you just don’t enjoy doing them. And try to delegate, automate, and eliminate those tasks as much as you can. The next category is a little bit tricky. This is where a lot of people get stuck on is the type of task that you like and you are good at. Some people will continue doing those because you kind of can do it and you kind of like them. You don’t really hate doing that. But the final list of category is called the zone of genius.
Is the type of task that only you can do as a founder and you do it so well and you love it and you really bring you energy by doing that. For me as an owner and the founder is connecting with people, connecting with different partners and like coming up with directions and like leadership for the team. That’s for me. But this is a very simple exercise that you can do. That I would highly recommend and also for our listener that’s struggling with delegation.
This is a very simple exercise. It should only take you about thirty minutes to start writing things down and just like draw four boxes and put all the tasks into one of those boxes to figure out like you want to eliminate all the button two categories and try to see how you can focus in only on your zone of genius long term if you really want to grow and have a team of people surrounding you to make the business more successful.
Nick Kopp (10:34)
Yeah, I think that’s a spectacular idea. It really I think would help with defining the job descriptions and responsibilities for people as you bring them on. Yeah. One of the hard things for me has been, well, let’s this person wants to help. Let’s bring them on to help us out. And we wanna do can you handle content creation or or content
But it’s really unclear about exactly what that means and what those individual tasks are. And something I’ve learned recently is I need to write very specific job descriptions with this is the tasks that you have to do. This is the expectations, this is the results that we expect from you. Otherwise people kind of do what they want to do and may not be exactly what you want the help with.
Jason Hsieh (11:13)
Yeah, yeah.
Nick Kopp (11:17)
It may be the things that you are actually wanting to do and are good at. So being very clear on those expectations. I really love your idea for that exercise because it can really define like these are the job descriptions I need to write.
Jason Hsieh (11:29)
Yeah, pretty much all the things you hate and you’re not good at. You want someone else to do those. So very simple exercise. And another thing I would also suggest this is for you and also for our listener, for those of you who is struggling with delegation, look into hiring help from overseas. Like for us, we have 20, more than 20 employees based in Philippines right now in the team. It’s just a lot more affordable to hire from overseas than hiring from the state with North America. And also Philippine.
English is one of their official language. So some of my employees actually speak better than me because English is my third language. I also speak Chinese and Japanese fluently. So you know I still have some kind of weird Asian accent I couldn’t quite get rid of. But but that’s something to consider and this is a fact I want to share. A lot of people don’t know how big of a like a cost of living gap there is between United States and other Asian countries. For example, this is the latest stats.
I actually just asked Chat GTP to make sure I got the right information. The current 2026 average for a fresh college graduate that live in Philippines, guess how much they make a month? Can you guess, Nick?
Nick Kopp (12:31)
So in in like American dollars?
Jason Hsieh (12:33)
In US dollar a month for a full time position you get fresh out of college in Philippines. Three four hundred dollar. Full time. That is the gap. That is the gap of cost of living that a lot of business owners didn’t realize because for the same position you hire one full time person in US, you probably can hire at least five in like somewhere overseas.
Nick Kopp (12:38)
Three thousand a month?
Wow.
Jason Hsieh (12:56)
So this is how you can leverage your resources. And for the business like us, like in the boardgame industry, we don’t really need people in person. Right. I never work with my team member in person. We all work in front of computer from our own home anyway. So why do you even want to bother like hire someone based in the US? It doesn’t make any sense for me as a business owner.
Nick Kopp (13:15)
Yeah, sounds like that sounds amazing. It’s something that we’ve considered in the back of our minds, but really haven’t looked into much. Right now we do have a foreign licensing agent who’s working with us with foreign companies to deal with, but getting help from other countries, how do you start? Well, like where’s the starting point?
Jason Hsieh (13:33)
Very good question. So the best place to start, I would recommend, is onlinejob.ph. It is an online forum designed for Philippine-based like workers, like remote workers that they are trying to find a job to work in other countries. They want to find a job that works for a US company or Canadian company, or other European companies. That’s a really good, like very easy job for to start out with. Just create a job post, like you mentioned, doing that exercise and figure out what other positions you want to outsource and hire.
Then just post a job and you can get people for four hundred, five hundred dollars a month for entry level position, really affordable that’s working forty hours a week, hundred and sixty hour a month for you, that you don’t need to do all this work yourself.
Nick Kopp (14:14)
Yeah, how would you compare the the quality of the work to maybe like
Jason Hsieh (14:18)
About
Setting expectation, as long as you set the right expectation with your worker or your employees, and you know, make the job descriptions and the KPI or the key performance indicator very clear. This is exactly what I’m expecting you to do on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. I have no problem, and I’ve been doing this since 2016, it’s gonna be 10 years for as well, hiring from Philippine. So, and I always wanted to outsource from day one because.
I just like you when I first started, I also have a full time job. I have no time. I have to have people I have to delegate in order for me to get things done. So yeah, but I would just say hiring is same as hiring from any other employees in US. You set the right expectation.
Nick Kopp (14:59)
So wow, yeah, and I’ve I’ve corresponded with s some of your employees so far and to me I feel like I wouldn’t have known that they were not in the United States. Yeah.
Jason Hsieh (15:10)
Yeah, the ninety percent of our team is based in Philippines right now. Wow. Besides me and my sister, we’ll it’s a family company. So my me and my sister is based in US, then the rest of the team, everyone else is based in Philippines right now. I know some people like to hire from India or Pakistan, but I just prefer all my team to be in the same country. Some people like to hire one from each country. I think that’s too much for me. I prefer to keep everyone in the same country. And for example, this year in during the summer
Me and my sister actually flying into Philippines to have a retreat in person with the rest of the team for five days as well.
Nick Kopp (15:43)
That’s amazing. That’s great. I think that’s an important thing to do that if I do definitely believe there’s a lot of benefits for working remotely and working with people from all around the world. Yeah. I do think it’s also very important to get FaceTime with people every so often just to connect as people. I think that when you’re working with somebody, it’s much easier and the information flows faster and the trust builds faster when you’re actually in.
Person and getting to know them as a person.
Jason Hsieh (16:12)
That’s actually one of the biggest challenges for me building a 100% remote team is that personal connection. Yeah. Because I feel like I actually don’t have any friend. I just work from home all the time. I don’t even get out of the house. So it’s sometimes it can be very lonely because when you have a day job, you go to office, you can chat to people over coffee break or whatever. When you are the entrepreneur, when you are the owner and you work from home.
You have like no one else to talk to beside your employees. So that is like a challenge in itself. And that’s actually very common in the toys and game industry because a lot of us just work from home. Yeah. And we don’t have an office or anything.
Nick Kopp (16:47)
The cool thing is about board games and is that oftentimes if you’re in a major city, there are most likely a group of people that get together every week and play board games. So it’s a great way to test your products and to get to know people in real life. I make it a absolute priority to at least go out of the the house every day to see some people.
Jason Hsieh (16:58)
Yes, that’s true.
Nice.
Nick Kopp (17:11)
And to at least once a week go play games with a game group. And then I’m sure that there’s also small business groups in every main
Jason Hsieh (17:19)
Also
Run your own game group as well, or is this attending someone else?
Nick Kopp (17:23)
I have delegated that task to one of my friends down the street. And he’s done a spectacular job at at running the group. We have run game groups in the past, but that does take a lot of effort.
Jason Hsieh (17:27)
Okay.
Great job for delegation.
Time, yeah. How about tournament? Because you have so many games now in your product line. Have you think about running on tournament for something?
Nick Kopp (17:44)
Yes.
So we’re actually I’m delegating that task also. We’re teaming up with a group that does a board game convention every year in the local Houston area. Okay. They are gonna help us run tournaments at different stores with like a championship at the convention in May. So that’s gonna be super fun.
Jason Hsieh (17:54)
Nice.
That’ll be a fun event. Which game is that for?
Nick Kopp (18:04)
That is for our new game Reef and Ruins. It Was on Kickstarter last year and it’s gonna be shipping to backers in April. What’s really neat about this game is you can play with a hundred people all running at the same time.
Jason Hsieh (18:07)
Okay.
I see. I see.
Whoa, how does that work? If you don’t mind spending a minute talking about the gameplay
Nick Kopp (18:22)
So what how it works is everybody gets a sheet kind of like Yahtzee. Where and then there’s a dice roll. Okay. And you get to decide what happens on your sheet with the dice that are rolled for everybody. So what we’ll do is we’ll put the dice up on a big screen and then everybody will decide what to do with the dice and you play 16 turns and then whoever has the highest score at the end of the game wins. And so you can play with a 100 people and just
See whoever’s has the highest score.
Jason Hsieh (18:48)
Almost like a bingo.
Nick Kopp (18:50)
Yeah, it’s kind of like bingo, but in this case, it’s like if bingo had a whole bunch of like combos and puzzles that you could do. I see. Where if I put the dice in this area it can trigger a bunch of different actions slightly like yeah it like because I got an 064 over here, I get a whole bunch of more numbers on the other sheets.
Jason Hsieh (19:09)
How many dice for each of the rounds? You say 16 rounds. How many round? Okay. Then you can allocate the dice to different slots on the board, I guess. I see, I see. Okay, very, very interesting gameplay mechanism. And I you’re very prolific, obviously as a publishing company. How do you get all this idea of the new game that you’re like publishing and coming out?
Nick Kopp (19:12)
There’s three dice. Three dice.
Exactly, exactly. You got it.
Yeah, that’s another important thing to learn as a small business owner. Everybody’s all about the hustle culture. I got to be working yeah a 100 hours a week 24/7 right? We’ve learned that it’s important to take a few hours every day and take take a break and and go outside into nature, walk around. We’re Houston, Texas, so we get to go to the beach every so often. Yeah.
Jason Hsieh (19:53)
Yeah.
Nick Kopp (19:53)
My wife and I are just sitting there and we just kind of think about things and that’s where we get a lot of our really cool game ideas. That we wouldn’t have got if we were just kinda hustling doing things on computers all the time. So
Jason Hsieh (20:06)
Yeah, that’s a good piece of advice. You know, just go out and decompress and sometimes let the idea flow through you as well.
Nick Kopp (20:11)
Yeah,
It’s really hard for me as a new business owner to kind of accept that I as part of my job I need to take a break. It’s very important.
Jason Hsieh (20:19)
Yeah, sometimes
That’s very important. I have the same problem as well. Sometimes you kind of need to slow down to go faster. Yeah. It’s kind of counterintuitive. Yeah.
Nick Kopp (20:29)
And I’ve seen a lot of startups think like, I got to keep doing something. But you get burnt out or you kind of spiral around in directions where if you would have stopped and thought for five minutes, you would have figured out that I could have cut off at a week’s worth of work by just doing this thing.
Jason Hsieh (20:33)
You get burnt out.
Yeah, because this is also a common thing I see because with our podcast, we have interviewed almost a 180 entrepreneurs within the industry already. The most common struggle people have is like a lot of people started as a designer, but then when they become a full time business owner, they struggle with the business side of things. Yeah. They can come up with all the design, but they don’t know how to do marketing, hiring, delegations, and all the other business stuff. Like for you, do you have any piece of advice based on your experience that you want to share with some of our audience?
Nick Kopp (21:12)
Yeah. And I’ve kind of realized that because I grew up with my parents as entrepreneurs that I have basically a cheat code over other people who have never thought about business. Yeah. And I’ve taken accounting classes in my schooling and so I’ve realized that I have a leg up over other people. But it’s important, I think it goes back to the delegation in figuring out what you’re good at.
And as soon as you can bring on a partner or somebody who can help who’s really good and wants to work on like the business aspect of things, there are people and the problem is as a designer, you may not be in the circles of the people who really love doing business and accounting and marketing and such. And so I think it’s important to like get out of your designer circles.
And maybe at some business to business trade shows we were talking earlier about GAMA. GAMA, yeah, yeah, yeah. And going there and meeting people who are there to provide that kind of service. And I think that’s the really important thing is if you wanna really grow and scale, you’ve got to work with a team. You can’t do it on your own.
Jason Hsieh (22:17)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. You’ll get burnt out for sure. I think there’s a wonderful business book I will also recommend, which I read. It’s called Who, Not How. That’s a book about like how to find the right people, about delegations, about scaling, team buildings, all that kind of stuff.
Nick Kopp (22:32)
Writing this down ’cause that’s one of my big things is I want to try to improve my business skills. I’m an engineer by trade and by schooling. Business is just something that I’ve kind of
Jason Hsieh (22:42)
It doesn’t matter what type of business either you are in the toys and game industry or not, people is still one of the core element with any kind of business. Even in the age of AI, you still need people to monitor the AI output because AI still make mistakes with Chatgpt it always made up some random stuff. It’s like not there. So
Nick Kopp (23:00)
Yeah, and the research shows it’s probably not gonna ever not make mistakes based on the way that it was developed. It’s always gonna be having those kind of problems. It’s always gonna have some you’re gonna need a human to kind of decide. Is that the right thing?
Jason Hsieh (23:12)
Is that the right thing? Yeah. Is are they just making up some stuff that’s not what is going on? Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that’s definitely a very, very important aspect. So my next question is looking ahead here in the next one, three, or maybe five years, what is your vision for the company and what is the goal you’ll have set for the companies?
Nick Kopp (23:17)
Exactly.
Yeah. So my vision is to bring on more partners to help us really scale so we could focus in on the things that we love, which is making new games and products. Okay. We have a big roadmap for this year where we want to do up to four crowdfunding campaigns. We are so excited for this one. It’s called Logic and Lore.
Jason Hsieh (23:51)
Okay.
Nick Kopp (23:56)
It actually came out at Gen Con last year and then sold out almost immediately. The problem is now people want to buy it, but we don’t have any to sell. So what we’re doing is we’re coming back to crowdfunding with it and a new expansion. But we’re so excited about that one. The reception has been amazing and throughout the game forums it’s
Jason Hsieh (24:00)
Congrats. Okay.
Any coffee? Okay.
Expansion, okay, okay, okay.
Nick Kopp (24:20)
It’s ranking pretty high. So I’m excited to see where that one goes and if it can turn into something that we really support with tournaments and to kind of make that our put us on the map title on into the major space because we’ve been kind of in the niche kind of area where this one I’m hoping will help break that barrier. But we’re also wanting to cater to our niche of
Kind of weird games with weird themes and mechanics. I have behind me a game called Way Too Many Cats. It’s got a whole bunch of cats on the front. We’re gonna have a second edition of that with a whole bunch of more cat games coming out. And then I’m super excited about a project that we haven’t announced yet. Coming in 2027 that I think is gonna be really helping to redefine the genre of games and two player games. So
That is kind of our roadmap. And hopefully we can turn this into some product lines that we support for the next three to five years.
Jason Hsieh (25:17)
Yeah. And one thing I think is very unique with you is you have launched over 20 different Kickstarter campaign, right? Right. What are some of the things that you learn along the way because not a lot of people have did 20 of them. Yeah.
Nick Kopp (25:28)
So we started in 2016 yeah, where it was still relatively a new thing. Yeah. You can kind of put together something on cards and just take a picture of it and say, I’m gonna make this. Trust me, it’s gonna look amazing. Yeah. To right now where you basically have to bring a finished product on the crowdfunding. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So some of the big things that I’ve learned is well, it goes back to just the delegation before I would
Do main a lot of the work, like the the graphics design and the the layout and such and bringing on help. I just can’t can can’t say enough about how good people who are really good at things yeah can make your product look when you ask them for help. So I that’s been one of the biggest learning I think is been like bringing on a graphics designer to help us out with
Making our graphics look very professional. Okay. And bringing on some people who are really good at reading and correcting rule books to help make those look good as well. So that’s been I think the major thing is that at the beginning it was just me and my wife and we did all of it. We had a local artist or a friend that helped out with art. To now
Nick Kopp (26:38)
Each of our campaigns is probably at least like eight people that have some sort of input
Jason Hsieh (26:44)
What kind of strategy do you recommend marketing wise? Do you do a lot of meta campaign leading up to the launch, email leading up to the launch? What are some of the strategies that’s working for you?
Nick Kopp (26:54)
Yeah, so marketing it’s all about the number of people that see your game yeah and then want to know more about it. So we do a combination of going to different game conventions, meeting people face to face and showing them, Hey, look, look at this, it looks great. And then getting their email address so we can make sure that they can follow along with the campaign. Okay. In this case,
Jason Hsieh (27:06)
Okay.
Yeah.
Nick Kopp (27:18)
We are trying some new things for the upcoming campaign of Logic and Lore. We have a list out there. So you if you go to the website now, you’ll see that you can sign up for some free upgrades. Only if you sign up before the campaign you can get about 15 dollars worth of free upgrades just by giving us your email address and letting us send you some email.
Jason Hsieh (27:31)
Okay.
That’s a good way to do it. I know some company also like to take like a one dollar deposit. It’s like a deposit company almost. Have you tried that? Yes.
Nick Kopp (27:52)
I’ve heard about that. I’ve seen that people do that. Were talking to some of our crowd and they felt like at that point it’s a little bit overdone at this point. It’s great to get a very specific metrics about whether or not you’re ready to launch your campaign. But in this case what I’m
Jason Hsieh (28:04)
Is it?
Nick Kopp (28:13)
Trying is just to sign up for this and then kind of a appeal and help educate the people that are really interested in why it’s important to back the project on day one for the success of the project. So I’m hoping that we can treat our backers as humans and that if they see us as humans and they can see why hey it’s important to do this.
I’m gonna go down that route rather than trying to kind of I don’t know coerce them into hey, you spent money, you probably should back this kind of thinking.
Jason Hsieh (28:45)
Mm, I see, I see. Yeah, obviously different companies have different kind of strategy for sure, for sure. So yeah. Okay. So thank you so much for sharing that insight as well. So as we’re kind of wrapping up today’s interview, if you have to share just one piece of advice with someone that’s just getting started in the toys and game industry, what would that be? Yeah.
Nick Kopp (29:04)
I think one of the major things is somebody loves playing board games, at least in the board game scene, they love playing board games, they played board games for their entire life, and then maybe they came up with some new ideas, and then they came up with, well, I’m gonna make my own board game. Yeah. And then now they’ve gotten to the point where like, okay, so what do I do? I have a little board game. What’s the next step? Yeah. Some people are think, okay, I’m gonna go to
Kickstarter or crowdfunding and people are gonna buy my game. They’re gonna love it. And they don’t realize how much work it is to publish a game to get it manufactured in bulk and work with partners in China to get that manufactured and do it cost effectively and the logistics it takes. Yes. If you want to design games, there are people who just do that. And then they
Pitch their designs to publishing content take care of all the rest. So I think the most important thing to think about is to be really truthful with yourself and whether you want to do the work that it requires. Because at some point you’ll realize that you’re spending maybe 90% of your time to 95% of your time on things that are not designing board games.
Jason Hsieh (29:54)
Publishing. Yeah.
Mm. Yes, yes, yes. It’s all the other business stuff that you need to do. Exactly. Yeah. Okay. That’s a very good piece of advice. And you know, thank you for sharing that two paths, you know.
Nick Kopp (30:18)
Exactly. Yep. So
Yeah, exactly. And it’s really hard to be honest. At least for me, it’s really hard to be honest with myself. Like, I could do it. But I would say take a look at some of the resources out there. We have some blogs on our website at weirdgiraffegames.com about like the work that we do. Yeah, yeah. And then I would highly recommend checking out Stonemeyer Games and Jamie Stegmeyer, he’s got so many blogs about the work that
Needs to be done to make a Kickstarter campaign successful.
Jason Hsieh (30:49)
Successful. Yeah. Yeah. It’s a lot of work behind the scenes.
Nick Kopp (30:52)
A lot of work.
Jason Hsieh (30:53)
I see. Thank you so much for sharing that. So for our audience and our listener that would like to learn a little bit more about you and your company, where is the best place for people to find you online?
Nick Kopp (31:02)
I think the best place to find me online is by going to weirdgiraffegames.com like it says behind me. It’s kind of hard to spell and we tried to get a shorter URL, but the rest of them were taken. So Yeah. weirdgiraffegames.com You’ll find links to our upcoming Kickstarter campaign for logic and lore second edition with the variants expansion.
Jason Hsieh (31:16)
Okay.
Nick Kopp (31:26)
And you’ll find about us and all contact information. And I’m very happy to answer questions if people have questions or point them in the right direction for resources.
Jason Hsieh (31:36)
Mm, I see. Okay. Thank you so much. We’ll make sure we put that in the show note. And thank you so much for your time today, sharing your story, your journey, and your experience with the rest of our audience.
Nick Kopp (31:45)
Yeah,
Thank you so much for having me, Jason. I really appreciated you guys reaching out and I love talking about this stuff, so I’m more than happy to talk to anybody who has any questions.
Jason Hsieh (31:54)
For sure. Thank you so much for so willing to share. And thank you for our audience for tuning in to this episode of Toy Business Unboxed Podcast. I hope today’s conversation gave you some practical insight and fresh inspiration for growing your own toys or game brands. This podcast is proudly brought to you by Toy Launch, a leading marketing and growth partner for Toys and Game Company. At Toy Launch, we help brands scale on Amazon and beyond through full service account management, advertising, SEO, creative, catalog optimization, influencer marketing, and more.
If you’re looking for a proven team that understands the toys and game industry and digital marketing, we’re here to help. If you want a free personalized strategy session for your brand, your opportunity, and your best next step, you can schedule a free consultation session with us. Just visit toy-launch.com/schedule. And if you want to connect with other toys and game founders, join our free community Toys and Game Launchpad at toy-launch.com/group, or you can find our group on Facebook as well.
For more resource update and industry insight, visit us at anytime at toy-launch.com. Until next time, keep innovating, keep creating, keep bringing joys through toys. This is Jason Hsieh signing off on the Toy Business Unboxed Podcast. We’ll see you in the next episode. Thank you so much, everyone. Have a good one. Bye. Bye.
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