How This Family Business Stays Close

Jason Hsieh (00:00)
Welcome back to another episode of Toy Business Unboxed Podcast. Today I’m excited to sit down with Bryan and the rest of the family team. That’s behind Ghetti Games, a family-owned company on a mission to get people talking, laughing, and connecting in the real world. We’ll be discussing the journey of launching their first games and also navigating some challenges in publishing and also their most recent successful Kickstarter launch.

So thank you so much, Bryan and Michael and Carson and Angie on joining today’s interview.

Michael Tamietti (00:30)
Thank you, Jason. Appreciate time for having us on. Yeah, thank you.

Bryan Tamietti (00:32)
Thank you for having

Jason Hsieh (00:34)
So first of all, just to be transparent, this is my first time interviewing so many people at the same time. So we’ll see how the dynamical, hopefully we don’t talk over each other too much, but we’ll try our best. But first of all, I want to start off with the interview. Like how did the idea of the first game even came to life?

Bryan Tamietti (00:53)
Yeah, Oh Crud We’ve played many games over the years. We would go camping, have family parties, play games, and you’re always looking for a new game, right? So we found a few games that we kind of liked certain aspects for or about. And we, I don’t know, I think we were camping one day and we decided

And you know let’s modify this game a little bit and maybe we can make a release our own game and anyway one day we talked about it for several years and one day I just finally decided

Let’s just do it, make a game. So just put our heads down and got everything done that we needed to do. And we released it in November of 2021. We released it on Amazon. That’s where we sell most of the games.

Jason Hsieh (01:36)
Okay, one. Okay.

Mm-hmm.

I see. And from the original idea to a actual kind of product in hand, how long does that took you and the team?

Bryan Tamietti (01:51)
Was probably several months Carson I and Michael, I mean we all kind of had some input Just adding some different dynamics to the game, but I would say within about four months we pretty much had it all and our work wise and everything just we did our own our work and

Just put it together.

Jason Hsieh (02:06)
How did that go with manufacturing in the US?

Bryan Tamietti (02:09)
Yeah, we manufacture the games in the US honored it to be a made in America game. I was thinking that, you know, cause a little bit more people would be willing to spend the extra money to buy a made in America game. The one challenge we had, the entire game was made in America, except the dice I could not find a source in the United States to make the dice. So that was out sourced to China.

We had the dice shipped here to the United States. Then they were all put with the rest of the components and they were actually made in Florida, the first batch.

Jason Hsieh (02:37)
I see. What is the reason that you couldn’t find the dice manufacturer? Is it because of the design of the dice or is it a very specialized dice?

Bryan Tamietti (02:44)
No, They’re very simple dice. They’re just a little bit bigger than your typical small dice. I called around know, we didn’t have AI back. Just ask Rock who all the dice manufacturers are in the United States.

Angie Tamietti (02:58)
There you go.

Bryan Tamietti (02:59)
Yeah,

But we wanted make dice, know, just quality plastic dice. But it is what it is. We got it done. And that’s how we did it for the first, actually, three batches of games. So.

Jason Hsieh (03:00)
Oh okay.

Okay, okay. And when do you transfer into manufacturer in overseas?

Bryan Tamietti (03:16)
It was our second batch. We had some problems with the first batch. Let’s just say that.

Jason Hsieh (03:20)
Okay, okay, okay. Yeah.

Bryan Tamietti (03:22)
One of the cards was misprinted.

The manufacturer had to undo all the packages, reprint them and reinsert. It was just a small mistake, but it turned out to be a big mistake because it was printed on one card in every deck. After that, we decided, you know, we started shopping around a little bit. I didn’t really want to go to China, but I noticed

Jason Hsieh (03:36)
I see.

Bryan Tamietti (03:44)
Some of our competitors were using some sources in Poland. So we checked out some of those. We ended up using another manufacturer in Poland and they did a great job. They really did. They did a fantastic job.

Jason Hsieh (03:54)
Okay.

Bryan Tamietti (03:54)
So that’s what I did the next two batches. We’re on our four batch now and this one the fourth batch which is the deluxe edition. Okay. That was made in China.

Jason Hsieh (04:04)
Mm.

Bryan Tamietti (04:04)
I see.

You know, doing everything we can to hopefully one day makes money. Right now we’re just doing it for the fun.

Jason Hsieh (04:14)
I see. So I have a question specifically for Michael and Carson. When did two of you got involved into the business? Is that from the very beginning?

Carson Tamietti (04:23)
I would say more so into Cat-in-8. We did a little bit with playtesting and giving input or advice for Oh Crud. Yeah. But especially for me, my involvement was definitely Cat-in-8. I mean if we want to jump into the story with that we can or we can wait. So we had just moved at the time, and we didn’t have internet for

Jason Hsieh (04:40)
Okay, you can share that. Yeah.

Carson Tamietti (04:46)
Six or eight months and we were like, man, what are we gonna do? You know, past time. We have a bunch of games, right? Let’s play some games. And so we were playing games and then we were thinking, man, we could make our own games, you know, like we just made Oh Crud. We could take a lot of these ideas. And then we had the thought we had just played like two or three games and we’re like, man, we can make a really fun combination of these games, right? And so we literally thought Michael gave me the idea for

A game that moves like labyrinth and we had just played sequence with lining up tokens in a sequence and I thought why not make things that line up while you move the board around, try to make fun combos, fun interaction, right? And that’s when we came up with the first idea for Cat-in-8, which wasn’t Cat-in-8 at the time. It was we were thinking, you know, a bunch of different other names, different brands or, you know, themes. And our very first playtest was on

Paper that we cut into squares and I swear we played with Skittles as the tokens. Our first play test, we were like, Yeah, I don’t know if this game’s very fun. You know, you try to push it, the paper slides on top of each other. And then we abandoned the idea for a a few weeks, but then we came back with cut out cardboard and actual tokens we could put on the cardboard. Okay. And that’s when we knew like we have something here, you know, we need to proceed to do this.

Jason Hsieh (06:02)
I see, I see, I see. How about you for you, Michael? Do you also got involved on early?

Michael Tamietti (06:06)
Yeah, I would agree. Mostly similar timeline. It’s definitely my dad took the reins on Oh Crud and turned it around, made it into a game. I was gonna add when he was telling his story to it. We have my dad that’s colored blind and my sister that’s colored blind. So he would put these things together and then he’d have us check it, like does this look okay visually? Like is this the color that it’s supposed to be?

But he came up with all the different symbols and stuff so they could be differentiated for everybody. Which was kind of cool to see that, you know, he went and just did that, put it all together. We made sure that it all worked as a game cohesively and I would agree that me and Carson basically just helped play test, make sure everything worked, checked artwork for him. And then Cat-in-8 was definitely a when we were more involved with

Bryan Tamietti (06:33)
Hmm.

Jason Hsieh (06:51)
Involved in the project. Okay. Okay. Got it. Thank you for sharing. And I always find the family owned business a very interesting dynamic. Like before the interview I mentioned, like I also run a business with my sister. I think that has been a very actually put very productive. I think me and my sister has been become closer since we were running the business together as well. Did you also see that in your interaction within your family? Did your family’s relationship actually become better

Or maybe it actually became worse because of all the fighting and all the issues coming from the business. What is your like experience, especially from two of you so far getting involved into the business?

Angie Tamietti (07:28)
Yes and no. So we we’re all we’re all finding out that we’re all kind of stubborn. It is nice that we get to spend time together. Like if we go to conventions and stuff like that, we all get to go and then we can kind of compare notes and see what we learned and didn’t learn or did you guys know this? So that’s really nice, is that there’s four of us to kind of split up the stuff too. But then there’s four of us. So

It’s like, okay, who wants to do this? Who wants to do that? Who’s gonna try try this? You know, and it’s like none of us wanna do marketing or social media because none of us like that’s really important.

Bryan Tamietti (08:01)
Awesome.

Carson Tamietti (08:03)
Yeah, so I definitely think there’s positives and negatives, right? Like all things in life. Positives is we already know each other quite well and we’re learning new things about each other as well as we all have different inputs on what we like and don’t like. The downside is we all have things that we like and don’t like, right? Trying to cater to the things that we want in each game and the things that we don’t want in each game. Trying to fight for our voice and opinion, I suppose, while also being able to

Have compromises that come with that. As well as it’s nice being able to just casually go into like a workflow, you know, like sitting around dinner talking about work. But at the same time, sometimes that also eats into our own like lives, I suppose, of life becoming work, which in itself is good and bad, you know, good to get things done, bad to not have like your own time, you know, to yourselves as well.

Jason Hsieh (08:50)
I see, I see, I see. How much are you both in the business full time now or is it just part time helping out the business?

Carson Tamietti (08:56)
I would like to make it full time become my career to get this to where it needs to be.

Michael Tamietti (09:01)
Yeah, so both both technically it’s more part time.

Jason Hsieh (09:04)
Okay, okay. I see, I see, I see. Well, do you enjoy the type of work or do you how do you like the industry so far?

Carson Tamietti (09:10)
I surprisingly really enjoy this. Like I think that I have a lot of I don’t know, experience playing games, right? And I’m really enjoying creating my own games. As well as the people in this industry are amazing. Going to Board Game Geek, GAMA, everyone’s so friendly, everyone’s so welcoming. And I definitely could see myself being a part of that.

Jason Hsieh (09:28)
Mm, I see, I see. Thank you for sharing that.

Michael Tamietti (09:30)
It’s been awesome to sit down with some people to play test our game and kind of showcase our game or whatever, but everybody’s just so friendly and willing to just learn a new game with you, play other games with you, just very friendly, open people. It’s it’s been really good.

Jason Hsieh (09:45)
I see, I see, see. How about from your perspective, Bryan? do you feel like they are carrying more of the weight now since they joined the business so you can be more hands off and let the brothers do the work?

Bryan Tamietti (09:55)
Yeah, it’s definitely nice to have additional help. There’s always plenty to do when you’re running your own business, especially starting a new game. This was our biggest game for sure. Oh Crud was fairly simple compared to this game, this Cat-in-8 game, especially with the expansion packs. The base game wasn’t too bad, but then the expansion packs, it got a little complicated. But again,

I wouldn’t have been able to probably pull off the expansion packs without Michael and Carson because they were very good about, I mean, there’s a lot of different cards that can affect each other and testing all that and, you know, trying to decide what is the right approach for the various outcomes. Anyway, they’ve really stepped up their game there and I think it’s been good. You know, it’s difficult at times,

Because you’re a family, you can’t fire anybody. Can’t just, you know, we’re a family. So if things don’t go your way, you just have to accept it and everybody’s got to get along and we move on to the next thing. So that’s the way it is.

Jason Hsieh (10:46)
Ha ha ha.

Well, looking back at your journey of launching the business and getting everyone else involved, what has been some of the biggest challenges that you have faced so far building and scaling the business?

Bryan Tamietti (11:06)
Wow, there’s a lot of challenges. Social media.

Angie Tamietti (11:09)
Social media. That’s

Our biggest challenge.

Jason Hsieh (11:12)
I see. Okay.

Carson Tamietti (11:13)
And marketing along with it. One of them.

Bryan Tamietti (11:15)
There’s challenges around every corner. Let’s face it. Everything is a challenge, but that’s all life is. Life is just about solving problems. Running a business is no different. You just solve problem after problem after problem. And sometimes things just are smooth, but then other times they’re not. Learning all these new systems. Everything we do is a new technology platform, whether it’s social media marketing, Facebook.

Google or whatever or Amazon. We’re selling on Amazon, it’s its own little monster. It’s its own ginormous monster.

Jason Hsieh (11:47)
Yeah, yeah. Amazon’s

Bryan Tamietti (11:48)
There’s just so much I, you know, I don’t know everything that I can do on Amazon and trying to figure out how I am going to do something on Amazon is a whole nother challenge. Luckily with AI, I’ve found that actually using Grok, just asking Grok, I actually get better tech support from Grok than I do from Amazon or.

Jason Hsieh (12:06)
I’m not surprised. Yeah, customer support support for a seller is not good.

Bryan Tamietti (12:11)
Item by item here’s take step one two three and if that doesn’t work try this and if that doesn’t work try this yeah

Jason Hsieh (12:16)
I see, I see. Well, but since we’re on the topic of Amazon, I know we our team also have the honor of serving your brand on Amazon in the past couple of months. And I think it has been a really a joy working together with your team and our team. I just have some question regarding about like your experience with us as well. Like what were some of the challenges that you were facing with Amazon before you’re working with Toy Launch and our team?

Bryan Tamietti (12:39)
Well, I mean, like I said, there’s a lot of challenges on Amazon. Things happen. Think everything’s going fine. And then suddenly they send you a notice that there’s a problem, you know, with whatever it could be anything. You know, we’ve had our listing completely disappear early on. This was early on. Everything was going fine. And then our listing disappeared. Anyway, just strange things can happen.

Nothing drastic has happened lately, but I think one big challenge is the marketing side because you can spend a lot of money on advertising, whether it’s Facebook or any kind of social media, or if you’re just advertising on Amazon, you can spend a ton of money. But what actually makes sense, that’s the hard thing is trying to figure out, what am I really making money at? At the end of the day, I spend X amount of dollars advertising and sell it.

And we sell games, we do sell games, but how do you manage that so that it’s profitable? So that’s been one thing that you’ve helped us with immensely is taking over that side of it and using your expertise and your tools. I think that’s been really helpful.

Jason Hsieh (13:39)
I see, thank you. And what kind of result have you seen since partnering with Toy Launch and our team so far?

Bryan Tamietti (13:44)
Yeah, I mean, so far it’s been good, you know, you’re keeping up, you know, you have your numbers that you abide by and you have to meet, you know, the objectives or where it doesn’t make sense. And so far you’ve been able to to manage that. So, yeah, kudos to you, you know, for keeping up with all that, because it’s really difficult for the average person or, you know, if you’re not doing it all day, every day.

And we only have really one product right now on Amazon. Yeah. Yeah. So I can’t imagine these people that have multiple products. That’s a lot to keep on top of really.

Jason Hsieh (14:14)
Maintain yeah and amazon keep on changing their rule changing their compliance requirement lab requirement that’s like changes constantly as well sometimes hard to keep up and what will you say to other toys and game brand owner that’s listening to our podcast considering working with us?

Bryan Tamietti (14:31)
Well, I would say if you value your time, it’s nice, you know, shifting some of that responsibility off to somebody else who can take over and do it effectively. You know, I would say, you know, if you can focus on creating additional games, creating new good games, and let somebody help, you know, assist with the marketing side, I mean,

I think that’s extremely helpful.

Jason Hsieh (14:53)
Thank you so much. And going back to the game, I think a lot of our audience haven’t saw your game yet. And I think you have a copy with you. Can you do a quick demo on what is the rule of the game and how it’s being played?

Bryan Tamietti (15:05)
Sure, so it’s Oh Crud. This is the Deluxe edition. The Deluxe edition, it’s essentially got two decks in it. Let me get it open here. All right.

You’ve got two dice, a number die and a color die. The color die has multiple symbols. And you’ve got a red deck and a blue deck.

Angie Tamietti (15:24)
So you can play with a big group or just red or blue for a smaller group.

Bryan Tamietti (15:28)
Right. So if you’re going to play with, you know, two to six players, you just take one of the decks, but we made them different colors. Even though they’re identical decks, we made them different colors so that you could separate them easily if you needed to.

Angie Tamietti (15:42)
Yeah, we’ve played in enough games that we know that you don’t want to sit and spend your hours sorting out the decks and flash through the colors.

Bryan Tamietti (15:47)
You

Have your red deck and your blue deck. Let’s say you’re playing with six people. You basically deal all the cards. You shuffle all the cards. There’s actually six suits.

Jason Hsieh (15:59)
Okay, six two, okay.

Bryan Tamietti (16:00)
Yeah, suits here and there’s yeah one. Yeah one through nine of each suit

Angie Tamietti (16:05)
And then we have different rounds. Whoops, there we go.

Bryan Tamietti (16:08)
Yeah, so there’s six rounds. So the objective is different with each of the six rounds. In essence, it’s a trick-taking game. So you deal all the cards out. Everybody’s got their hand full of cards like this. And then everybody takes a turn. I play one card. If I play the black triangles, the next person has to follow suit if they have it, if they don’t.

Jason Hsieh (16:28)
Mm-hmm.

Bryan Tamietti (16:29)
So, what is crud? Crud is different for each of the six rounds. So the objective is slightly different. Okay. So, for instance, round one, crud is a suit. And so you basically roll, you roll the color die, you roll this die here, and let’s say it lands on the blue hexagons. So this suit you are trying not to get stuck with. Yeah, you’re trying to avoid that because they’re 10 points each.

Jason Hsieh (16:48)
Trying to avoid, okay.

Bryan Tamietti (16:52)
And so everybody plays their cards at the end. You count up, how many blue hexagons did I get stuck with? And there are 10 points against you. And then you record it on the scoreboard.

Jason Hsieh (17:01)
Okay, okay, okay.

Bryan Tamietti (17:02)
So the next round, you actually roll a number die and credit is a number. So if it’s a four, then you avoid taking fours. The next round, you roll both dice. And then there’s round four, five, and six where we introduce a power suit, which is essentially a trump suit. You’re avoiding taking the last trick or you’re avoiding taking any trick. And then the last one is like a card stacking round. It’s kind of like sequence.

Carson Tamietti (17:26)
So I did.

Bryan Tamietti (17:26)
Yeah, kind of like Solitaire, where you’re trying to be the first one out of cards. So crud is not being the last person out of cards. And then when you’re done, the person with the lowest score at the end of the game wins. And that is mostly a trick taking game.

Jason Hsieh (17:41)
I see.

Angie Tamietti (17:41)
Michael, you wanna tell about Cat-in-8?

Carson Tamietti (17:43)
So for Cat-in-8, we have sixteen tiles that are arranged in a four by four grid. On the tiles there’s spaces, token spaces. Yeah, so if you can picture that in a four by four grid, it becomes an eight by eight playing area for tokens. And then you’ll have cards that match the icons on the tiles. And on your turn, you have the option to play a card and put a token on the corresponding image. Or you can play a chaos card. But basically

Your goal for the game is you’re trying to line up your cats in a row based on where you play them with the cards, or the chaos cards that let you rearrange the board. So we have zoomies that lets you push an entire row all the way through. We have cat NATO that lets you rotate a tile. And we have cat fight that lets you swap the two tokens already on the board. And then we also have three expansions, one expansion focused on board and token movement and manipulation.

Jason Hsieh (18:27)
Okay, okay, okay.

Carson Tamietti (18:35)
Yeah. One expansion or the second expansion that’s focused on player interaction and combos, things like that. And then the third expansion is focused on rules and strategy. So it changes the rules of the game or gives you new win conditions and goals that you can have for the game or to win.

And then we love playing with all of them combined for the maximum amount of chaos and strategy, you know? Well, I say us, everyone except for my dad. He doesn’t like playing with everything together. Yeah. He loves the third expansion. Playing with everything combined is kind of chaotic sometimes though.

Jason Hsieh (19:07)
So I think too much variation, maybe. I see, I see, I see. So and with the new product, that’s very interesting. You have three different expansion as well. Was that already designed in the initial process or that was designed later on?

Bryan Tamietti (19:07)
Chaos.

Carson Tamietti (19:23)
No. So we were actually thinking of different chaos cards that we could have in the game. And we had one idea for a card that wasn’t necessarily a board movement card. Yeah. And we thought we could include it in the base game, but it might feel like the ugly duckling of the game, right? Like it doesn’t really quite fit. And so we were thinking maybe we just do the three original base game chaos cards.

And then as we were thinking of new card ideas, we thought, man, we can do one expansion that could be really cool. But as we were thinking of the one expansion, it kind of seemed split down the middle on half of the cards want to do board movement and half of the cards want to do not board movement. Okay. So then I had the idea of doing two different expansions, one for board movement, and we created new cards to go along with that. And then one for the play interaction and combo and make new cards for that.

And then eventually Michael and my dad also had the idea of doing the third expansion that’s more of a modifier to the game and not necessarily the chaos cards of the game.

Jason Hsieh (20:25)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I see, I see, I see. How is the customer reaction to the game and expansion so far? on Kickstarter and maybe at a show if you bring it to any show yet.

Carson Tamietti (20:34)
Yeah, so definitely at the shows, we were honestly surprised by how many people wanted more chaos, especially with the expansions. We’ve only or mainly, we’ve play tested just the base game and people their reactions is basically that we love your game concept and what you do that’s unique and different, and we want more of that uniqueness and difference. And we thought, you know, that makes sense. So that’s why we also included the three expansions to double down on our unique

Take on the game and genre.

Jason Hsieh (21:03)
Mm, I see, I see, I see. Got it, got it, got it.

Michael Tamietti (21:06)
And then it’s

Been interesting to see how many people come and sit down and would be willing to play test with us. And they’re looking at the game and we explain the rules. They’re like, this is a fairly simple, basic game. But then you get them playing and you start moving stuff around and then you can just see their mind kind of start thinking through some of these moves on like, I have to really think about how I’m gonna line up all these cats to try to win or get most points. And it’s been fun just to see how

That develops in people’s minds.

Jason Hsieh (21:31)
So how remind me how does the point work in this new game? So how do you get the most amount of point in the game?

Carson Tamietti (21:37)
So there’s two ways to win. Well, at least without the third expansion. The two ways to win is you either get eight tokens in a row and you instantly win the game. Otherwise it’s whoever has the most points at the end of the game. At the end. And just getting three or more in a row gives you points, but having combos of maybe you have two or three or four lines that intersect, you get points for each of those. Or you can get points for each of those. But yeah, it’s really just

Simple concept with a really fun strategic learning curve of the more effort you put into the game, the more it rewards you. If that makes sense.

Jason Hsieh (22:08)
I see, I see, I see. Got it, got it, got it. And how long does this game took you and the team to develop this time? Is was it faster the second time around?

Bryan Tamietti (22:17)
Too long. Too long.

Jason Hsieh (22:19)
Love.

Carson Tamietti (22:19)
Yeah. Two years too long.

Bryan Tamietti (22:22)
The base game took a while. The hardest part with that was the actual tiles, because the game concept, we thought we had it done. We actually made these tiles out of wood originally. And they were beautiful. They were beautiful. I would have loved to made them out of wood. But then when you put the tokens on and you go to rotate it to tile or move

To the time all the tokens would fall off.

It’s UV printed on the plastic, but you can put the tokens on here and they’re not going to fall off. So this is a plastic version. This is the deluxe edition. We’ve got a standard edition that is made with dual layer grayboard, punch board, which also keeps them in place. That’s what took the longest time is to figure out how we were going to do that. And you can see that we have little finger holes.

Jason Hsieh (23:14)
Okay.

Bryan Tamietti (23:15)
Little

Finger holes to pick them up because you have to pick them up and rotate them or slide them or whatever. So, tile design was probably just coming up with different ideas, testing the ideas, having prototypes made, testing again, over and over and over and over. We literally have a whole table full of prototypes.

Literally. All kinds of variations. And that’s what we ended up with.

Angie Tamietti (23:35)
Which is something that we learned like a lot of people who do Kickstarters have the basic game down and then after they get the money, then they start, Okay, let’s look for someone to manufacture it or let’s look for the components. And we play games. And we like durable stuff. We want something well made. We don’t want stuff falling off. We want cards that we can shuffle and shuffle and tokens that are nice and thick and durable and

Yeah. So that’s our downfall is. We try to make the best possible game we can.

Michael Tamietti (24:06)
We know what we want.

Jason Hsieh (24:07)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Angie Tamietti (24:07)
Yeah.

Carson Tamietti (24:08)
Pay the price for it, yeah.

Jason Hsieh (24:09)
Yeah. Well, but it’s quality, right? So that’s also important in the long run. As you’re designing and building more games down the road. So And how will you say the role as a community play in the in the mission and the growth? Do you do a lot of the community engagement event? Is there any tournament using some of the games as well that you’re thinking about hosting?

Michael Tamietti (24:18)
Definitely.

Bryan Tamietti (24:31)
There’s no tournaments yet. That’s a great idea. We do want to travel the country and set up little game events in game stores, et cetera. And I think that’s a good way. There’s so many games out there. I literally, I’ve played many games that I just learned about for the first time. And you go to play the game, you look at the copyright, and it’s been out for 13 or 15 years.

That’s the first time I ever heard about it. It really is, it’s just kind of a chance thing. Somebody plays it at someone at a party or whatever. Anyway, just the way it works, I guess.

Angie Tamietti (25:05)
So yeah, so if we did travel and teach other people games, it’s not just our games. We want to teach them other games too, other people’s games. Cause a lot of it for me is intimidating if I don’t know how to play or if you know it’s like I want to join, I want to learn how, but sometimes the rules are not. Yeah, Carson did a whole class on that. He’s our rule book writer. And the way people interpret

Jason Hsieh (25:26)
Yeah.

Angie Tamietti (25:28)
What they want and what you read and yeah.

Jason Hsieh (25:32)
Yeah, I think rule book is hard.

Angie Tamietti (25:33)
Whole new world.

Carson Tamietti (25:34)
Yeah.

Jason Hsieh (25:34)
Yeah, because sometimes that’s where you can really trip people up. Because we manage so many different products to our company on Amazon, a common negative review people will leave is like the rule is very confusing. I couldn’t understand how to play, then one star review. Even so you might have the best game, but because the rule wasn’t written correctly, you still get kind of a blame for it. So that’s definitely a very important component.

Bryan Tamietti (25:58)
It’s a difficult thing. You got to be clear and concise, but short.

Jason Hsieh (26:02)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. People also don’t have a lot of patience to read very lot of rule books.

Bryan Tamietti (26:07)
Yeah.

Carson Tamietti (26:07)
It’s definitely easiest to explain a game in person, but even that has its challenges.

Jason Hsieh (26:12)
Yeah, yeah. Well the next best thing is video, so yeah.

Michael Tamietti (26:15)
Exactly.

Bryan Tamietti (26:15)
And

And

Jason Hsieh (26:16)
I see, I see, I see.

Angie Tamietti (26:17)
Videos for any product.

Bryan Tamietti (26:18)
Yeah.

Jason Hsieh (26:19)
For sure. So my next question is looking down in the future, what is the one year, three year, five year plan for the brand and the companies? Are we launching more product? Like how aggressive are we launching more product? What was the vision that you are seeing with you and the rest of the team here?

Bryan Tamietti (26:34)
Yeah, I mean, we definitely want to launch more products. I think the more products you have, the easier it is to stay alive as a game business because, you know, certain games, I mean, they fluctuate. Just surviving on one game like Oh Crud is really not practical. You know, it’s not the only thing we do. So adding additional games, you know, I think building a catalog of games is the smart thing to do.

Just to make it easier so you don’t have to sell as many of each unit to be successful.

Jason Hsieh (27:02)
For sure, for sure. So as we’re kind of wrapping up today’s interview here, if you had to just share one piece of advice with someone that’s just getting started within the toys and game industry, what would that be? Maybe one from each of the person so we can see all the different perspectives. That’d be great. Bryan, you want to start first?

Bryan Tamietti (27:19)
Wow, yeah, I mean, piece of advice, learn social media marketing as much as you can, learn as much as you can, I suppose. Because I think social media marketing is really one of the big keys to success. And I’ve never been a huge social media person in general. With any business, you have to be.

Learn as much about social media marketing as you can.

Jason Hsieh (27:41)
Mm. That’s a good piece of advice because game at the end of the day is a social game. Yeah. You need to get another you need to get more player. I mean there’s some solo game out there, but you know, most of the game is social.

Angie Tamietti (27:52)
I would say there’s always someone that can help you. Like going to GAMA, reaching out, like, you know, you and your company, there’s always people that are willing to help you or give advice or just to lend a hand. I think you just have to be willing to ask, ask for help.

Jason Hsieh (28:09)
Mm, okay. That’s a very good piece of advice as well.

Michael Tamietti (28:11)
Mine was gonna be right on the similar lines of just build connections. The amount of people that we met that were willing to give us contacts for different people that they knew on where they could make a game, people they knew of creating games or anything that we needed. Just matter of finding the right people that fit for you and making those connections.

Jason Hsieh (28:15)
The connection.

Mm, for sure. Yeah. How about you, Carson?

Carson Tamietti (28:32)
I would definitely t say take inspiration from wherever inspiration finds itself. You know, if you play games, play other games, find inspiration of what other people find fun or unique ideas they have. If you’re an artist making sculptures, perhaps look at other people’s techniques on making sculptures, you know. Wherever inspiration strikes you, harness that as well as you can.

Jason Hsieh (28:51)
Mm, I see, I see. I think everyone have a very good piece of advice. And for our audience that would love to learn more about the companies, where is the best for people to find more about the business and the product online?

Bryan Tamietti (29:01)
Yeah just ghettigames.Com that’s G-H-E-T-T-I. We’ll be updating our website with additional information with Cat-IN-8 as we’re getting closer to actually being able to sell it.

Jason Hsieh (29:19)
Okay. Perfect. We’ll make sure to put that in the show note. Yeah. And thank you so much for everyone’s time and thank you for having the entire team on the show to share your wisdom, the knowledge, the journey, and also the lesson learned. So really thank you so much.

Bryan Tamietti (29:20)
Yeah.

Carson Tamietti (29:21)
Thank you.

Bryan Tamietti (29:34)
Thank you for having us. Good talking with you.

Angie Tamietti (29:36)
Thank you, Jason.

Jason Hsieh (29:37)
Thank you. And thank you for our audience for tuning in to this episode of Toy Business Unboxed Podcast. I hope today’s conversation gives 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 companies. 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 are looking for a proven team that understands both the toys and game industry and the e-commerce digital marketing space, we are here to help. If you’d like to have a personal breakdown of your plan, your opportunity, and your next best step, you can schedule a free consultation session with us. Just visit toy-launch.com/schedule to schedule a free consultation session with us. If you want to connect with other toys and game founders, join our free community, Toys and Game Launchpad.

On Facebook. You can search for us on Facebook or you can visit toy-launch.com/slash group to find our Facebook group. For more resource, updates and industry insight, visit us 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.

Michael Tamietti (30:57)
Bye, thank you.