How long can we keep running without a plan?

We are reaching the limit, that's for sure.

When we started making the game, our goal was simply to have fun. We wanted to fill a gap that we percieved in the trivia board game market. Not because we believed it was a profitable thing to do, but because we wanted to be able to play a trivia game where the categories were more aligned with our own interests and areas of expertise. In September, we put up a website and started to collect questions for this game. We talked to some printers, and to a bookstore. We set up a Facebook Page. Our hope was to sell enough copies that we'd cover the worst of our production costs, and walk away with one copy of the game each. We joked that it would be great to meet someone, ten years from now, who had played the game and liked it. But we did it just for fun, to see if we could, to see how far we could get.

Then the ball started rolling, and we had to run to keep up. Our Facebook Page hit several hundred fans, then a thousand, in just a few weeks. We have been to several events, as keynote speakers, talking about our start-up and our game. We have got some soft money funding. People we don't know come up to us and say they've heard about what we are doing and like it. And no-one has even played the game yet!

Right now we are in the middle of prototype production, and will begin game testing soon. After that, we'll prepare for printing and selling our first batch of games. And right now, we're starting to feel the fact that we don't have a clear-cut strategy for how to proceed from here. As the potential of the game seems to grow, decisions are harder and harder to make without some guidelines. When do we release the release date? How many games do we make? How will we market this? Should we lock-in to one retailer or do we want to spread out? How do we answer this or that post on Facebook? There are thousands of questions, and they are getting harder to address every day.

We recently got some perspective on this in conversation with a friend, who recently went through a successful exit from a start-up he worked on for the past two years. Talking with someone who has experience with the phase we are in now is very helpful. He could clearly see that we have digged deeply into product development, and to some degree have dipped into all the other areas that need to be handled - marketing, suppliers, finance - in order for the game to reach market. But we clearly don't have a plan. We set out on purpose without one, to see where it took us. However, we've been running after the ball since the get-go, and it is time we sat down and decided where we want the ball to roll next. We need a strategy.

We need a business plan.