Production, and two lessons from the product development endgame

We've gone to production! That's right, a few days ago we shipped our digital files to our manufacturer, and we're currently holding our collective breath, waiting to see the results. The past few weeks we have been working round the clock to finalize every detail of the game board, the box, the questions, the cards...the works, really. And we've learned two important lessons.

Lesson one: Going from 99% to 100% takes at least five times longer than you planned. There are a million tiny details to fix. There's graphics formats to convert. There's grammar to correct. There is proof-reading to be done, for the umpteenth time. There are formulations to argue over. Crossing the i's and dotting the t's takes weeks.

We learned lesson one a few weeks ago, when we thought we were nearing completion, but we still seemed to spend 16 hours a day in the office. But we hunkered down and set to it, determined to reach our deadlines.

Our deadlines are now past, the files have been submitted, and we can proudly announce that we learned another lesson during the last few days before the deadline:

Lesson two: You are never actually going to get to 100%. No matter how much time you spend ironing out all the details, fixing, proof-reading and so on, there is always a potential for improvement.

I believe we have a killer product. I believe this game will rock the socks off anyone who gets to own it, to play it. I genuinely believe this is it, the perfect engineer game. But there will still be details that I know could have been better. As with any product, of course, but this is OUR product. Realizing that perfection is unattainable is a hard pill to swallow.

Suppliers: How to avoid new customers

In early December, I approached a potential supplier, inquiring about a quote. They replied the same evening, asking for some details, which I submitted the morning after. After that, radio silence. I emailed them once right before the holidays asking about progress on the quote, but no reply.

Today I got an email wishing me a happy new year, and asking if I had considered the quote. I replied that I never recieved a quote, whereupon I got a short email containing nothing but a brief apology and a number, saying this is their "default price for this volume".

Luckily, we've already found a serious supplier...

Happy new year!

Happy new year, world! Don't worry, we're still here, although posting clearly has been neglected during the holidays.. and for quite some time before, too.

A lot has happened since last posting. I won't go into details, but among the highlights are incorporation, a few networking success stories and several new partnerships. Each of these events entailed valuable experience, and might deserve their own posts in the future, but we'll have to get back to that when there's time. For now I just wanted to let you know we're still here, and there'll be more later.