To help others, you have to help yourself first
The Gamer Lifestyle program is all about helping others craft a better life for themselves. We hope to help many gamers and entrepreneurs to create a reliable revenue stream from their hobby. Someone pointed out that it’s difficult for anyone to know how seriously they can take our advice on making money from RPGs, since there’s now way to know how well we’re doing ourselves.
So I decided to share my DungeonMastering.com earnings every month, starting in June 2009.
September 2009 earnings report
Guidelines
Here are the guidelines I established to offer you meaningful numbers without having to bore you with too much accounting:
- I only log revenue that is deposited in my Paypal or bank account. If I sell a third party product, the payment is often delayed 15 to 60 days. Until then, it only helps to do projections, not pay the bills!
- DungeonMastering.com costs me $450 / month in outsourcing, web hosting, advertising, and other fees like aweber, e-junkie, paypal, D&DI – yes, that’s a business expense! – etc.
November 09 earnings:
- Dungeon Mastering Tools memberships revenue: $595.75
- Affiliate revenue: $114.00
- Book sales: $351.50
- Total: $1,061.25
Book sales fall to second best revenue stream
I’ll be honest. I want my book sales to be my #1 revenue. Books, once written, never really lose value. In fact, our business model is based on free updates and creating living books that actually get better over time. This month, the DM Tools membership sales far outfperformed everything else. There are 2 reasons for this.
1. We switched from a monthly subscription service to a lifetime subscription service. In effect, DM Tools customers are now buying software, not a membership. This move got us rid of our retention issues. The perceived value of the product (a fixed value) now exceeds the price (a fixed price) as opposed to a fixed perceived value that had little chance of being higher than the price (an ever-expanding price tag).
2. We now offer more bonuses to get people to purchase the DM Tools. It was hard to do this before the pricing switch because of poor retention and CPA (cost-per-acquisition) higher than the first monthly payment. As we publish more books, our incentives can only get better. So our book publishing endeavors are partially responsible for the increase in DM Tools sales.
March 12, 2010 at 2:41 am
Heya Yax, these Earning Reports were very insightful, I was wondering if you would consider starting to post them again as you get time?
Also, since the switch from monthly to lifetime subscriptions have you noticed a decline in sales due to removing repeat customers from the equation? Since with the monthly subscription (even with poor retention) you are always leaving yourself open to returning customers? Or does the additional cost upfront outweigh the negatives?
March 12, 2010 at 1:59 pm
For reasons that I’d rather keep confidential, the December 09 report was the last one.
As for the monthly vs. lifetime models. I still believe the monthly model is more lucrative, but I did not have the resources to create enough value to warrant the ongoing billing. The lifetime membership was a great move at the time.