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 For
almost ten years, I've been
updating this page every week. Well, not every week... I usually
take off a few times each year, for vacations and holidays. But
it's been almost every week. But I've also been totally unreliable...
the "Thursday update" rarely goes live while it's still
Thursday, and often doesn't get published until late on Friday
or even on Saturday. But it's hard work, every single week, finding
things to talk about and make pages about. In fact, it's such
hard work, we've decided it's time for me to scale back the effort
a bit.
Here's the big news: starting immediately, this
webpage will be updated every other week instead of weekly.
That said, I need to back up a whole bunch, in order to explain
how I got here.
Although we are celebrating our tenth anniversary as a company,
Looney Labs is still
very small and our efforts to expand our sales and our market
share haven't been as successful as we'd wanted them to be by
this time. So, as part of our ongoing efforts to build a profitable
company, we've been doing a lot of belt-tightening and self-evaluation,
looking for any expenses we can cut, any processes we can make
more efficient, and anything new we can do to help make Fluxx
the breakout success we all know it can become.
A big part of this process has been the development of a comprehensive
new Business Plan, which we've spent a lot of time writing these
past few months. We've also been getting input from a team of
industry professionals (our Board of Advisors) who've agreed
to give us a little of their time each week to help advise us
on how to tighten up our company while expanding our sales.
As part of all these efforts, we did a big survey a few months
ago, to find out more about the people who love Fluxx and thus
better understand who's most likely to be interested in our
products.
We got a huge amount of really helpful info from these surveys...
we were really pleased with the number of people who took the
time to give us their opinions. Over 2400 people took the Consumer
survey, and since I'm sure everyone's curious about what we learned
from the thousands of responses we got, I've put together a page of
Observations on the subject. (Mostly it's a massive
list of unorganized quotes about why people like us and our
games.) Thanks again to everyone who participated!
So far, all I've really looked at are the results of the Consumer
survey, but I do have some information about the Retailer survey
to announce. Here are the ten stores who will be receiving our
Retailer's Prize of a six-pack of Fluxx: Comic Encounters, 3
Trolls Games & Puzzles, Modern Myths, Phoenix Games, Sammy's
Collectibles, Comic Store West, Bad Moo Comics and Collectibles,
Chinaberry, Game Depot, Myriad Games. We'll be contacting you
in the next few weeks (or maybe not until after Origins) to arrange
to ship you your prize. Congrats and thanks to everyone for taking
our survey!
All of this brings me to one particular question on the survey:
"How often do you visit Wunderland.com?" Sadly, only
216 people (less than 10%) answered "I visit each week."
Much as I love you, my most dedicated 216 readers, the realities
of our cost/benefit analysis is that y'all are taking up too
much of my time.
It's all about the bottom line, and the bottom line is, we
as a company are spending too much of our time and energy on
fan-support efforts, such as this webzine (plus various elements
of our Mad Lab Rabbit
program) which really don't pay for themselves. Much as we love
you all, our future hinges more, at least right now, on making
and selling products than on so very actively rewarding our devoted
fans for the cool stuff they do.
So, I've decided I can be happy enough updating this webpage
only every other week. (In a related story, the LooneyNews
is going to become a more occasional update.) Naturally I have
mixed feelings about this... on the one hand, it'll be nice having
more time to spend on other projects, but at the same time, I
enjoy the weekly ritual of updating the webzine and I worry it
won't be as good somehow being updated half as often. But at
the end of the day, the fact that I'll be spending half as much
time on web updates is more appealing than clinging to tradition.
I really do need that time to spend on other work. So I think
it's a good decision.
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