How To Monetize When You Hate Money

Recently, I published some articles (like this one) about starting my first online store and some of the nitty-gritty details behind it. I also mentioned that perhaps the biggest issue, in the end, was entirely unrelated to skill or technical know-how.

It was the question of what do I actually sell in my online store?

At first glance, you might assume this means I had no ideas and no products. That I blindly started an online store without actually having anything to sell ;)

But it’s the opposite. I had too many options, and too much work already in my portfolio, and it was all so overwhelming that I completely froze from indecision (for a shameful number of days).

This was compounded by a second issue. I don’t care about money. I personally have no desire to be wealthy, to encourage our broken systems of economy and power, to put price tags on things I want all people to have for free. That’s why I did give everything away for free, for ten years. Which, not surprisingly, gave me no stable income.

And so, for weeks and weeks, I walked around asking myself the same questions.

What could I monetize? How much should I ask? Do I keep my current work online for free, or do I start taking stuff offline to sell it? Do I treat the online store as my main job, giving it 75% of my time, or do I just treat it as, say, a recurring project every season? Do I exclusively create new stuff for it or just turn existing work into merchandise?

In the mean time, to get something going, I had started a small test webshop (for free, also not expecting anything) to play around and learn how to do all this. That shop used existing print-on-demand merchandise platforms, which means I can put my logo on a shirt or something and they handle the printing and shipping completely when bought.

This only confirmed my doubts. I don’t buy stuff. I don’t buy products I don’t desperately need. And so I had no idea what to even put on a shirt, or what anyone might even be looking for and how they might find my … erm … mug with a cute bear drawing on it?

I immediately felt more hollow. In just a few weeks, thinking only about products and merchandise and selling made me lose all motivation to even work on anything.

Thus I knew: this was not the way to go.

The general feeling

If that online store was going to work out, the products I sell had to be things for which I felt at least a sliver of passion. Things I would have created anyway. Things that felt useful, instead of some frivolous random thing I dreamed up. Only now I have a stricter deadline, or a target audience and a price tag in mind.

In the end, it all came back to education and returning to our roots. Of all the things I imagined selling, only things that could be seen as educational (i.e. they could be used by parents when playing with their kids, or in a classroom) or that promoted physical, analog, simple, social experiences could rely on a hint of interest in my heart.

This cut out …

• Video Games: they’re behind a screen. Also, nearly impossible at the moment due to lack of budget and functioning hardware.
• Hybrid Activities: I’ve made a few of these in the past. They’re board games with a digital component, or some interactive applet on a website. They’re fine, but absolutely not something I want to do more often or want to sell.
• Randomly Merchandizing: no usefulness or educational value. (By this I mean creating merchandise just to create merchandise, which is what I did for that initial test webshop. I drew random things and came up with jokes/characters/logos only to put it on a shirt or mug or whatever. And it felt very very meh.)
• Creative Services: I used to offer these on my portfolio, since I started as a “freelance artist” ten years ago in the Netherlands. But I have barely had any project, and whenever I did, the work was just hollow and stupid. For example, I had to do many routine tasks for people who simply didn’t know how websites worked, or design a logo for someone’s weird start-up idea that never had any chance of succeeding, or proofread texts that I’m pretty sure were generated by AI and somehow even worse.

I also knew I didn’t want to have to maintain the online store too. Products should not be bound to a specific time, or have an expiry date, or follow trends and hypes. I simply don’t have the time and energy to do this on top of actually creating products and all my other projects. The only reason I’ve been keeping so many spinning plates in the air for a while is because I am very disciplined in keeping things organized and cheap to maintain.

No, ideally, all products should be “make once, it’s done and self-contained, continue with life”.

Once I’ve created a quiz about, I don’t know, Dinosaurs, that’s that. The quiz is completely standalone and doesn’t require me to maintain an app or keep a digital component online. There is no upkeep. No updates are needed. Quizzes are a fine choice for my online store (as I’ll explain further below) because there’s no real point in creating a new Dinosaur quiz every year or so. I mean, the dinos are not really doing new stuff this year, are they? ;)

So … let’s talk about my worries when I wanted to start creating things for the online store.

The categorization

My first general approach to the online store was as follows. (This was, in fact, more like version 0.5 than 0.1, but the earlier ones are not really interesting to list here.)

• ESCAPE ROOMS (self-explanatory)
• PUB QUIZZES (self-explanatory)
• BONUS MATERIALS (the source files/behind the scenes of projects, as well as any, well, bonus material on top of existing projects.)
• EDUCATIONAL (self-explanatory, though admittedly vague)

I didn’t like the name BONUS MATERIALS, nor that it basically merged two different things. So I split it:

• SNEAKPEEKS (source files)
• ART & MEDIA (any bonus material for existing projects)

I chose the name ART & MEDIA because it was simply the best encapsulation for everything I was missing. More generally, this category basically contains anything creative I “create” that doesn’t belong to the other categories. I default to creating “practical art/media”: playable games, readable books, etcetera. This category simply contains anything that is not that, which is what most people assume when you say “art”. (They think of abstract paintings and such.)

I considered adding merchandise within the categories first. For example, if I make a cool drawing for an escape room, and I put it on a shirt, then you can find that shirt in the Escape Rooms category. This, however, was needlessly confusing. You’d have two wildly different things listed on the same page, amongst each other. The audience for these two things might not be the same too.

So I added a separate category for all that: MERCHANDISE.

The idea is basically that you only arrive here from another project/page. You played an escape room, and that page links to related merchandise. Or you bought a book, and that page links to its related merchandise. With that philosophy, it makes sense to bundle it all into one streamlined category. But I’m still not entirely sure about this.

By now, I was disliking the name “PUB QUIZZES”. I had realized there was so much more I could do with quizzes and trivia, especially using a system I’d already coded years prior. So I renamed it to TRIVIA.

My biggest doubts came from my Gaming work. I have a huge website (Pandaqi) hosting tons of board games, which have always been completely free and very accessible. I didn’t like changing that website to suddenly take things away, or make them paid, or some other bad or convoluted construction. Additionally, I had plans to expand into other types/areas of game experiences, and wondered where those would need to be placed. But “Games” is a very broad moniker and doesn’t do justice to the wide variety of different projects this might contain. Already I can imagine selling some ideas here that are nothing like anything I made before.

In the end, I added a final category with the codename (or “working title”) FUN FRONTIER. It would mostly list products related to that new idea (which I expect to actually launch in a year or two), which, again, combines my vision of “physical games” and “practical + educational”. All those products are game experiences, though, so I imagined any other game experiences could sneak into that category too. (If really too different, they could be put in Art & Media for example, but I would like to avoid that.)

Now I had a general categorization I could live with. At least, one I imagined would fit anything I’d make, and the products would be somewhat evenly distributed among them.

Now … how to use it?

The devil is in the details

Now you will start to see why I “froze” for a bit. Why I became completely overwhelmed and paralysed by all possibilities, by the many pros and cons of every idea, and more.

Trivia

I had quickly decided to start with making a few quizzes. I already had the system half in place (and wanted to finish the other half for ages). In the grand scheme of things, coming up with some interesting questions and displaying them on a screen is not the biggest challenge.

Buuuut you haven’t met my hyperactive brain yet.

I immediately imagined the many, many possibilities. And once a creative person has imagined, they cannot unimagen!

• We could do digital quizzes, yes.
• We could also provide completely physical/analog ones, for those who want it. I’d certainly prefer that in many cases.
• Maybe we can do quizzes clearly designed to be educational? Without words, and the kids cross off their answers on the paper immediately?
• Wait, if we have digital quizzes, how do we make sure they are standalone? The current system requires hosting them on a web server …
• What determines if I make a quiz digital or physical? If I make it digital, I must use the special features it adds, such as playing audio and video clips!

This goes on and on, as I research possible topics and slowly build my system to completion, but never actually design the first “trivia experience”.

In the end, it took writing this article (and several more articles/devlogs for these projects) over the course of several days to make decisions.

• I changed my system to be both digital and physical. Yes, that’s what Tiamo does when he can’t reach a decision. He just provides both options for every quiz (with minimal overhead for himself).
• The only alternative is to create a quiz completely manually. (Draw every image/question myself as a single image, combine into PDF.) I do this for quizzes aimed at the youngest of kids, so I can add more images, color, decoration, etcetera.

I quickly realized that young kids obviously can’t read (well) yet. That some people aren’t as fluent in English as others anyway, and that’s the only language in which I intent to create these. That the general idea of a pub quiz, and their usual length, isn’t something you can just throw at young students in a classroom in any case ;)

That’s how the distinction between the two “types” of quizzes appeared.

• One that’s more typical. A 1-2 hour experience, just a bunch of questions in a standard format.
• One that’s mostly textless, more colorful and decorated, and which has you interact with the quiz directly.

Now I knew what to do. I knew the digital system would be used much more, so I needed to finish that first. I had some direction.

Finally, I created a list of what the quizzes could actually be about. Again, many options, too many to just create them all.

• Common Events or Holidays (Christmas, New Year, Sinterklaas, Easter, Birthday, Graduation, New School). These should have the widest of appeals and be most like a traditional pub quiz.
• School Topics (language, spelling, math topics, geography, biology/nature/insects, history, etc). These are clearly educational, often manually created and short.
  • In a way, this just means about the same topics I’m researching anyway for Saga of Life. When I write a story set in the Roman Empire, for example, my notes are more than enough material for some interesting trivia.
  • I used to do this as a kid, actually. I don’t really remember this, but I’ve found evidence of course: I used to write “essays” about topics for fun. After a weekend, I’d suddenly have ten pages with “everything I’ve learned about fireworks”.
• General topics (Marvel/Superheroes, Brands, Famous people, Music, etc). These are hyper-focused on a specific thing that interests the buyer already, so they can just use my system and do whatever is needed.
• My Own Franchises (Saga of Life Cycle 1, Wildebyte Arcades Book 1–5, etc) This is very optional and I’ll probably only do this once my own work is large and strong enough, otherwise it’s just silly. Really, the best candidate for now would be turning the information inside my Pandaqi Tutorials into quizzes, replacing the very minimal built-in quiz widget on that website …

The ones about holidays make the most sense when that holiday is around the corner. That gives it a nice deadline, but that’s an exception. Also, these are the kinds of quizzes you can already find in spades online, so I don’t know what unique thing I would be adding right now.

Out of all the options, the School Topics align most closely with my vision. Make quizzes that are also educational, useful, practical, grounded in reality.

And so it was finally decided: I’d look up what kids generally learn in particular higher grades (where they can already read), then use my digital system to create quizzes around that. Once I have made enough of those, I create some manual ones for the earliest grades. Once the educational side has solid offerings, I’d branch out in the other directions.

I felt comfortable selling these experiences because …

• It isn’t just a set of questions. You get the entire system, two ways to play (digital or physical). All self-contained and yours to use forever and however you like, with no requirements. (A much better deal than elsewhere, if I say so myself.)
• I have two different types, one of which (the manual one) definitely takes more effort but also creates more unique quizzes as a result.
• Nobody else is doing the obvious thing of using quizzes (fine-tuned to age groups) educationally. I would’ve liked school a lot more if we used these kinds of things instead.
• As with everything, there’s some art and creativity to finding engaging ways to ask questions or expect answers. Creating a variety of these trivia experiences takes enough effort that I feel it’s worth some monetary value.

Escape Rooms

An escape room is basically the advanced version of a quiz around a topic. A sort of love baby between educational material/trivia and games. You get a set of clues and puzzles, and you must make creative leaps and clever understanding to solve the final puzzle (and “escape”).

This also means they are very freeform. Anything is possible. Anything can be turned into a puzzle; any theme can be used to generate challenges.

Yes, you guessed it, my mind exploded with possibilities and I couldn’t choose again. Once I realized I could make/sell these things, I wrote down nearly fifty ideas for escape rooms in the little notebook next to my bed. (When I say “bed”, think “mattress on the floor in the only corner where it fits”. Did I mention I desperately need stable income?)

In general, the ideas boil down to the following.

• Common Events or Holidays: yes, this one again. Christmas is the ideal time to play a Christmas escape room with your family.
• School Topics: oh wow, this one again. If you can make a quiz about a topic, you can make an escape room. The questions are simply asked in a more puzzly way, and you can obtain/check your answers rather than guess them.
• General Topics: huh, this one again too. When I say escape room, I’m sure many can already imagine some general adventurous themes that always go well with this (such as pirates and treasures, ancient pyramids, mysterious ghosts, etcetera)
• My Own Franchises: wait, I’m just repeating myself. Once I’ve established some project of mine, I can use its content (and general vibe/theme/characters) to design an escape room.

Yes, I’m highlighting this repetition of general areas on purpose. I’m going somewhere with this.

Realizing the similarities made me able to pick my options here too:

• I focus on escape rooms about some educational topic first, which might be played in classes or by parents with their kids.
• Around holidays/special events, I create escape rooms about that.
• The others come later.

It is very tempting, yes, to create my very own “treasure hunt escape room”. It might even turn out very good. But it’s been done a million times already, and at the end of the day, it means not doing something a little more practical or educational instead—which I value more.

I felt comfortable selling these experiences because …

• Creating an escape room, even a small one, is a ton of work. Like, I had expected it to be hard going in, and it still blew me away how many things your mind has to take into account to prevent making huge mistakes (such as unsolvable puzzles, or ones that are so easy people might see the solution instantly, etcetera)
• I feel these experiences are the holy grail. They need no extra rules or setup, which means most people are willing to try them and instantly like them. They support large groups, without blowing up the price or material requirements. If I can create a few strong ones, I feel this would be a great “gateway” for people to get into board games, potentially board games as “educational tools”
• What you get is a fully illustrated, hand-designed, unique set of 20+ pages that make up an experience that sometimes lasts 4+ hours. That’s quite some value.

Note that these are all fully analog/physical. Creating the digital system for the quizzes gave me the obvious insight that I can use the same techniques to add a digital component to escape rooms too. Which is definitely useful, as a computer can secretly know the answers and help you check much faster (without accidentally giving away clues or solutions). But as I wrote down a plan for this, it became too complicated and I decided to leave it for now. I want to stay true to mostly providing physical experiences, not straying into the digital too much.

Educational

I have always been completely honest about this, and I forever will be. I hate the educational system. I have all the science and the arguments on my side for why its techniques are either useless or actually damaging.

As such, I don’t … actually believe these educational materials will do much good. Yes, they are better than doing nothing. They are hopefully fun, which is worth something on its own.

Many people (parents and teachers alike) do believe educational material—such as worksheets and workbooks and coloring pages to learn letters and whatnot—are some amazing tool that will do wonders.

There is no evidence they are. Sitting still and lightly interacting with a piece of paper really isn’t what our minds and bodies were made to do.

But, still, people are eager to buy and use such material. I was surprised to discover the breadth of websites offering such digital goods, free or not. Just as I was surprised, years ago, to learn that someone had used content from my tutorials (at Pandaqi Tutorials) in their own homemade educational worksheet.

And so this is the section where I’m blatantly selling my soul. Creating things because I have the skill and the knowledge, and I know they will sell. Not because I think they are amazing value or adding many new ideas.

I have years and years of knowledge about how our brain actually learns and how our educational system definitely does not help. I can empathize with children and different age ranges well—yes, let’s call it empathy and the advantage of a children’s novel writer, instead of me still being childish at heart. I can draw colorful and cute things, then simplify them into something anyone can understand.

And so I decided to make educational material.

But now I wondered: what’s the difference?

Most of my other categories ALSO have educational content! Pretty much any game-y experience is educational, woah, what an insight. One might even conclude that we evolved to enjoy games precisely because it’s what helps us learn faster and better … blasphemy, of course.

The difference, I decided, is simply that this category contains everything educational that is not an escape room, quiz or game. In other words, it contains your more typical “worksheets” (for children) or “workplans” (for parents/teachers). By checking the general skills kids are developing around a certain age, I can create some really simple “challenge” (more homework/test, really) that uses that information.

Learning about letter shapes? Here are dots, connect them to get an “A”. Here’s an outline of an “A”, fill it with … popcorn, or beans, or marbles, or some other small thing. Here are letters in many different fonts, connect all that are the same letter.

Yes, the more I worked on this, the more I realized I was making a more fun version of homework. But I knew that going in. As stated, this is because people want it, not because it’s the best way to teach/learn.

After researching how others approach online education, and which topics they teach, I concluded that the simplest approach was to start at the first grade and work our way up. Later knowledge builds on earlier knowledge anyway. So it’s the natural way to create these things, and I can reference/reuse earlier work later to make everything cohesive (… and save myself some effort).

As such, I literally started with the very first things you learn at school and turned that into my own brand of educational material. Once I felt I covered everything in first grade, I moved to second grade, and so on.

I felt comfortable selling these experiences because …

• Schools/parents are buying extremely expensive books or courses all the time, every year. There have been several studies showing their exercises are often based on nothing and sometimes even harmful. But, well, everyone parrots the same lie that school is oh so amazing and we need the most expensive books and what not. I think I can deliver something better for a fraction of the price.
• The fact that I dispute its usefulness, doesn’t mean it’s easy to make. It takes a lot of research to figure out fun activities that a child understands, even though it’s about a topic they don’t fully understand yet. And then you still have to design it and polish it.

Educational Eureka!

The bigger realization here was the one about everything being educational. About creating some sort of “funnel” of education:

• You start with a really simple and bland worksheet ->
• This encourages a parent/teacher to try, say, a quiz about that topic ->
• This encourages them to try an escape room about it ->
• This encourages them to try some games around this topic.

A teacher won’t think twice about using a fun, colorful worksheet to play around with the alphabet. For some reason, they will be offended if you suggest playing a simple word game that teaches language much more thoroughly and effectively.

With this “funnel”, I can basically lead people away from their wrong assumptions and into educational heaven ;) But that only works if I have something available in all categories for specific topics or age ranges.

In other words, I switched around my thinking here. Instead of working in batches per category, I should work in batches per topic. Instead of “5 quizzes this week”, it should be “worksheet, quiz, escape room and maybe game about topic X this week”.

The worksheet gives me all the notes and research needed. I can use that in the quiz. I can progress the quiz into more challenging escape puzzles. And I can tap into the best ones to create an actual game around the topic.

It’s a unique workflow, but it makes sense. And it is a workflow, which is always better than my aimless hesitant wandering so far. It stays true to my vision of keeping everything useful and practical, while allowing me to hyperfocus on one topic for a longer stretch of time. (Which is nice for momentum in general, but especially hyperactive people like me benefit from hyperfocus as opposed to switching tasks all the time. I’ve written loads of insightful articles about that over the years; I should bundle them or something.)

I also wrote a longer article about this specific “funnel” realization/setup, if you’re interested.

Fun Frontier

As stated, these are basically “board game experiences”. But where do we start? What should I sell?

The problem with board games is that you need multiple people. Many are hesitant to buy a new game if they aren’t certain they can get a few plays out of it (with their friends/family/local gaming group).

This becomes even worse when it’s a print-n-play game. You take a bigger risk (because the game isn’t “professionally published”) and you put in more effort beforehand (to cut and prepare it yourself).

For several weeks, I considered how to approach this. I found a few other websites that sold print-n-play games or similar “board game experiences”.

Then the obvious realization hit me: these should be small solo games.

Think Sudoku or Crosswords. Think playing a puzzle game or relaxing game against yourself on your smartphone. Think a nice time-waster as you travel to work, which you can easily store in your bag or pocket.

Only it’s on paper, and you play by writing on it.

This sidesteps the issue of needing more players. (The games can support more, of course, but they’re solo games first and foremost.) This allows keeping the games very tiny, with minimal cutting or preparing.

Additionally, I invented the One Paper Games some time ago. I can reuse the lessons learned and make more of them, albeit more geared towards solo experiences, to fill out the offerings nicely. (I’ve had several great ideas for OPGs for some time, but never made them because I didn’t want to create one just for single player or two players.)

My experience tells me that I should sort such projects based on complexity. How hard is it to write the code to generate puzzles? How many elements do I need to draw in each puzzle? How “uncertain” is the idea (i.e. a few rules I don’t like yet, not as interesting and needs some extra spice, etc)?

After sorting the ideas, I simply start with the one that is most certain, that I know how to code, that only needs to draw, say, some numbers or rectangles in the puzzle. And then we go down the list.

I felt comfortable selling these experiences because …

• Being solo games, I can actually extensively playtest them myself. (The biggest issue with all my other games is that they are barely tested by others, sometimes not at all, because I just can’t make it happen.)
• My experience creating 100+ games, as well as inventing things like One Paper Games (which are basically a blown-up version of this, adding an entire game onto one paper), gives me the expertise to do this with sufficient quality.
• For a very low price, you might get a hundred hours of playtime out of these things. A great deal, especially compared to a quiz you can only play once, for example.
• This is hard. It takes significant effort and experimentation to come up with new Sudoku-style puzzles, and especially ones that are more thematic and that support “expansions” or “variants” too. That’s why I feel selling this is worth it and it can’t be easily replicated by others.

Sneakpeeks

As stated, this creates nothing “new”. I simply make all the source files, versions, notes, everything available of an existing project. (Which might be something available for free, or something new and paid.)

The decision here turns into “which projects do I publicize this way!?”

If I ask myself what are my “best projects” or “most worthy of this treatment”, I would never have an answer. Like most creatives, I think everything I make is shit.

If I ask myself what is “most likely to be of interest to others”, I would never have an answer either. Like most creatives, again, once I’m done with a project I am done with it. I don’t look back, the source files are useless to me now (especially because I know all its secrets and how everything was made).

As such, I changed my perspective and merely looked at it practically. What do I already have available? The past year or so, I already started zipping the final folders of all projects, after I sanitized them and cleaned them up. So … those zip files are ready to be sold!

This mostly contains my board games, about 50 of them. But as they are already completely prepared, it wasn’t that much work to include them all.

• Once that later project of mine launches, which I mentioned at “Fun Frontier”, those source files will be the first candidates for this treatment too.
• I always planned to release working prototypes of all the games played (or “parodied”) in my Wildebyte Arcades books. I did some work on that, but it never felt quite right. If I figure that out, the source code of these games would be released here too. (While the actual playable games would just be freely available as marketing for the books, I guess.)

After this, I have to look at my writing work. I might make an entire book available for purchase this way, which only makes sense if the price is higher than, you know, buying the final book in the shops. This is easier to do for really old books of mine, which may never have sold more than 5 copies to begin with.

My other work, such as music, has enormous files (audio recordings in high fidelity and such). Those are unlikely to even be possible this way, so definitely something “for later”.

I felt comfortable selling these—though comfortable is perhaps the wrong word—because …

• This is literally giving away all my secrets. You can see exactly how something was made and thus copy/use that yourself immediately. But you can also simply see techniques, naming, notes, ideas I left out and why, etcetera. If we’re talking about “educational content”, this actually takes the cake.
• Most of my projects are far larger and more involved than people think ;) They only see the streamlined, simplified final product. Behind the scenes, there’s a massive amount of files, drawings, revisions, stuff to take care of, etcetera. Again, if we’re talking about “getting bang for your buck”, this takes the cake again.

Art & Media

This category has no specific plan attached. As stated, it’s the “miscellaneous” category.

But keeping things that vague has never treated me well in the past, so I still dove into the details a bit.

I mostly created it for two main purposes:

• Yes, even I become artsy-fartsy from time to time. Some random abstract painting I felt like making, some random song idea recording, it might just appear.
• An alternative venue for selling small-scale stories and songs, too small for actual books or albums. (In other words: “not really possible to release through the usual sales channels”)
  • “Type B” stories for Saga of Life. (As explained on there, or at least it should be explained by now, these stories are tiny spin-offs that don’t adhere to the Saga’s structure and thus don’t fit on the website.)
  • Any extra material for other writing work, tiny standalone stories, other (ebook) versions of stuff.
  • Song snippets, sound effects, anything else that streaming can’t really do.

I felt comfortable selling these, though I am by far least comfortable about these, because …

• These are actually the most typical things you’d find in a store like this. New work that doesn’t fit an existing sales channel. “Extras” on top of existing projects sold or displayed elsewhere. Those vague abstract paintings that random rich people seem to buy sometimes to … hang in their living room?

See? I only have one reason for this!

These projects feel closest to selling my soul. It’s my art, my most creative and personal output, and to “monetize” it will forever feel wrong to me. But this is the right place for several of my ideas, and this feels like the best way to go about it.

Merchandise

My initial “test store” with only merchandise left a bit of a sour taste in my mouth. Pointless stuff for people to buy. Lots of tiny exceptions and traps at all the POD platforms, making me ever cautious and afraid I’m somehow losing money from selling a custom T-shirt for 35 euros.

As such, this has no priority. Even as I wrote down the very first plan, I felt pretty sure that merchandise would only be populated well after the store’s launch. At the very least, it will take some time to copy over the most successful merchandise from that test store to the new one.

In general, I’d divide merchandise into three categories.

• Functional: as explained earlier, those “merchandise” platforms sell a lot of things. Some of them aren’t something you wear, but something you use, or place on your table. I can actually create functional games, experiences, etcetera from that. Pretty cool, pretty useful.
• Identity: something that aligns really well with someone’s personality and identity. That is why they’d want to have it, wear it, display it. (And that’s why they’d give it as a gift to someone they know with that identity) I can understand that and I can work with that.
• Pretty: something that just looks cool, or smart, or colorful, or similar words. This feels most pointless to me, so I haven’t really given it much thought. Why would I need more stuff with even more stuff on it? I personally like my shirts one solid, friendly color and that’s that ;)

This immediately illustrates their priority too.

The first merchandise I’d make are my more creative and functional ideas. The ones that use merchandise for educational or game purposes. Things you can use, you can interact with, that open up more possibilities (for games/activities).

Everything else is “as needed”. From time to time, I check which of my projects gets the most attention, and make sure there is some merch to identify yourself with that project’s vibe or message.

I felt comfortable selling this kind of merchandise because …

• As stated, the functional type is, well, actually functional. It’s a physical thing (one of my core values!) to hold and use for the same purposes as my physical goods.
• Even the other types can be very useful or sensible. You still need shirts to wear; why not a shirt with the Wildebyte logo (on which I spend a lot of time)? Because they are physical products, the cost is far easier to justify. Those things simply cost money to make, and to ship, and people are much more understanding of that.
• Thanks to my many attempts (and failures) with merch in my test shop, I feel I’m growing my skill here and might, in time, actually provide really nice things for people to wear or use.

Conclusion

Pfew, that’s a lot of words. It just goes to show how much I struggled with this. So many options, so many possibilities. So many things I could do and that might be great, while constantly wary of that hollow and pointless feeling when I lean too much towards the side of monetization and commercialism.

I haven’t even talked about pricing. Or further details about the size, quality, etcetera of the content.

This is just my general struggle to find a way to stay creative and independent, while turning the output and skill of it into a stable income.

I hope you can agree with my reasoning for making certain decisions. My feelings why something is worth selling—or isn’t. Which, honestly, mostly come down to “how much value is it”, “how much effort does it take me to make” and “how much effort does it save the BUYER”. That last one is actually most important, but it’s hard for me to really integrate that mind-set. I should think about “this educational material will save the teacher from having to do X and Y themselves, so it’s worth Z dollars” … but that’s just not how my brain is ever going to work.

The important part here is that funnel of education. How one topic can be spread, or “built upon”, across the different categories. A unique approach, one that suits me and my work, one that might actually convince a few people that our systems of education are (far and wide, generally) rubbish and there is more to explore. The categories for which this does not hold are special anyway, relying on my past work or adding that physical component (“merchandise”) to an otherwise exclusively digital imperium ;)

As expected, these plans will probably change. Some stuff might be delayed, or, if the planets align, actually be done sooner. Once the online store fully launches I’m sure I’ll be scrambling for months and learning a lot every day, adjusting my plans to the newly gained experience and reality.

I’ll try to write some new articles with insights and findings then.

These were my thoughts. The considerations from someone who really really doesn’t want to ask money for anything they do, but are pretty much required to do so, and this is the middle ground they landed on.

Until next time, perhaps give my store a visit,

Tiamo