月商172.5万ドル（$1.725M）のボードゲーム会社のソーシャル成長と規模拡大
月商 $1,725,000 · 創業者2人 · 従業員4人 · St. Louis, MO, USA
Jamey Stegmaier（Founder, Stonemaier Games）· 創業 October 2012 · 記事掲載 — · stonemaiergames.com · 元の記事
顧客と小売業者（実店舗が中心）との関係を強化するため、小売店関係マネージャーを雇用し、パーソナルなコミュニケーションで直接販売を急増させた。集客の大部分はInstagramとYouTubeのコミュニティ形成と、年間15ドルのチャンピオンプログラムが中心。月商172.5万ドル（約2億5,875万円）、従業員6人（創業者2人＋従業員4人）は記事の時点の自己申告
売値の出典: 公式サイトの商品一覧とChampion Programの説明（1ドル150円で換算・価格は複数あり）（2026-10-14 取得）
Focus on what you can control: What makes your product/service special, how you delight your existing customers, and how you add value to your community.
会計: QuickBooks
分析: Google Analytics
ブログ: WordPress
メール配信: MailChimp
決済: PayPal, Shopify Payments
ネットショップ: Shopify
業務: G Suite, Google Workspace, Dropbox, Trello, Basecamp
発送: Stamps.com
SNS: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube
I’m Jamey Stegmaier, and I co-founded a tabletop game publishing company called Stonemaier Games in 2012. We’ve published 15 games during that time, focusing on putting our customers first, creating content that offers value to other creators, and bringing joy to tabletops worldwide. We’re best known for the games Wingspan, Scythe, and Viticulture, which have collectively sold over 2.5 million copies worldwide in dozens of languages. Here’s the link to our original Starter Story interview.
We’ve had an interesting couple of years. In the first year of the pandemic (2020), sales were very strong, as people were looking for ways to entertain themselves at home. 2021 was also a strong year, but we started to see big cost increases and delays in freight shipping. The holiday season was still quite strong. Then distributors stocked up on games, but the shockwave of Russia attacking Ukraine and the ensuing impacts on inflation resulted in distributors being overstocked, resulting in us making fewer units than usual in the second half of the year. Focus on what you can control: What makes your product/service special, how you delight your existing customers, and how you add value to your community. We used this time to focus on consumer and retailer relationships, both of which have blossomed thanks to our website and the hiring of our amazing retailer relationship manager, Susannah. Instead of just broadcasting information to retailers like in the past, Susannah has fostered ongoing, personalized communication with hundreds of retailers (mostly brick & mortar), and we’ve seen direct sales from retailers skyrocket as a result. While retailers generally prefer to buy from distributors, distributors don’t always carry all products and they sometimes have high minimums–Susannah makes it easy for retailers to craft the order they want. I also continued to foster strong communities on Instagram and YouTube (where we have nearly 100k combined followers) by sharing information about our games and elevating games made by other designers/publishers. I play a lot of new-to-me published games for the design/development side of my job, and I use those experiences to create videos about my favorite mechanisms in those games as well as top 10 lists focused on specific mechanisms/genres. I record on Tuesdays and schedule videos in the future, and I try to keep the recording process easy: I take a few notes in advance, then just turn on the camera and talk (typically 5 minutes for a video about a specific game and 20 minutes for a top 10 list). To add some polish to the top 10 lists–which more people engage with–my coworker, Joe, adds visuals to the videos before I upload them. The other unique marketing approach we use is to value those who choose us through our Champion program. It’s an annual membership that costs $15, and all Champions get 20% off on all website purchases from Stonemaier Games along with prioritized shipping and other perks. We currently have over 13,000 Champions, and I’m always trying to add new benefits to show how much I appreciate their support. Learn more here and here.
Our focus remains on creating high-quality games that bring joy to tabletops worldwide and supporting past products that are still providing that joy. We’ll also continue to improve the accessibility and inclusion of our games, as well as their eco-friendliness (a major endeavor of the last few years).
I’m not sure that growth is the best goal. You can’t control how many people buy your product or service, so focus instead on what you can control: What makes your product/service special, how you delight your existing customers, and how you add value to your community. I know it can be discouraging at times to feel like you’re talking and no one’s listening, but that might be an opportunity for you to listen more and talk less (advice I need to remember more often!).
We have a rolling job application page on our website, but we’re not currently hiring.
You can find links to everything at stonemaiergames.com! If you have any questions or comments, drop a comment below!