1 Year in Business: A Retrospective

For those of you who may not know, my tabletop game publishing company, Broken Door Entertainment has been in business for 1 full year. I filed the Articles of Organization on April 24th, 2024, which makes today the 1 year anniversary of the business (and what an eventful year it's been).

When Broken Door was founded, I had ~80-90% of a finished tabletop roleplaying game (TTRPG) manuscript and a dream to publish it. I invited a friend to be my co-founder (they had to step down a few months later due to a change in life circumstances), set aside a few thousand dollars from my severance at my previous job, and we were off to the races!

Looking back a year later, Paragons: The Roleplaying Game is done. The book is available in PDF form on the Broken Door website and the physical copies are sitting on a pallet in China, ready to ship (womp womp). We've come a long way in the last year, and I've certainly tried to dream big while keeping my immediate plans very practical, to varying degrees of success. Let's recap a few wins and losses from this past year and the lessons I learned from them:

1) Merch

In late 2024 I wanted to do a limited merch release, but eventually scrapped that plan. I didn't have a great vision for the designs, and frankly didn't have the bandwidth to get that project off the ground or market it well. The goal was to raise some additional funds to help publish the book and add some buffer to our operating budget, but this would have ultimately stretched me too thin, I think.

Here's my lesson: It can be tempting to try to do too much and overextend yourself. By staying focused on my core goal, I was able to get the book done on-time, and we can revisit the merch idea when I have time to give it the attention it deserves.

2) Project Size

One of the big challenges with Paragons was just how much work needed to get done for the book (even though it was mostly finished before crowdfunding!). Our team was amazing and professional, and we completed all of that work, but something I realized along the way was that I simply didn't have the bandwidth to project manage this book to completion AND ALSO work on future-looking projects. Not with Broken Door being a passion project (I haven't taken a cent and don't plan to for the foreseeable future). So in order to address that, I'm working exclusively on smaller projects for the rest of 2025, after we complete fulfillment on the Paragons Kickstarter. My theory is that I'll be able to get 2-3 small projects done over the course of 6 months, compared to a much larger time investment needed to complete a single larger project.

Here's my lesson: Adjusting my workload and goals to accommodate my time and bandwidth means that Broken Door will have more products available sooner rather than later. Granted, they will be smaller projects after Paragons, but being able to move faster and get more done in the short-term means that we'll have more things available to sell. This will (hopefully) lead to more revenue before year end, and allow me to hire someone to help take some of the work off my plate going forward.

3) Done is Good; Perfect Never Happens

It's a classic saying: "Perfect is the enemy of good". There have been several moments during the lead up to the Paragons Kickstarter and getting the files off to the printer where I was tempted to pump the brakes to get more time to fine-tune things. Ultimately, I believe that taking that additional time would have done more harm than good.

Let me share just one example: Our Quickstart Guide wasn't perfect when we first released it prior to the Kickstarter launch. We needed to make some layout changes, and a few rules updates were needed from playtest feedback. At the same time, I knew that I wanted the Quickstart Guide to be available to the public during the crowdfunding campaign. These days, it feels like best practice in the TTRPG crowdfunding space to have a clear proof of concept available for interested backers to check out. In spite of the temptation to push back the campaign start date (which would have led to an early 2025 launch - tariff uncertainties galore!), I made the tough call to stay the course and release a revised Quickstart Guide during the campaign, letting people know that the initial one was not fully representative of the final game.

If we hadn't done that, our bank account would have dipped into the red in November 2024. In order to get the game ready for publication, we hired and paid a bunch of amazing freelancers, and I was committed to paying them in a timely manner. I do freelance marketing work by day and I know how stressful it can be when a client pays an invoice late, so I was committed to paying invoices in a timely manner. Our final invoices came due about the same time that the Kickstarter payout hit; if we'd waited until 2025 to launch the campaign, we wouldn't have been able to pay those last few invoices for several months.

Financially, we're in the clear now. Even with uncertainty surrounding the tariffs, Broken Door has enough in the bank to fulfill the Kickstarter without issue and enough product ordered to sell for at least the rest of the year. But with the benefit of hindsight, I can say with certainty that launching the campaign when we did was the right decision.

Here's my lesson: You can only continue polishing and refining something so much before you just need to release it. That line looks different for everyone, but for me, I know that I'm inclined to nitpick something for too long after it's already good enough. By setting deadlines and sticking to them, I guarantee that my own perfectionist tendencies don't get in the way of releasing a good product. And for the record: Paragons is an incredibly fun game.

4) Teamwork

One of the best parts of this process has been the absolute privilege of working with amazing people. In the past, I have sung the praises of the editor for Paragons, Taylor Navarro. Collaborating with her to refine the rules and polish the manuscript for the game has made it so much better than I ever could have. The same can be said for pretty much everyone who contributed to the game (I don't know about that Josh guy, though).

Something that I have come to realize and appreciate is how essential collaboration is for my own creative process, and how helpful it is in terms of having deadlines and meetings where certain milestones must be hit. We are all social creatures, but especially as an extrovert, I know that I need social interaction to be my best self. After working on Paragons more or less in a vacuum for several years, working collaboratively was a breath of fresh air that rejuvenated my love of tabletop game writing. In realizing this, I've made a commitment to prioritize collaborative work going forward. For one project in the early stages, I have a co-writer and we're scheduling monthly development meetings which has made it easy to stay on track as we bring this game idea to life.

Even for future Paragons products (and I've got a couple in the works), I'm trying to work more closely with others, to bring that collaborative element into the process sooner. So far, it seems to be paying off, because at least one of those next projects is already pretty close to done (and I hope to announce it in the next month or so).

Here's my lesson: Find collaborators. Don't work on creative projects in isolation for too long. Whether you work with someone on a profit share basis, pay them a flat rate, or based on word count, your project will be better because you had someone else help you bring it to life. Even just finding a friend to bounce ideas off of will make your work better.

Closing Thoughts

As I said at the top, it's been a wild year. Holding the production samples of Paragons in my hand was such a surreal experience, and the fact that those books will be in the hands of hundreds of people before the end of this year feels a little bit like a dream still. I've learned a lot, grown a lot as a creative and a business owner, and I hope folks are as excited about what the future holds for Broken Door as I am, because we're just going to keep making more cool and interesting games.

I have more RPGs planned and in development, card games in development, board game concepts in the works, and hope to eventually lean into the "Entertainment" portion of the company's name with some actual play and podcast content to go along with publishing game products. I can only tackle so many things at once, but we've got a lot on the horizon, and my hope is that 2025 and 2026 will be big years for the company. If you want to stay abreast of everything that's going to happen in the coming months, you can sign up for our email list at the bottom of our website: www.brokendoor.shop

Thanks for reading!