Hello.
We are taking a new approach to the newsletter.
Hinokodo was in charge of the newsletters this past year and frankly, he’s just not delivering what we were hoping for. No, now management has to be involved.
Meet your newest newsletter writers for the Mimic Times:
What we lack in thumbs, we excel in maximizing our efforts in the office. No one else in this place gets as much sleep and leisure time as us, because we get work done fast. Let’s get this newsletter started.
Here’s the agenda for today:
What was.
What is.
What will be.
What Was
Our operation really got off the ground last august during Kickstarter’s zinequest. Hinokodo had the bright idea to finally release something and now I’ve gotta write newsletters instead of chewing on plants this morning.
We hit the ball running with over 300 physical orders during the Miru campaign, and finished with about 500 total physical orders in 2022. Absolutely mind blowing. We had so many boxes around the apartment, I didn’t know what to do with myself. We made a new pin, many new friends, we created a Mastodon when Twitter began freefalling into the social abyss. (But we’re still on Twitter, turns out not many folks bought into the Mastodon movement)
But that was last year. Old News. If you want a deeper dive on the numbers, we have a radical transparency policy and you can read about last year’s numbers here.
What Is
We’re 2 quarters into 2023 and Hinokodo never wrote the reports. Humans, amiright?
Q1 Jan-Mar.
We got a wonderful review by The Dungeon Dive.
Gila RPG streamed a multi day playthrough of Miru. (he also filmed a great 5 minute review of Miru)
In February we launched MIRU 2 for Kickstarter’s Zinequest 5. That was a surprising success. We were hoping to match, at best, what the original MIRU campaign did. But we more than tripled the past campaign! As a last minute surprise, we announced that the original MIRU would be getting a facelift and being reprinted as a second edition. (Pstpstpstpstpst, It’s available here.)
Here’s some proof of all of our hard work:
Over here in the mimic offices we practice something we call ‘radical transparency’. All that means is we’re pretty open about our books, and this can sometimes feel like oversharing. So we’re just going to drop some quick fun fact numbers for Q1 for the folks following us that aspire to run their own creative businesses, and can maybe gleam some useful information from our efforts in the field.
Fun Facts for Q1: (expenses)
Materials - $2,037
Transaction Fees - $1,062 ← wild
Platform Fees - $1,294 ← also wild
Carbon Offsetting - $318
Shipping - $135
Sales Tax - $1,509
Fun Facts for Q1: (Revenue by platform)
Kickstarter - $23,368 ← wild
Itch.io - $1,432
Mimicpublishing.com - $605
Paypal (wholesale) - $150
We sold a lot of games in Q1, but we didn’t ship them until Q2. We learned a lot during this Kickstarter campaign, and we look forward to showing you are improvements if we get the chance for another one.
The year continues into Q2.
Hinokodo worked with Love & Wine Media to create (probably) 2023’s first game soundtrack to be released on MiniDisc. We’re awfully proud of it and they smelled great!
We also partnered with the folks over at Fistful of Ink/Crit to make a one of kind minidisc cover. They did a phenomenal job.
Quite a few things happened in quick succession during April and May. The big news is that Hinokodo & Ryan moved (as did the Mimic headquarters). There’s a lot more room for box packing and order shipping now.
The next big thing is that their old car died (way back in November) and they managed to buy a used Nissan Leaf that can only go 60 miles on a good day. But now Mimic operates oil free! (The new office is even wind powered!)
[No one documented the big delivery to the post office. I work with a bunch of knuckleheads, but trust me, it took 2 comically large car loads of packages to deliver the US orders for the Kickstarter campaign.]
While shipping is always a huge ordeal for many small businesses, it appears that everyone who participated in the Miru 2 campaign have their orders! (International shipping has been a WHOLE thing.)
In Q2 we shipped over 1,760 items through 510 shipments. That’s a lot of boxes!
Here are some fun facts from Q2:
Fun Facts for Q2: (expenses)
Materials - $9,132 ← expected
Transaction Fees - $102
Platform Fees - $47
Carbon Offsetting - $32
Shipping - $3,828 ← $800 of this was just getting stuff to the UK. Oof.
Sales Tax - $150
Fun Facts for Q2: (Revenue by platform)
Kickstarter - $0
Itch.io - $941
Mimicpublishing.com - $1545
Paypal (wholesale) - $770 ← who could this be? 👀👀
While Q1 was very fruitful thanks to the Kickstarter campaign, but we spent over $13,000 in expenses to fulfill it. Meow!
Our expenses were about $2,500 more than expected for 2 reasons.
We did not expect shipping to our fulfillment partners in the UK to be as expensive. Our estimates were way off. This forced us to seek cost savings where we could and we shipped with UPS. USPS was 2x as much! (this bit us in the butt later) Delays and damages (physical and financial), on top of the kind of surprising tax bill, it was not a fun experience. (But we are past this and folks across the globe should have their orders soon, if not already.) This was our first time shipping this many products internationally, using UPS, and working with a fulfillment partner. Lots of lessons learned we can discuss in another newsletter if you’d like.
We gambled on ourselves and ordered an extra 1000 copies of MIRU 1 & 2. (we needed about 800 of each to fulfill the Kickstarter orders) We decided this gamble was worth it because it pushed us into having the quantity to qualify for offset printing (fancier printing option) as well as lowered the per unit cost. Expensive up front, but if we can manage to sell enough copies, we can afford a printer for the office.
What Will Be
The rest of the year looks bright!
Admin-wise, we’re still working on quite a few things for Mimic. Our short to-do list:
Revisit our approach to project submissions.
Build out our licensing program.
Sniff more catnip
Hinokodo has a few projects in the works. Checking out his newsletter or Discord server is a great way to keep track of all the nonsense he’s working on. (Last I checked, he was working on 6 games all at once.)
His game PONDUS is closest to being complete. We’re hoping he can complete that by late august. (Just in time for Kickstarter’s annual Witchstarter event?) 👀
And with that teaser, this newsletter is quite the read, so we best stop it here for now.
The first half of the year is done. We survived. Despite the world falling apart, there are now 2 happy and healthy cats managing a publishing company, and a couple of creatives getting to work on the things that bring them joy. Check out our shop! (We just added MIRU 1 & 2!) We really appreciate everyone’s support and we love hearing from folks. Please message Hinokodo if you have any concerns or praises, as when I respond outside of the newsletter, my paws are too big to find the right letters. I often resort to just laying down on the whole keyboard like this: alksf2aj’owiv’kinpVN’Iwvonih
visit www.mimicpublishing.com to support our work.
Until next time kitties!
- Syn & Artemis