Michael Mindes started his board game publishing company, Tasty Minstrel Games, in early 2009.  With his little spare time between being married, having 3 children, and providing financial advice, he has created a popular brand within the hobby board gaming market.  Recognizing a lack of time, he concentrates on building scalable marketing solutions, and outsources the majority of the business (game design, artwork, manufacturing, shipping, warehousing, and fulfillment).

As a result, he has fallen in love with email marketing, building a solid fan base, and brand evangelists.  He currently enjoys the benefits of an email list of over 5,700 gamers.  Monthly newsletters typically have a 30+% open rate.  While a recent beta invitation had almost a 50% open rate and over a 23% CTR.  He also loves being in a hybrid physical/digital business.  Meaning the product is physical, sold through retailers, and marketed heavily via the Internet.  He believes that having a hybrid business allows for a barrier to entry when compared to purely digital businesses, and utilizing Internet marketing methods allows him an edge on the competition.

Last year, he received over $48,000 in crowd sourced funding through Kickstarter for his game, Eminent Domain.  Since then he launched a Preview Night program for retailers and pre-sold the entire first print run of 5,000 copies before the game was finished being manufactured.  Eminent Domain should grow into a evergreen profitable game, which will hopefully explode into a top industry hit.

Maybe someday Tasty Minstrel Games will be profitable enough for him to concentrate a full-time effort on, but until then the scalable solutions that he has built shows that with the proper thoughts and actions great businesses can be built with spare time.