I’ve been building a business for the last twelve months centered around the concept of the Treasure Hunt.
I see a lot of businesses out there doing this solely through a high scale, low effort app that guides players around using GPS tracking.
These businesses don’t seem to offer much value to the participant.
I decided to go a little more analogue with one key low-tech difference.
1. players purchase or download a premium quality treasure map complete with puzzles, riddles, and clues set in the city of purchase. Working with small local businesses I’ve arranged to hide a small “beacon” containing an NFC tag. The backend is extremely simple: the NFC tag stores a url to a simple webpage that displays text, video, images, and audio with light CSS styling. The player uses the map to find the beacons. The beacons reveal a piece of the puzzle. The goal is to find the final hidden beacon and complete the story.
I market tested the idea by promoting a free treasure hunt that gave away $1000 to one of the players who completed the game within a 4 four week period. We had over 2000 players and the feedback was very positive.
I have confidence that this has viability. All the local businesses were very happy with the increase customer traffic the game brought in while the tech interface was simple enough for most players to easily access.
Honestly, I am at a bit of a crossroads.
I am unsure whether to focus on retail sales of the treasure maps or continue to approach city councils and tourism websites to pitch bespoke experiences.
Rough cost breakdown:
Monthly service expenses (website hosting etc) = $100
Map printing costs per unit = >$5
Retail price for map: $45
CP to purchase maps wholesale = $200 (for 10 maps)
Custom bespoke pricing: $2500 – $5000 for turnkey experience with custom locations.
I figure if I can sell 50 maps per month and secure at least one bespoke experience I can generate $8 – $10k in revenue. Which seems like a scalable model to me. Add more map stories, more cities, and do more custom projects I think I can get to $300k in maybe 12 – 18 months.
Feedback request
Would love the groups thoughts on this and more importantly: can you poke holes in the model?
I think I’m seeing everything through rose tinted glasses. I’ve gotten public liability insurance, developed great relationships with local businesses, and do maintenance on the beacons every four weeks.
I can also track a lot of player information from the NFC tag scans. So this is helpful in seeing where the beacons are active or not.
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