Item — HN Reader

Nice! I have a couples of questions if that's okay :)

1- Are you making profit? How long did that take you to be profitable?

2- In what do your spend money? Mind sharing a breakdown?

3- Who is your typical customers? Do they come back? How do you reach them?

2 comments

Definitely!

1/ The up-front costs were $30k for me, and it took about 8 months to make it back. After operating costs, I make anywhere from $1k to $5k/mo. (Once in a while I lose money)

2/ I want to do a real blog post, but high level: $3.5k rent, $2k for a manager, $2k for labor, $1k for other utilities, and then money on things like adwords, etc.

3/ They would come back, except we only have one room! On weekends we get a lot of tourists, on week days we get a lot of team bonding from startups and larger companies. So, while they don't come back, their coworkers tend to. (This is atypical for most escape rooms in the US, though. Most have 3-5 rooms, and very few "company outings".)

OOC how is a manager $2k a month? Is it a part time gig?

Of course! I don't know the hourly rate exactly, but it's definitely a great amount of money for the time worked. We also pay employees $50 (minimum) for every one hour game.

3- If a place has more than one room some people come back and try the other rooms too. But if you did escape from a room, you already solved the puzzle and it's not fun to do it again.

Most people I know did it with some other people from work. Also myself, somebody at work asked and we went with around 10 people to a place with two rooms.

i think this is the big problem with escape rooms. zero replay value. now imagine that the puzzle/escape is custom build, for you, each time.

you can literally play the “same” room hundreds of times. how about designing the room and having your friends bash their heads against the wall. this space is ready for disruption!!!

> how about designing the room and having your friends bash their heads against the wall.

I think you underestimate the skill and time it requires to make engaging puzzles.

The big chains will solve the repeatability issue by swapping puzzles around their world locations. I assume they are doing this already.

This is a cool idea, but also a pretty unsolved problem, even in digital games. Heck, computers can't even procedurally generate decent crossword puzzles.

Best comparison point I can think of are roguelikes, but even if you can figure out a way to make custom hardware build-out easy, roguelikes largely work by making replayability cheap. It's hard to build an on-ramp to teach players about the interactions of complex systems when each playthrough costs them $50+ and takes an hour plus transpotation time.

is disagree. while it may be expensive it’s far from unsolved (im the virtual world of course)

We played a variant where you "find treasure." This made reconfiguration simple!

i was thinking a blend of physical and virtual but that may increase the cost of building the escape room significantly.