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I built an escape room in San Francisco! It's a loving parody of startup culture (Startup Escape), and while I built it because it seemed like a fun challenge,
by gkoberger 7y ago
I built an escape room in San Francisco! It's a loving parody of startup culture (Startup Escape), and while I built it because it seemed like a fun challenge, it's also bringing in a good amount of business still.
If you're in SF and build it custom, you can make some money. If you are in a random place with low rent and you buy an off the shelf game, you can make a ton.
If anyone is interested in building one and has questions, ask away!
- eric_khun 7y agoNice! 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?
- _trampeltier 7y ago3- 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.
- mirceal 7y agoi 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!!!
- tomrod 7y agoWe played a variant where you "find treasure." This made reconfiguration simple!
- mirceal 7y agoi was thinking a blend of physical and virtual but that may increase the cost of building the escape room significantly.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- lazerwalker 7y agoThis 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.
- mirceal 7y agois disagree. while it may be expensive it’s far from unsolved (im the virtual world of course)
- ninth_ant 7y ago> 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.
- gkoberger 7y agoDefinitely! 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".)
- evolve2k 7y agoI live in a smaller city where I’d say the number of escape rooms is about equivalent to the number of bowling alleys (less than 5 of each come to mind). How’s the best way to measure if the market is saturated?
- dfeojm-zlib 7y agoI would find a better (defensible) business model that's better than a restaurant that anyone can open. ER's have zero intellectual property and anyone can start such a business for little investment. Do something else (hard/er/expensive/tedious for most people) that lends itself to greater monopolization by you, and that's profitable. (Build something defensible and profitable that customers love.)
- EForEndeavour 7y agoWould your advice to anyone interested in building an escape room not to build an escape room?
- TheSoftwareGuy 7y agoNot everyone needs to be a billionaire monopolist, I think most people can be happy with a solid consistent income
- braythwayt 7y agoI wrote some books. Books are completely indefensible. There are billions of the things, and new ones get written all the time. I made some money. I was and am very happy to have written books. Is writing books a good business? Perhaps not, if viewed through the “The world is divided into unicorns and NOOPs” lens. But I don’t look at the world through that lens. See also: Making music, opening a social pub, running a day care, organizing festivals or conferences... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifestyle_business https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifestyle_business
- lozenge 7y agoDo these rooms have an online booking system? Check their occupancy rate!
- throwaway00009 7y agoAwesome! Care to share some stats / revenue?
- zerr 7y agoHow to come up with the pricing?
- nailer 7y agoClickable link. This seems fun (and ridiculous) https://startupescape.com https://startupescape.com
- fortes 7y agoWas just there about 10 days ago with my team! Good times, we solved it in about 45 minutes :)
- gkoberger 7y agoCongrats! That's quick for the room :)