Weekly Game-Night Tradition Turns Into A Bestselling Board Game

You're now listening to Hack and Grow Rich with Shaahin Cheyene and his co-host Bart Baggett. Yeah, I tried other jobs selling, buying a pizza franchise, selling real estate, and selling vacuums door-to-door. So I was doing all that, but I hadn't started a product and built a business and so this was eventually, when I started, it was the first shot but I kind of knew deep down. It was the right shot to take. But yeah, so but so I'm thinking of the idea or excuse me I graduate from college and move in with some buddies and it's 1982. I'm 22 years old and we start sketching words out of the dictionary. That was it. I mean there was no grand plan. There was no game. We're just having fun. Well, we get home late. Now there are three guys, six guys were just playing this silly game. We were having a ball every night. And so the entrepreneurial spirit started kicking in. I'm going you know this is going to be a good board game because in 82 there were no video games. Everybody played board games. So that was the vernacular of the day. And then, of course, I procrastinated for three years. Are you ready to go, man? I'm good. I'm an entrepreneur. I'm gonna be, you know, I went to Europe. I kept waiting tables. I wasn't ready and I just couldn't get out of my way.

A couple of years later, the idea would not leave my head though. It wasn't like I forgot about it and it was driving me nuts. So I had to get started. I had to just so I could chill and I couldn't figure out how to put the words into the game, right? There's a selling point there. The words were the thing that people were going to pay for nobody, you know, wants to get addiction. People are lazy for goodness sake. I say that out loud. Yeah, people are lazy consumers. I was going to give them something they could use and that was the words. Couldn't figure it out. But then serendipity entered in. My mom sends me children pursuit and I look at this freaking Trivial Pursuit card. I go holy. That's it. I put the words on cards. The next day I got out of my way, backyard, dictionary, the pad of paper, and a pen and I started making the word list. I said, keep in mind. Though I still did not have a plan for a business. I didn't have partners. I had no money. I didn't know what the frick the game was going to look like. I just knew I needed a word list. What year was this? Oh god, it was 84. Way before inner