Case Study 2
Product & Creative Strategy
Building a product for the market
The Sharper Visage Catalog was an original publishing product developed with cold acquisition in mind. Market and competitor research shaped the product concept, while marketability informed its development and positioning. The resulting strategy was then tested through actual purchases from new customers.
Context & Research
Finding the right product
I founded Bardmaven as an independent publishing studio to bring original gaming products directly to market. For its first release, I chose to use cold acquisition to validate demand, testing whether the product’s value proposition could generate purchases from new customers at its regular price before adding organic content to the acquisition strategy.
Market Selection
I researched several niche publishing markets before selecting tabletop gaming because it supported a wide range of products and offered access to a large audience through common digital channels. Based on product and competitor research, I chose to publish a collection of magic items for its broad market appeal, limited direct competition, and its built-in potential for individual pieces to work as standalone product hooks.
Product Strategy
Building differentiation into the product
Concept Development
My research of competing magic item products revealed that the most prominent competitors in the market relied on communicating the quantity of magic items and gameplay options as a driving message in their marketing. To differentiate from this prominent strategy, I chose to develop a product with a value proposition that challenges the cost of abundance: browsing fatigue, too many similar choices, difficulty identifying what will matter in play, and content bought but never used. It would instead compete on curation, applicability, personality, and a product experience designed to cultivate purchase intent by fostering consumer anticipation.
I settled on the concept of a fantasy mail-order catalog inspired by the Sharper Image catalogs from the 1980s. The concept provided a framework for presenting the product as a curated collection of magic items with a humorous but earnest personality. I developed an in-world wizard character to personalize the book and establish its uniquely dynamic tone.
Product Experience
I developed an original design hypothesis from an analysis of the most popular magic items and their mechanics: memorable magic items provide broad creative utility that gives players new ways to change what happens next in the game’s story. Additional market research pointed to an underserved gap in the market, revealing demand for this kind of experience: low-powered, broad creative utility became my chosen axis of product differentiation.
The product’s core experience is to provide magic items that players instinctively imagine using. Item concepts, descriptions, and shopkeeper anecdotes are designed to make readers imagine applications. The reader does not merely assess whether an item’s bonus is useful; they instead begin constructing a scene in their mind of the experience using it.
Product Development
Building the strategy into the product
Creative Direction
My research of the tabletop gaming market found that fantasy products commonly rely on illustration and skeuomorphic decoration as atmospheric polish to communicate tone and perceived value. To visually differentiate the product and its marketing, I developed a type-led editorial system that made the product’s ideas themselves the focus.
Items were organized around the kinds of experiences they supported. Distinctive item names maintained the product’s personality, while typography, color, and information hierarchy made the content easier to browse and drew readers from an item’s name into its description, where the product’s primary experience begins: imagining what they could do with it.
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Designing for Marketability
Because the product was being developed for cold acquisition, I considered how its individual components could function independently in advertising. Research into the intended audience pointed toward an interest in character-driven and story-focused gameplay. I designed additional content around those interests that reinforced the core product experience and created a larger inventory of independently marketable high-concept material.
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Positioning
Turning the product strategy into a market position
Positioning the Product
Product and customer research showed that the most commercially useful response to the product was not simply that readers found its magic items creative, but that they immediately began imagining how they would use them. I used that behavior to translate the product’s broader ideas about player choice and creative utility into a concrete customer promise: Magic items your players will want to use.
Building the Acquisition Funnel
I carried the same message hierarchy through the acquisition funnel. Cold ads demonstrated individual items designed to trigger the same imagined-use response identified in the positioning research. The product page then connected that experience to the pain point of buying magic item content that rarely gets used, demonstrated how the items create new possibilities, and progressively revealed the product’s broader value.
Outcome
Market Validation
I established purchases as the primary measure of validation and set a target acquisition cost of $15 or less against an approximately $24 break-even CPA.
Over eight weeks of controlled acquisition testing, cold Meta traffic generated 41 purchases of the $24.99 product at its regular price. Within that testing program, two distinct product hooks independently met the target acquisition cost: Portable Peephole generated 12 purchases at $14.20 CPA, while Chronoporter generated 14 at $14.79 CPA. The results provide small-scale market validation for the product’s positioning and marketability strategy across multiple product hooks. They do not yet establish product-market fit or a scaled acquisition engine.
