boomgnade

1. Wow, I pretty much grab time whenever I can. My oldest (3yo) has school 5 days a week until 3pm and I have childcare for my 1yo 4 days a week M-Thurs until about 2pm so from 9am-2pm I get as much as I can done and then fill in after they go to bed, when my wife gets home from her job etc.
2. Depends on the game - my games have ranged from about $5-$9 per unit in general but this can go down with bigger runs and there's import taxes/landed costs as well.
3. Again this can depend generally I would say your margin is about $5-$10 per game.
4. I have definitely learned to step away when I'm stressed overwhelmed. The thing about doing something creative like game design is it can strike you whenever and you can't force it. Sometimes my best ideas come to me walking my kids to the park.
5. I've invented my own games and designed them up until this point. Set a Watch (on KS) is a friend's design and my first time developing and publishing someone else's idea.
6. No
7. Yes I've always been indie and work with factories to produce my product.

Kickstarter is probably 70-75% of our income but it helps us actually get product into stores. Once we fulfill a kickstarter and our games get into stores we usually get a nice bump of income from these stores buying games but they get them at 50% off so our margin is worse.

You need to bring your own crowd to Kickstarter and know your'e going to be funded on day 1. For me, this meant spending over a year pounding the pavement and going to conventions to play my game with strangers. Once you build up a mailing list and you're funded, you can start spending money on online ads with fb, reddit, boardgamegeek etc.

I would wean myself off of retail stores before Kickstarter. Kickstarter lets me go direct to consumer and I have colleagues who are doing this full time and ONLY sell their games on KS.

To be fair, the game was well funded before the AMA. I did schedule this during a slower time of the campaign though so it could get my proper attention. Doing it on launch day would be silly.