We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Bridgette Sieffert. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Bridgette below.

Bridgette, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Coming up with the idea is so exciting, but then comes the hard part – executing. Too often the media ignores the execution part and goes from idea to success, skipping over the nitty, gritty details of executing in the early days. We think that’s a disservice both to the entrepreneurs who built something amazing as well as the public who isn’t getting a realistic picture of what it takes to succeed. So, we’d really appreciate if you could open up about your execution story – how did you go from idea to execution?

GraduateTheU – University of Minnesota Twin Cities Edition – is a board game my family invented, designed, played, re-designed and took to market over a two year span. The idea of GraduateTheU was born out of an excessive amount of family board game playing during the pandemic. My parents were working from home and my brother and I were attending the U remotely during the day. We played board games pretty much every evening. One evening, while we were playing one of our many games at the dining room table, we came up with the idea of creating a board game based on the adventures, history, and general craziness one can experience while attending the wonderful University of Minnesota. As a family of almost exclusively Gopher alumni, we immediately imagined what a board game encompassing student life at the University of Minnesota could look like. Someone asked “What if we made it?” From there, the idea took off and we started brainstorming game play, fun facts, recognized landmarks, unexpected challenges, and crazy real-life experiences we had along the way to graduation. The rest of that day was spent designing the game structure and goal. We indepthly discussed rules, strategy, game theory, and how to balance fun and entertainment with accuracy and information about the University.

In the following months, we went through a long process of designing the game board layout to mimic the University of Minnesota and the Twin Cities. I remember spending countless hours between my online classes creating images of different campus properties and laying out specific paths between them in order to ensure fun game play. This was one of my favorite steps in the process of launching the game because it was during this phase that the game really came to life. In my opinion, the game board is the heart and soul of a board game, so as an avid board game player the chance to design my own was amazing. Another very time consuming process was researching the property cards. On the back of every property card in our game are fun/historical facts to help people learn about both the University and the state of Minnesota. This was a huge undertaking to research all of these cards. After we finished the first draft of the game, we took our board game to a local printing shop to print out a first test copy that we then spent days playing in order to test out every scenario we could think of that might occur during the game. Then we took our notes and headed back to the drawing board to design a second iteration that allowed for much smoother game play. Once we had our concept finalized, we worked with a local friend who is a children’s book illustrator, Taia Morley. She hand drew every property on the game board, as well as pertinent landscape, and it turned out beautifully.

After our game was fully designed and ready to print came one of the more lengthy stages of launching our business: licensing. It took us nearly a year working with the licensing team at the University of Minnesota to get our game content approved before we could manufacture our game. This required a lot of back and forth, tweaking the content and was very tedious. Only once this stage was completed could we send our game to print, where we immediately ran into supply chain issues, like paper shortages and cost spikes, during Covid-19. Then came the hardest part for me: business and marketing. As a computer engineering major these disciplines were a little outside my comfort zone. The actual development of the game was very enjoyable for me, combining two of my passions: board games and the University of Minnesota. However, navigating supply chain issues, agonizing over marketing expenses, determining the best avenues for advertising, and negotiating with businesses to sell the game, brought a whole set of new challenges. Finally, over two years after conception, our family launched GraduateTheU – University of Minnesota Twin Cities Edition in April 2022, ready to be sold on our website and in the University of Minnesota Bookstore, just in time for graduation!

Bridgette, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

GraduateTheU is a small business owned by a family of University of Minnesota alumni. Huge board game enthusiasts, we have been playing games together forever and were inspired to create a game of our own that captures and reflects our love of the University. GraduateTheU – University of Minnesota Twin Cities Edition was several years in the making but came to life from this desire. We designed game play and content to mimic student life at the University of Minnesota, allowing alumni to relive nostalgic experiences and prospective students and their families to learn about campus life and iconic places. As sole owners of our start-up business, I am proud of the fact that we were passionately dedicated to the development of our product, from start to finish. From designing the board layout, to researching fun facts on our game cards, to assembling and packaging each game by hand, this has been a once in a lifetime experience for our family. It has been a LONG road to finally reach the point of game production, including supply chain setbacks due to the pandemic, paper shortages, and months of working closely with the U to secure content approval and licensing for the game. As we look back fondly and proudly several years later, we are very pleased to offer the only board game uniquely dedicated to life and experiences at the University of Minnesota!

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

Launching a business during a pandemic turned out to be a crazy journey filled with challenges, ups and downs and, ultimately, a huge success. The largest obstacle my team faced in creating this game was getting approval for all of the game content and sorting out licensing issues from the University of Minnesota. During the licensing process, the University reviewed every aspect of our game, from board layout to the positioning of Goldy the Gopher, to the content of our property and GTU cards. This was a long back-and-forth process of review and refine that took about a year. During this process, we had to compromise some elements of the game that we were sad to remove. This long process led to several moments where we questioned our decision to proceed with launching this game and whether we could ultimately succeed. We had put well over a year of work into the process at this point and the launch of the game seemed out of reach. However, we had not invested significant operating capital yet so a decision to continue or not had to be made. My family ultimately decided that we very much wanted to see our vision come to life for the enjoyment of our fellow University of Minnesota lovers. We finished the process to officially license our game, and I am very happy to have the support of the University in the making of our game. I am forever thankful we chose to continue our journey as it has been so worthwhile to have people playing and enjoying our game.

We’d love to hear your thoughts about selling platforms like Amazon/Etsy vs selling on your own site.

GraduateTheU can be found in many different places. We sell the game on our own website (www.graduatetheu.com) via GoDaddy and on Etsy. The University of Minnesota Bookstore, the University of Minnesota Alumni Market, and the Minnetonka General Store all carry our game, both in store and online, as well. When deciding how and where to sell the game, the biggest challenge has been finding a balance between visibility of our product and controlling costs. Our target audience is prospective, current, and former University of Minnesota students and their families. The best place to reach students has been through the University of Minnesota Bookstore and a wonderful way for us to reach alumni has been through the Minnesota Alumni Market. These vendors have been excellent partners for reaching our target audience and selling our game. It was also important to us to offer direct sales, so we launched our own website, graduatetheu.com. While there are certain costs associated with operating our own website on platforms like GoDaddy and Etsy, those costs are much smaller than the costs / lost revenue when selling wholesale to retailers. Convenience, functionality, and integration are huge factors in the decision between the various e-commerce sites. Many of them integrate easy-to-use shipping elements. GoDaddy has a simple yet powerful product management dashboard for tracking orders, sales, revenue, postage calculation, tax calculation, and many other features, which ultimately influenced our decision to use this platform.

Contact Info:

• Website: graduatetheu.com
• Instagram: graduate_the_u