Gamer Grub

I talked about this a little bit on twitter, and said I would elaborate on the story here.

Gamer Grub first showed up on my radar last Friday when it was mention on Penny-Arcade. They did a comic about it which mirrored my sentiment. They wrote a bit more about it in their blog. I checked around on my own a bit, read the Tom's Hardware interview and looked at their website. I decided that action should be taken and sent a rather nasty email to Biosilo foods and urged people on twitter to do the same. I didn't expect any kind of response. I figured the emails would go into the same black hole of email that most big corps have.

I wrote:

as a gamer I am insulted by your "gamer grub". That is the worst piece of marketing I have ever seen, and it makes me never want to buy any of your products. I will also be telling everyone I know to steer clear of anything you create.

Next time you want to target a niche audience, do some research.

What I didn't realize is that Biosilo foods isn't a big corp. It's pretty much one guy. His name is Keith. Keith replied to my email.

Hi Steven;

Thank you for your comments. I can assure you no insult was intended. I just liked GG.

Actually I really do not have a marketing department; Biosilo Foods is a start up at the moment. I am not really a marketer since that stuff is a bit too cheesy for me.

Most of my gaming experience comes from LAN gaming while the boss was away at a corporate firm I worked at; and with my daughter who prefers Unreal with monster kills. I haven't upgraded to liquid cooling yet but I would really would like to.

If you would like I can send you some samples and you can taste GG and see what you think. If you have any ideas for improvement I am kind of at that phase where we can tweak stuff a bit if it works.

If you need to stay clear of what I do, that's cool. My last girl friend said the same thing. :)

Cheers,

KM

Now, parts of that email do seem a bit contrived. Especially the random part of wanting to install water cooling. It's pretty obvious that Keith is not a "gamer". But, since he went through the effort to respond to what was basically a flame mail, I figured I should at least be civil with the guy. I emailed back and forth with him a little bit, and the short of it is that he's sending out some free samples. I plan on sharing them with some of the students at the high school (probably the computer club kids), and give him an honest response.

I really do feel that the name of the product is bad, and I told him so. If I can think of something better than "Strategy Chocolate" then I'll pass it on to him. Maybe, as Tycho said, the guy is a carpetbagger. But I appreciate the attempt of the small guy to make it big. He just needs to find someone who knows a thing or two about marketing to geeks.