About a year ago, I came across a post on Reddit involving an adult treasure hunt. It had a ton of buzz around it and people in the comments were essentially writing out a business plan for somebody to take the idea and run with it. So I took that information and posted it here with the idea of having everyone try to run a treasure hunt in their city.
The idea was pretty simple. Charge everyone an admission fee, set up a series of clues and riddles around your town, then have a grand prize for the first team that found the treasure chest.
There was a lot of speculation as someone in the past had done this but for free, and participants tore up the entire town looking for it causing thousands of dollars in damage. So as I've progressed with this further, I've tweeked how this race will be held.
My post on here got a fair amount of buzz and a group of us set up a Slack page and talked for a couple days about our skills and what we could offer. We had a couple graphic designers, a few salespeople, and a couple people who were already running small businesses. Everyone seemed to have their own idea of what would work and what didn't, so as you can imagine, everyone fizzled out. I had personally built a simple website at the time that I just left it up and forgot about it.
Several months later I received a phone call from a Groupon rep explaining how they thought the idea was great and how they wanted to run a promo with us. I listened to the voicemail a few times and decided to just let it go as I really was focusing on other things and didn't want to get my hands tied into something else.
Every month or so after that, I would get a new call from a new Groupon representative. So, a month ago, I decided I would listen to what they had to say and try to take some action to see if this could become something.
Fast forward to today and we have 30 sales on our Groupon page with just under 100 participants playing. We decided to do a team model where teams of two pay $19, teams of 4 pay $39, and teams of 6 pay $55. As you can guess, the most popular option is the team of two.
The race is in exactly two weeks, Sunday, May 8th at 8 am. (Mothers Day). I'm starting to get extremely nervous. Here's how I have my first race set up to run:
Teams will start at 8:00am or 9:00am.
I'm going to hand everyone a written clue that will lead them to the first booth in our town. (I made sure to make the whole race within a 2.5 mile radius of the starting point so people wouldn't be wasting a ton of gas)
At the first booth will be a table set up with a booth attendee that will hand the team their next clue.
On the second booth, there will be a mini game set up where teams can build a paper airplane that has to fly 20 feet. This game is optional. If you can do it, it will knock off five minutes from their race time. If you can't then you just wasted time.
The third booth will be another clue where it is just handed to you.
The fourth booth will also have another mini game where participants can solving a little metal hand puzzle. If you can solve this and put it back together, it will deduct 10 minutes from your time.
The fifth booth will be the final booth where I will be there recording everybody's times. The fastest team at the end of the day will win a treasure chest full of gold and silver $1 coins totalling $250. Second place will be winning Treasure Hunt T-Shirts.
Since I was just going with the flow of things with the Groupon, I didn't think to put different race times for the start of the race. Currently, I have 29 teams competing at an 8:00 am start time and 1 team competing at a 9:00 am start time. I just recently realized this would be a problem and added a page on my website, (Which Groupon has linked on our page) explaining that you can sign up for the 9:00 am start time to eliminate any bottle necking at the booths.
Groupon is taking half of the ticket prices and I haven't broken even yet as i've ordered banners for all of the booths, have to pay for staff, and of course the grand prize.
I contacted five local business' to have a booth set up outside of their location and everyone was more than willing to let us use their property. I gave them an option to attach a coupon to the clue to bring back business for them. I even had a business ask the price for it and I told them it was free of charge since this is our first race.
What i'm really looking for right now is some critiquing. I'm hoping that you guy's will find some issues that I can think of in advance to address now vs later.
Thanks,
Garrett
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