Taking the First Step Blog

Hi, I’m Nika. Physicist. SnowBoardGames co-founder. Kickstarter creator. An advocate for efficiency. Climber. And since recently, a mom.

The SnowBoardGames story started in 2021, in the midst of covid lockdown, with a physicist, who had a fulfilling job in aviation, but who came to understand that if I want to be successful in life, ‘just’ physics won’t be enough, because it will never give me the independence I realised I wanted from life.

I needed another set of skills, which would help me navigate the changing world, and give me the ability to create something.

So together with Blaž, my awesome life partner, a fellow board-gamer, climbing partner, and a civil engineer, we founded SnowBoardGames and decided to launch a husky-themed board game on Kickstarter, to learn about crowdfunding.

The campaign took off way better than we dared to hope – 3451 backers helped us raise almost €120,000. We knew right away that we wanted to publish more games, but we were conflicted, because we did not want to leave our professional fields, physics and engineering, which we are passionate about too. And we wanted to still have free time, to climb, be in the mountains, snowboard, and play board games with friends and family.

We decided to do all 3. And if things weren’t complicated enough, I enrolled on a PhD in 2022, because I wanted to deepen my knowledge of numerical simulations.

So for the past few years, we have been working in physics & engineering from Monday to Thursday, and running SnowBoardGames – theoretically on Fridays, but usually on week afternoons and rainy weekends – and enjoying 3-day weekends filled with travelling and being outdoors.

It has been a crazy journey. We’ve met amazing people. We’ve learned so much about business and crowdfunding, and about game design. We’ve had periods with a lot of free time and ones where we were pulling all-nighters. We’ve had the ups. We’ve had the crashes. But most of all, it’s been an exciting journey of personal growth.

I enjoy writing, so I’ve been documenting parts of our journey. If you are interested, I warmly invite you to join us. This blog is my personal outlet, where you will find posts about personal growth (this is a major one), intertwined with reflections about business (written from the perspective of someone from a tech career, who is learning about business and balancing it on the side), and crowdfunding (from someone who’s launched and fulfilled successful campaigns). And, of course, sprinkled with board games.

The first cycle of posts is from 2021/2022, when we were launching our first Kickstarter campaign. Then, there was a long gap, because I started my PhD journey, was probably on a road to burnout, took a break from SnowBoardGames, turned 30, got married, had a crisis, and, it seems, finally found balance between physics, SnowBoardGames and free time in 2025, when the new posts start.

Some highlights:

  • If you’re interested in how it all began, start here, and if you want to hear a story behind the SnowBoardGames name, check out this one.
  • If you’re thinking about launching your own Kickstarter campaign, definitely check out this one  and this one.
  • If you are thinking about sharing your story, but you can’t decide, I had the same dilemma, and I shared some thoughts here. And if you’re thinking about starting an endeavour, but you can’t get yourself to actually start, I analysed my process here, and I wish you all the best with your project!

4 things I wished I knew before we started a business

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As you can imagine, we did some research before we opened a business. But you know that no matter how well-prepared you are, there will likely be some unknown unknowns that will surprise you. These are the 4 things that surprised us, and I’m sharing them in the hope that they will help someone else when they embark on an entrepreneurial journey. We’re based in Slovenia, Europe – some of the experiences are location-specific. 1. The amount of spam you […]

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My 5 book reccomendations (2024/2025)

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Since we started SnowBoardGames, we have a habit of ordering some books in December. I’m gathering suggestions for this year’s order, and I thought I’d share some of the books and insights I found helpful over the last 2 years. Why 2 years? Because it’s been a continuous process when we’ve been figuring out what kind of business we want to be with SnowBoardGames, how to work with our partners better, and how to structure it so we can manage

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What’s happened during the long gap

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Do you ever think about doing a project on the side? Something that could be monetised, and that you would do independently from your job? I have been doing it since 2021. The beginnings & working on the side I have been wanting to do it for a long time. As a physicist, I wanted it to be some cool tech project that I would work on in my free time, together with my friends, and that would have the

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Feeling all grown up

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I think in the last weeks, since it became clear that our Kickstarter would be very successful, some people have started looking at me differently. It felt funny to me, as I didn’t feel any different than before. But I think this week, I felt for the first time that something has changed too. Rationally, I’m not sure why I should be perceived differently — since the start of this Hike! project, we were dedicated to making it a success.

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Kickstarter lessons — communication and interactions

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Last week, I wrote about some of the personal lessons that I’ve learned during the Kickstarter campaign. This is part two of that list, which is strongly focused on communication and interactions with backers. They are the cornerstones of a successful campaign, and I think that, given it was our first time, we did quite well. 7. Prioritise communication We didn’t have enough manpower to reply to all of the comments and emails promptly in the first few days. So

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Kickstarter lessons — the less technical stuff

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We were very well prepared for the technical part of the Kickstarter campaign, but there were some subjective and personal aspects that I hadn’t thought of before, and that surprised me. So I thought it would be interesting to share them in case someone finds them useful. I wanted to write about them as they were happening, but I really didn’t have time — and I’ve skipped two blogs in the last two weeks. So I am writing about them

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Kickstarter launch through the eyes of a creator

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We launched a Kickstarter campaign for a board game two days ago, and after an overwhelming launch, I found myself in a unique situation where I had the time to write down my feelings. And I feel privileged for that — with only two days’ distance, I’m already seeing it through different eyes, so I am grateful I have this written reminder of how it was. So here it goes, live from the launch day: It’s 2:45 in the morning,

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6 lessons that I’ve learned in 2021

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2021 has been an eventful year for me. I have explored new fields and grown as a person, and looking back, I can hardly recognise the person who started this year with an idea to go to Kickstarter, she feels so distant to me now. And she has no clue of what’s awaiting her. So, as the year is ending, and before I start making plans for 2022 (that would undoubtedly seem naïve by the end of 2022 again), I am taking the opportunity to

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Setting the date

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This week, we took another important step towards Kickstarter: we set the date for the start of the campaign. January 11, 2022. Well, to be honest, this date has been rolling around in our thoughts as a possibility for a while now, and we’ve mentioned it to reviewers when we sent out prototype copies for reviews, but this week, we’re announcing it publicly. We sent out the email newsletter to our subscribers yesterday, and we’re sharing it over our social

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A 3-part to-do list

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For a large part of 2021, I was balancing a full-time job, a large project in my free time, and climbing. The full-time job obviously occupied an 8-hour slot of the time that was cemented, but I could time-manage the other ones the way I wanted. At first, I did them by my gut feeling, prioritising on the way and focusing on the thing that was most urgent. It wasn’t the best method, as I would usually find the Kickstarter

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