Hi everyone, 

Just a quick reminder if you're in the Bay Area and free on Saturday, we're having our launch party at TechShop. Details in the last update. Great if you RSVP, but if you decide to show up at the last minute we'll be delighted to see you there. 

cheers,
Jazz 

You're Cordially Invited to the Official Launch of the Hugalopes.

Where: TechShop San Francisco
When: Saturday, April 6 2013 @ 2 PM

RSVP 

Everyone put on your dancing shoes and party hats. We've been working really hard to fulfill all the backer orders and it's time to celebrate. 

The plan:

• Pick up your Hugalope or bring your Hugalope with you. 
• Put your Hugalope on your head. 
• Take a guided tour of TechShop – the amazing creative space where we did so much of our prototyping work. 
• Fun with lasers! We'll cut some patterns for parts on the lasers. 
• Part building party! We'll use some of the patterns we cut out on the laser and have everything you need on hand to make parts from scratch. We'll show you how it's done and you can make custom parts of your very own. We'll also make an instructional video for people who can't attend. 
• We can't wait to meet everyone and talk to you in person about the whole adventure and take lot's of pictures. 
• Oh, and CAKE. Or maybe pie. Home baked goodies for sure. 

So let us know if you're coming so we can plan for the right number of people!

By the way, if you live in the Bay Area and have not yet received a Hugalope, it is because you indicated somewhere – in a comment or message or email that you prefer to pick it up in person either at Hugalopes HQ or at the Launch Party. If you do want to pick it up in advance, please contact me at jazz@hugalopes.com to make arrangements.

We hope to see all of you there!

People have been picking up their Hugalopes and packages have started going out via UPS and USPS and I've been putting in some very long hours continuously since the shipment came in to pull all this off and I've been discovering that shipping logistics on a tight budget is just really, really hard. But we're incredibly excited to be sending these out and seeing new orders come in via the website is deeply gratifying. 

But I just had to stop for a bit and post about my day. Through a TechShop connection I was recently put in touch with a woman who is giving a presentation at SXSW this coming week. She wanted to interview some TechShop people who had run successful kickstarters and hear about their experiences as background for her talk. She's super nice by the way. 

Well, I'm telling her our story and the keys to promoting a campaign effectively and I'm giving her all this advice about how best to raise money through crowd-funding and the things I wish I knew when I started, etc. All the advice I pass on whenever people who are starting campaigns of their own ask me how to do it. 

I tell her the single most important lesson I can give from my own experience is to involve your friends in the creation and preparation for the campaign early on before you launch. Getting them invested in this way is so much better than having everything in place, launching, and then asking them to spread the word. Our most effective evangelists were the ones who helped us from the very start and they turned out to be essential in so many ways. So I always tell people to engage their friends early and meaningfully - it's also more fun that way. 

Then the discussion turns to our experience with fulfillment and delays and keeping your backers in the loop about what's happening. I have to admit we took way longer than we expected to pull this off and how at first I was really sheepish about discussing this in updates. And how there were times when we were stuck waiting on the factory and the time between updates felt too long. And then when stuff would happen it would be all at once and it was so hard to keep up with changing events. And about all the frustrations surrounding the reality of fulfillment and making sure our backers understood that we were in fact incredibly dedicated to all of this and to the support they'd shown. And she mentions how Kickstarter projects in general are notorious for this.

Then I start telling her how the experience has evolved for me. How I started hearing from people who were (amazingly) reading every update and following our progress incredibly closely. And how they really paid attention and knew what was happening (I always wonder since my posts tend to run super long). And how much they are really, really rooting for us. I tell her how understanding all these hundreds of people have been and how even the least patient ones have motivated our efforts and we're grateful for all of the feedback. 

And I tell her about meeting people in person for the first time and how they have all this knowledge about your experience and familiarity with your journey. And how I always expect people to be annoyed with the delay and instead I keep hearing congratulations on our success. Which is weird since I feel like we have such a long way to go and we're always struggling just to keep the company alive. But then this helps put things in perspective and I can see how much we've actually accomplished that we never even imagined at first. And how people have told me the updates have been chapters in a story and every one of them a true cliffhanger. And how so many people have shown how much they support and care about our adventure as it continues. And I start gushing to this woman about how we have the best backers in the world and yeah, every campaign says that because all of us really feel that way, and isn't that just a great thing about kickstarter? 

So then I stop and tell her I was completely wrong about the most important lesson I've learned from running a campaign. I tell her that without a doubt the single most important thing I've learned from running a kickstarter campaign is that people are amazing. They are fundamentally good and wonderful in the most surprising ways and if you put them in your path they will show you just how incredible they can be. You guys have awesomized our lives.

Now, there are still Hugalopes to send and I have to get back to work.

~j

Wow, I've been working pretty long hours without a break and no days off since the shipment came in and I'm exhausted. But I don't really have time to just take the day off. So... let's have some fun and get some work done at the same time:

It's supposed to be a pretty warm day tomorrow (with a slight chance of rain, but let's hope for some luck) so we were thinking it might be nice to spend some time by Lake Merritt and make a mini Hugalope pick up event of it. If you'd like to come by and take delivery of your little fuzzy fellow, we thought we'd go to the wonderful farmer's market and get lunch then hang out by the lake for a few hours near the pergola where the slackliners set up on Saturdays. If it rains, we'll be sad and postpone. 

This is not the launch party, but a chance to pick up your package early and go home and customize your Hugalope for the launch party :)

Comment here or send us a message if you can come!

Many of you have inquired about purchasing additional Hugalopes. Not only does this warm our hearts (it totally does!), it's the key to staying in business. So please tell all your friends. It's not the prettiest site yet, but you can place orders here. It takes Paypal and all major credit cards.

The details: We are selling the starter kit at the regular price and you can send all your friends to kickstarter.hugalopes.com. 

If you scroll all the way down to the bottom, you'll see a link to a special thank you offer exclusively for backers. You may purchase additional Hugalopes up to the number of your original order for $40 each (20% off). This offer runs through March 21, 2013 but if you place an order very soon we can consolidate it with your current shipment immediately. 

We're limiting the number of discount Hugalopes to the number of your original order to be fair to the people who ordered at the highest tiers. Please use the regular price option beyond this number. And don't worry if it's confusing, we'll double check everything with our spreadsheets and sort out mistakes.

Please note that the address for purchasing the special edition is kickstarter.hugalopes.com. This is a subdomain; the regular hugalopes.com address will take you to the Jakks edition.

Please help us spread the word so that we can keep this going. I promise to make the website prettier as soon as we've gotten all the kickstarter orders shipped. Right now, that's our top priority. Once we've taken care of Kickstarter fulfillment, we'll turn our attention to building up the business and offering extra parts and character kits for sale. We also want to really expand the website to feature puppet videos - both the ones we make and the ones you do - and all sorts of fun stuff. We're really excited about what comes next!