Editing The Pen Addict 349/transcript (section)

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'''Myke Hurley:''' From RelayFM, this is The Pen Addict, episode 349, and today's show is brought to you by ExpressVPN, Away, and Squarespace. My name is Myke Hurley, and I have the pleasure of being joined by Brad Dowdy.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' It's always a pleasure to join you, Myke Hurley. How are you today?

'''Myke Hurley:''' I am very well, my man. I'm a little bit jet-lagged. We'll get into why in a minute. But I'm ready and raring to go. I'm full of old grey tea. Let's do this thing. We should start. We'll start today. We'll give another quick update on the Kickstarter campaign. Thank you, thank you, thank you so much to everybody that has backed the campaign so far. Last week, I spoke about two records, and we were wondering if we would beat any of them. And we have beaten one of the records quite handily right now. This is now currently the most funded campaign that we've ever had. It's currently sitting at $31,650. So we've now made more money on this campaign than we did on last year's campaign. And we are right now at 600 backers. And the backers that we have to beat, total backers, are 720. I'm intrigued if we could do that. I don't know. But I'm so, so thankful for all of the people that have backed so far. We should mention, because we've already had people asking, what are you going to do with the extra money? One of the reasons we're so thankful is we have now met the amount of money we actually needed to do this. San Francisco is significantly more expensive as a location than any of the other secondary locations we've visited before, even including New York. Yeah. So we were hoping, really, we were expecting that we might be doing some of this campaign this year out of our own pocket. But we haven't needed to do that because of your incredible support. So we are now at the level in which we have all the money that we need to get everything done the way that we want. So what will we do? Do we have any extra? I don't know yet, because we haven't yet got any.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah. Yeah. We can't really say. We don't have any plans for anything extra. If we come up with something later in the campaign, it's certainly not something that's going to pop during the campaign. If we come up with some grand scheme to do something cool, you will all know. So what this tells me, Myke, about the dollar amount versus backers is that this was an interesting case study in backer reward levels and perceived value of things, because we have more money and 100 fewer backers, and everything was the same price point this year. You just, you know, I guess the perception of things this year changed that a little bit. So that's just me being business Brad and looking at Kickstarter campaign creation.

'''Myke Hurley:''' I think what it's shown potentially is that more people are interested in the physical reward this year than last year.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' I think we've made it clear that this is a more, value is not the right word, but this is a more expensive product.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Here's the big thing. Here's the big difference maker. So this year we have, and we're getting real into the weeds now. Welcome to the behind the scenes discussions. We have 33 backers right now for the videos level. Last year we had 131. So there's basically 100 people difference. We had 684 last year. So the 720 was the year before. That was like 2017 when we did all the stretch goals and everything, which makes sense as we spoke about why it was the most. So like we have 84 less backers right now, but there's like 100 people difference in the lowest tier. So I think that's what's going on is more people want the case this year.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah, it's a good deal.

'''Myke Hurley:''' We already have like, so we have 457 people that have gone all in for everything at $50, right? Which is the case, the sticker set and the videos. Last year we had 400. So we've already beaten that. So that's why we have at the moment, we have less backers, but we've made more money is because people seem to be more interested in the physical reward. And that's where the big money comes from. So that's really interesting, isn't it?

'''Brad Dowdy:''' It is. It is very interesting. So I'm going to have to wrap my brain around that further, especially as the future goes for the next one and the next one after that and the next one after that. Because we're not going anywhere anytime soon.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Heck no, we have big plans. I have big plans over the next couple of years of some of the places that I want to visit with this show. So we'll see about that. So on the last episode, we were talking about the Wancho Dream Pen and you were a little bit miffed at the finish as it came like kind of around the grip section.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' I would say not miffed. I would say questioning.