Editing The Pen Addict 139/transcript (section)

== Goal Reached ==


'''Myke Hurley:''' Ah. Yep, there it is. Yay. We hit it.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' I love you guys so much. I can't believe we've done this. Yep, there it is. Oh my God, it's happened during the show. This is the best thing ever. Yeah.

'''Myke Hurley:''' That's pretty amazing. I, I, I gotta admit, there's no, you can never plan this in a million years that that would happen.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' I'm tweeting about this right now.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Yeah.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Are you teary?

'''Brad Dowdy:''' I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm a little bit choked up. I'm tweeting in all caps.

'''Myke Hurley:''' That's pretty amazing. So virtual cheers to you, mate. And we'll, we'll, we'll have a, uh, an in-person cheers now. Um, guaranteed because we've done it.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' I'll go for this.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Perfect.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' You guys are just the best. I love you all. And you're just the greatest. Thank you so much. This is an incredible day, like an overwhelming, uh, just this throughout the time that I've done what I do. And I'm sure that you feel this way as well. There are these things that happen that they, they're kind of like points in the road and, and they're very, and all of these things tend to be very surreal moments. And that's why they stand out as like important things. This is definitely one of them for me, because this is like a totally different thing. And it's so strange that this is something that people are willing to give me their money for, uh, so I can go and hug my buddy in Atlanta, Georgia for a weekend. It's just, this is just one of those things where it's like, I can't even, I don't even understand how this is happening. So that kind of brings me back to what I was just saying about my family. So like my, my parents and my siblings and my girlfriends that they can't fully understand the fact that I've done this. Like that, I was like, Oh, we've made, I said to my mom today, we've made $5,000 so far. And she's like, what? And she's been since, uh, since then she, I think she's been texting me every half an hour to ask me how it's going. Uh, uh, yeah.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' It's so you can't even concentrate now. I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm struggling. I'm, I'm struggling. Uh, God, I can't believe this. It's just $7,500 is not all the money in the world. Um, but it, it's not the amount that is important to me.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Yeah, totally.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' It's the fact that it's, the fact that it's happened. Matt just sent me a message to ask me if I could lend him $7,500.

'''Myke Hurley:''' We need to borrow from borrow money from him.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' I know Mr. VC.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Yeah.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' So it's, it's just that thing. It's just like, uh, people, people struggle to understand. I am struggling to understand it. So now we've met our goal. Let's talk about stretch goals. Okay. This is something that so many people are mentioning to me today, especially as our trajectory looked very healthy. Right. I have no desire to, to, to have any stretch goals because, and this comes back to what we were talking about earlier. Like we are not attempting to make money. Like now we already now have 45 more dollars than we, than we'd established that we needed. And one of the big things for me is I believe that every Kickstarter campaign requires, um, accountability because that's what I feel it's for. So if you're selling a product, the accountability is every, every pledge goes towards the product that it is attached to. Okay. Now we have met our goal now and we set the goal below the amount of cases. And the number of cases is set on the fact that if we sold them all out, we'd have more money. But this is a round number and it's a number that you guys can easily produce and deliver on time.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Right.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' But we, we could never guarantee, like we couldn't set the exact amount of cases and just leave it at that because then we may have been like, are you familiar with the term? I don't know if it's, if it makes sense in America to cut your nose off to spite your face.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Yeah, no, it's the exact same phrase.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' So it's like, we would potentially be doing that. Like we would be, we'd be setting ourselves up to fail if there were like, because we've had, um, 26 or $260 have come through from people just wanting the video tier. Uh, so we, you know, we may never, you know, you can kind of think of it that way. And we may never have got the amount of money that we needed if we would have done it this way. Right. Um, so there was, the idea for me is like, what is our accountability? Like what, what, what is the stretch goal? Like I can't think of anything. And the idea is not for us to continue to, to pursue making more money because now every dollar that we'll have, we'll make sure that we can now make the video better, but we don't need a stretch goal for that. Right. Because now it's just like, well, we've got another 29 days. I'm sure that we're going to get a little bit more money than what we've got today. So now we can put that in. And like, I mean, I don't want to fly business class. Like we don't need to do that. You know, that's perfectly fine. And we're going to stay in the same hotel that we're going to stay in anyway. Cause we, I believe Brad, I believe you're looking after this part. We're going to get the, the, a room in the hotel that the, the convention is attached to.

'''Myke Hurley:''' I hope to, we'll, I will, uh, let you know tonight once I book it. Cause I'm going to go book it tonight.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' And I hope, yeah, you know, we're going to get one close, but it's not that we're going to like, we're going to now go stay in the four seasons and have a suite each like that. Right. There's no need for any of that. So it's like, if anyone can think of like a stretch goal that makes a lot of sense and they suggest it, then fine. But like people are saying to me, like, what your stretch goal is going to be like, there has to be some. And I think that that is a fundamental problem with Kickstarter these days. Like set your goal. And then your goal is your goal. And that's what it is for us. Our goal is our goal. Now, every penny we make over, we're going to have to find something to do with that makes sense. Now, look, there's a, there might be that now me and Brad might be able to buy a new, a nice pen for ourselves when we're there.

'''Myke Hurley:''' You know, And someone mentioned, someone mentioned in the chat room, maybe we buy one for one of the backers and give it away to them. That's a fair, that's a pretty good stretch goal.