Hi,
Today was a quiet day on the Space Elevator front. Much of the day was taken up with mundane stuff that’s not very interesting.

However, towards the end of the day, I got two requests for interviews – one a podcast, and another from a significant technology website. The first was due to a long-ago employee that now works at the State Department, that introduced me to a friend of his. And I think the second is due to my recent restart of posting updates – the editor there covered our story several years ago. So I’ve scheduled one of those for Sunday, and the other is still pending, but probably early in the week. Once those are live, I’ll let you know. I don’t know how in-depth those will be, but I have a hunch that one will be very detailed. Hopefully that will answer some of your ongoing questions. (As I said yesterday, I’ll spend time over the weekend responding to many of your comments and questions.)

The only other thing that was actually relevant to our combined project was this: I had a long chat with my city’s Director of Economic Development 10 days ago. I told him a lot about what’s going on. He agreed to convene a meeting with the local Universities, civic and commercial groups, makerspaces, incubators, and other stakeholders to identify local resources in robotics, engineering, and the like. Hopefully, through these untapped resources, we’ll be able to find what we need in order to get this robot into the sky!

Other than that, I tried meeting with the former Director of the Space Frontier Foundation, but we had a schedule conflict and will reschedule for when he returns from a business trip.  

Take care, mjl

First, I want to say “Thank You!” for all the supportive comments I received yesterday. It is so very easy to get caught up in navel-gazing and analysis-paralysis when things aren’t going well. Your enthusiasm is greatly appreciated! Sometimes, the only reason I keep going is because of you. All I can say is this: Hope is contagious. I feed off your excitement when I’m deep in a rut. Seriously, thank you.
No, I’m stuck on the robot, for the time being, so I’m not working on that.

Yes, slowly, I am still sending out rewards, but I can only do that on a very very limited basis.

So what am I working on these days? When I say that I work on this Elevator “every single day”, what does that look like?

Well, there is a never-ending flood of calls, text, email, and messages from every social media platform – LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and many others. Rarely are these particularly interesting. This week, there was a VC firm from China asking if the tech is “anything other than science fiction”, and the week before it was an 8th grade student writing a paper on the project. So those are pretty fun to respond to. 

I invest the time to react to students; they are a higher priority to me than the venture capitalists. Typically, the VCs are interested in having something clever to say at the next board meetings, whereas the students are sincerely curious about how this technology – space / robotics / communications / energy / lunar settlement / bioscience / materials – might impact their own lives. Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy to chat with the VCs, however, none of them have ever been interested in the actual down to Earth business of this project. Whereas, working with students almost always generates tangible results. The one is very satisfying, the other is less so. 

Beyond correspondence (which is sometimes over 1000 messages/day; 85% is spam; it never takes less than 2 hours to wade through it… and I often skip many messages because it is overwhelming), what else do I do? 

This week, I’ve been spending a lot of time working on two things: PowerPoints for a lecture series I’m giving, and working through aspects of our business plan. But I’m also juggling calls about our planned Technical Advisory Council, a radio show/podcast we are developing and there’s a set of books that will launch in the fall. 

I’ll talk more about these later, but I don’t want to chat about them now… you’ve heard enough about what I’m ‘gonna do’, and not enough about what I’ve done. 

Some days are pretty mundane. This one was. I’ve got an interesting appointment scheduled for tomorrow morning. I’ll let you know how that goes. 

​Take care, mjl

A good friend asked me for some notes and advice about my crowdfunding experience. This is what I sent.

Crowdfunding changed my life. Really. Almost three years ago, in August of 2012, I launched (what I thought would be) a small Kickstarter campaign. I wanted to do something pretty straightforward and simple. Design and build a robot that could climb a string. Seems easy enough, right? I had an established community that was interested in what I wanted to do, and by just a little promotion, we got our fans to support our idea. 

And then everything got a whole lot bigger, very very quickly. Instead of the $8000 that we asked for, three weeks later we had $110,000! Sounds great, right? But that’s where the problems actually started: 

1)   Poor prior planning – I was the only person (initially) running the campaign. That was madness. Too much to do, and not enough time to do it in. Responding to media requests, follow-up on comments, posting updates, and keeping current with social media added up to an amazing amount of work. Don’t do this by yourself. Also, there are elements that you can prepare for before you launch: pre-write certain updates, and email messages, use templates, and streamline your communications. 

2)   Inaccurate budgeting – Budget everything. After all is said and done, I am probably somewhere north of $30,000 in the hole from this experience. Budget meticulously. Know what your main idea will cost, know what any and ALL stretch goals will cost, and know what each and every reward will cost to produce, package and ship. Don’t guess and have a friend double check your math. 

3)   Deaths, cancer and amputation can wreck your best plans – I’m not going to bemoan things that happened in my life. But sometimes people die. Sometimes two people die. Sometimes other people get cancer and have their leg amputated. This real-life stuff interferes with whatever your best plans are. And when it does, it’s on you to figure a way around these obstacles and still fulfill the social contract you made with your community. 

4)   Lousy ongoing communications – You can get every single aspect of your campaign right; but if you screw this up, your project will be a failure. What do I mean by this? The act of a successful crowdfunding effort means that you have galvanized a community to make something happen. Your backers want – and deserve – your attention. Attention comes in many forms: Social media, blogs, website, pictures, video… If you don’t communicate with the community you established, then you’ve wasted the most valuable resource that crowdfunding conveys. Long after the money is gone, and the project completed/failed, you still have the crowd of backers. Don’t mess this up. 

5)   The robot didn’t work – If your campaign is about building a robot, then build the damn robot. If it’s about going to Africa and helping with clean water, then go to Africa. If it’s about designing a space poster/paper or a Lego exposition, then by god you’d better do what you said you would do. If the robot doesn’t work, at first, then you need to have the perseverance and commitment to figuring out how to make it work. There’s no middle ground. As Yoda says – “There is no try.” A project only ends once the creator has: 
     a. competed the task, or 
     b. quit. 

Am I bitter? Upset? Angry? God no!  I'm so very very grateful.  These backers allowed me to pursue my dreams – and re-engage with a project that I thought was lost. However, there are consequences, and there is a downside to all the hype around crowdfunding. So this post serves as a cautionary tale. If you’re going to run a campaign – good luck! 

I know that some of you think I’ve given up, or quit. I haven’t. Over the next 30 days, I’ll post an update every day. Yup, every day. Why? Because I work this on this project every single day… 

​Take care, mjl