Progress Report, Media, and Goals - 4 Days Left!

Hi folks!

It’s been a crazy three weeks: we built a new website, launched a Kickstarter campaign and participated in the International Space Elevator Conference! It’s been amazing!

And LiftPort’s Kickstarter effort has just 4 days left…

So what have we done in these three weeks? News articles about the conference, and our Kickstarter campaign have circulated the planet – over a dozen languages, and more countries than I can keep track of! LiftPort videos have been viewed ~150,000 times and we’ve earned 2400 backers and $72,000 dollars! So, yes, it’s been a great three weeks.

Key articles include: NBC, Scientific American, Inc., Forbes, Economist, Yahoo!, KOUW
And a funny one: We’re not just ON the list, but at the TOP! – “16 Kickstarter projects that could destroy civilization”.

Behind the scenes, we officially (Re!)incorporated LiftPort, and built a team that can carry us into the future. We’re evaluating project management tools, parametric design software, expense and account tracking tools and various ways to asynchronously communicate with our community of hundreds of volunteers, researchers and advisors. We’ve made plans for our Robots+Balloon experiments for Tethered Towers; sourced (some of the) production for the reward levels; and begun working with several volunteers on a variety of projects. We have a lot more volunteers to assign projects to! We named a robot, Neil... We’ve made appointments to work with a school district on our education kits, and begun the planning process for our upcoming video channel.

But we could still use your help! I’ve said over and over again throughout this campaign – that while everyone else was watching the first metric – money – that I was watching the second – backers! Even though this campaign has vastly exceeded my original hopes, there are still a couple goals I’d like to reach: 

1) 3000 backers! Currently, we sit at 2423. I think this is the key to building our dreamed-of Elevators.
2) $80,000! We’re at $72,688 right now. We originally asked for $8,000 (which we surpassed before the Conference was over!). It would be great to say our community supported 10x that.
3) 1000 backers at the $8 “Card Carrying Supporter” level. (We’re over 700 now!)

Please, if you like what we’re doing, and what we stand for – tell three people that you’re backing this project. Tell them why you think it matters. Here’s a short link to the campaign: http://bit.ly/PIiqjR

Let’s “unlock humanity from the tyranny of gravity” – together! Thank you!

​Take care,
Mjl
Michael J. Laine, President, LiftPort Group