Don't worry, we're still going forward as planned

Mon., Aug. 31, 2026...

Sorry I haven’t been vocal for the last few days but, honestly, I slept mostly straight through Saturday & Sunday – recovering from the campaign. During its six week run, myself and my four core team members were putting-in between 14 to 16 hours a day, seven days a week, sending out 1500 emails a week each, and posting on our social media as often as we could.

So how, you may ask, did we fail to reach our goal?

Despite our supervising coach’s best advice, we ultimately went on the wrong crowdfunding platform – not that there’s much choice currently, anyway. Unbeknownst to us, things had apparently changed somewhat at Seed&Spark since I last donated there and they pulled something we didn’t know about until after we’d committed to launch. More on that below.

But, rest assured that, as my headline above states, the production will still be going forward – as we’ll be self-funding the start of it.

I’ll issue a bi-monthly vlog on our Facebook and our own webpages (a) to keep you posted on our progress and (b) to help our audience organically grow at a stable pace. And, we *will* be creating a new crowdfunding campaign on a different platform – but one that will be ongoing and allow fans to back us as they can at their convenience.

As far as what happened with our campaign on Seed & Spark, their website’s confusing GUI and their audacity of setting an outlandishly high “suggested tip” for themselves confused potential backers unfamiliar with the platform (which most of our potential backer were). And, again, we honestly had no idea they were going to pull all that until after we hit the “launch” button!

While I acknowledge that Seed & Spark has to make money to survive, they default what is supposed to be their totally optional tip to an unfairly high 25%. That is terribly off-putting to backers – especially when our backers were coming-in at a high average of about $200 a pop. The option to change the tip amount wasn’t appearing until you scrolled to the bottom of your final checkout page – and, even then, they’d pop up a warning box pleading for you to not reduce it.

Most of the backers know me so, during the campaign, I was receiving no less than one phone call each week from someone, while they were online, trying to figure out S&S’s interface and how to reduce the tip amount to something realistic. On the morning of the last day, another potential baker phoned me so frustrated that he backed out right then and there in disgust.

Finally, on Saturday morning, August 29, I received this message from one of the backers who finally pledged on the last day...