The "periodic table of storytelling", endorsed by A-list bestsellers as their favorite tool, is ready to double in size.
The first 100-ish boxes just got dropped at the post office. 😊 150-ish to go.
One car = an entire dock bin at the post office, apparently.
We're packing at home. Trying to keep the chaos under control. It was a huge relief to get the first car-load out of our living room.
❤️ Laura
10 minutes ago, the leather boxes finally finally finally arrived.
Please check your email for final address confirmations. You have 48 hours to confirm before the address automatically locks.
We will be packing all remaining orders this week. 🥳
Production is finishing up for your long-anticipated rewards, and our liaison just informed us that the 500 leather boxes we ordered will be done today.
Shipping = 25 days (+/- a few days for customs)
This means we will be able to ship all remaining Kickstarter orders right at the end of March!
We always request factory photos as part of our sourcing due diligence, to help ensure safe working conditions for partners across the globe. Please enjoy these images of your lovely boxes in their final production stages!
We hope you're excited for these boxes! We had fun showing the production sample off at Superstars a few weeks ago. 😁 We're also happy to report that the box holds up to being kicked around in a backpack. I've taken my sample box on eight flights so far, (carrying it in my backpack for three weeks) and it's no worse for the wear.
Want to check the current app status? We set up a live status feed on our Discord channel. When we catch bugs affecting multiple users, we post a report within the hour.
Check it out here: https://discord.gg/2bEmcEUdUt
We'll announce the Android app launch there when it goes live.
Our app is LIVE on Apple's store. Download here: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/mythulu-creation-cards/id1442867455
🐛 Report bugs here: https://discord.gg/H445VtZR
One user has reported a cache bug that's making some of the art for expansion packs very slow to appear. We're looking into the cause. If you're experiencing the same issue as another user, it's still worthwhile to let us know. When multiple users experience the same hiccup, it increases the issue's priority and helps us fix it faster.
If you like the app update, please leave a review on Apple's app store! Our reviews got trashed during this three-year lull between app updates, which we totally deserved. We're committed to regular updates from here on (quarterly at minimum). We're already mapping out issues and improvements for Q2. If you're seeing progress, please put in a good word! 🥰
Our Android app is ready but not live yet. It's all packaged but we're missing a signing key: a final, simple, essential step for publishing the app and having it register as the same app. We've submitted a help request with Google Dev support and have been told they'll get back to us within 2 days.
Your Love stretch reward e-deck is LIVE! 😍 25 new cards about rich relationships and human connection. Hope and transformation. Expectation and sacrifice. It covers the highs and the lows, both heartbreak and heaven. It focuses on romantic love but has also been written with other types of mature, meaningful devotion in mind.
We will release Horror with Android.
Your Kickstarter digital rewards have been automatically applied to your app user. In fact, we painstakingly went through spreadsheets and compared backer survey responses with pre-existing user accounts.
Need help accessing your account? Visit our Discord #help channel: https://discord.gg/zHbGkZZZQr
After adding 6 pages of content to meet Amazon KDP's minimum for color printing, we sent Issue #1 to print last week. Author copies take 2-3 weeks to arrive. We're expecting them on our doorstep by Feb 6th.
We've confirmed print alignments for Issue #3. Steam v. Substance is probably only 5-8 hours of work away from going to print. I'm juggling this task with convention prep (speeches, flights, reservations), customer service management, and app content management.
Our main bottleneck has been wrestling editorial workflows. Our editorial team cannot get InCopy and InDesign to cooperate, which means only one person can make edits at a time. For future issues, we're working through CLMP (Community of Literary Magazine and Presses) to find a mentor or consultant who can help our team implement industry-standard editorial workflows.
One of our Company's values is EFFICIENCY: "Strive to reduce wasted effort everywhere. Embrace technology as a creativity-enhancing tool and a dare to improve ourselves." A.I. is a sensitive issue, with complex legal and ethical questions unanswered right now. To help alleviate confusion and angst around this year's massive industry changes, We hosted a live stream today on writing with A.I.
Since ChatGPT launched, we've tested it heavily, producing everything from bonus chapters, email funnels, speeches, and ad copy to fifty pages of legal documents. This snarky, detailed chatbot is Gutenberg-big, a typewriter-to-PC level change. Love it or hate it, you need to understand it.
This video covers:
Skip to 2:30 to get past my two minutes of stage fright. 😂😂😂
Stay Awesome!
Laura Crenshaw
and the entire Mythulu team
PS. Last week we also carefully reviewed newsletter subscription emails. Some backers said "no thanks" to our newsletter but were already subscribed through another avenue. To honor the spirit of their request, we carefully went through our lists and unsubscribed these valued introverts. 💛 We believe in offering value in every email, but if you would rather pass, we totally understand. If there's something you'd like to see us cover in our emails, shoot us a message on the Discord #suggestions channel.
We hope this update finds you well. 🐙 We know it's been a few months since our last official update and we appreciate your regular encouragement as we've stayed in touch on other channels (Discord, Facebook, email, and private messages). 🥰 We have been working hard behind the scenes to bring you the best products possible. We are excited to report the following progress:
So all in all, in the last three months we finished a book, edited a book, outlined a book, made 50 cards, finished a magazine, shipped 120 orders, fixed our box design, and submitted our app to app stores. 🎅Many of our team members sacrificed most of their holiday break pushing Mythulu projects forward.
To the best of my knowledge, we're all caught up on shipments that CAN be shipped until the leather boxes arrive. This includes:
SHIPPED ORDERS:
If you fall in these categories and haven't gotten your cards yet, please let us know. Contact us via the Discord link at the bottom of this update (or by emailing [email protected]).
NOT SENT YET:
When we tried to print Magazine #1, it was 6 pages too short to print in color through KDP. We quickly added 4 pages of art and 2 pages of puzzles. We've just been too busy to do the final print reconciliation, so I haven't honestly printed these yet, which is why they haven't shipped. I'll take care of this next and push "print" early next week.
Overall, the mats are beautiful. The cards are stunning. The merch turned out cute and snazzy. The magazine content is dynamite. The leather boxes are perfect. And it's all on its way to you shortly! Box production should be done by Valentine's day, which means we can ship all remaining orders by April. We're prepping shipments/boxes/printing postage now, so when the leather boxes arrive, we'll can seal and send your orders immediately.
To accomplish this, I'll be sending final address lock notices next week. If you know you're moving between now and April, shoot me a message and we'll mark your order to do final address validation in March.
Programming languages and dependencies constantly evolve. Our new app is much more sophisticated than before, but it's also reached a software complexity where for every week that goes by, we accrue roughly 1.5 hours of fresh problems only Autumn can resolve. This is just maintenance to keep the software working.
Autumn got burned out in the fall after fixing the ReactNative bug. After taking a few weeks for herself, she returned to the project and already had fresh technical debt raining down.
CURRENT STATUS. Autumn has been submitting the app to Apple and GooglePlay for three weeks. The app is stable, clean, and all bugs are resolved, but It keeps getting bounced back to us on both platforms for petty things. Apple is being finicky about screenshots right now, for example, and making us export separate screenshots for every individual supported device. Autumn is juggling the keep-it-clean weekly app upkeep labor with the final big push needed to get this app over the hill. We're in daily communication with each other about it,
Please burn incense to the programming gods for us. 😂 We have worked very hard on this app and are extremely eager to share the new tools, cards, and feature improvements with you.
As of Dec 27th, we were able to validate the final sample. We sent final manufacturing payment the same day. Here's how the final sample box turned out:
We built a 3mm difference between the top and bottom of the box (and omg... it took work to convince the manufacturer they could do this). The 3mm difference gives our cards adequate clearance in every direction for the box to close. The final result is sturdy, space-conserving, and satisfying. 😍😍😍
While running a Kickstarter, we also have to keep running our business. On the team side, we named magazine editor Hana Jabr our MVP for 2022, for keeping the magazine alive and progressing during a challenging year. We had a very humble video call Christmas party as a team, where Hana opened her thank-you present from us: her very own Yorick.
Other entrepreneur victories:
I'm sorry our updates have been sparse. 🙈 I've been embarrassed about the app progress (and discouraged sometimes because I'm not a programmer, so there's very little I can do to help Autumn). I've let myself get hung up about app things and forget to share all the other victories with you. If you can be patient about technical progress and trust we're doing our best, I'll do a better job of issuing regular updates as we pack core rewards and polish all the bonuses. 💌 Sometimes it might just be boring packing photos or wallpapers for your computer and phone, but we'll let you hear the heartbeat of our daily labors.
For immediate customer service, reach out to us on Discord! We have a community server here: https://discord.gg/VyCfqjtcrn
This community server is always the fastest way to reach us. We're almost always online. The help channel is here: https://discord.gg/zHbGkZZZQr