40% Fulfilled! + Fancy Leather Boxes
over 1 year ago – Sun, Jan 08, 2023 at 08:20:18 PM

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:

•  Boxes are ordered. Production is in full swing. You'll be getting nice leather boxes! We agonized over every measurement with our liaison, and the final sample came back PERFECT.
• We've shipped all orders we're able to ship ATM (we're about 40% fulfilled).
•  We've been trying to submit our app to the app stores for three weeks.  The app itself is stable and bug-free. More details below.
•  The Love (25 cards) e-deck is complete and set to launch with the app! The Fear deck is close behind.
• I delivered the developmental edit for our top-paying backer.
•  Sweeter than Silences is written. Beta reader comments close on Jan 8th, and so far they've been raving about it.
• The Educator's Guide is outlined and underway. After surveying our educators, we've settled on 11 lessons of collegiate-level content, with adaptations for additional audiences.
•  We finished writing magazine Issue #3 "Steam vs Substance" (95 pages of rich content) and are finalizing print layouts now. This issue goes to print next week.

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. 

Shipping Progress

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:

• Pack B only + merch
• Pack A only
• Any backer who waived their box or requested we split their order.
• Merch-only orders (such as separate orders of the neoprene mat, hats, or hoodies)
• Magazine Issue #2 physical copies

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:

• Any orders that include both Pack A + Pack B, even if you purchased one of the boxes as an add-on after the campaign ended. We're including the leather box automatically with all orders that bought both boxes at any time during our campaign or fulfillment.
• Orders at the "Long Time Supporter" level, which also include the leather carrying card box.
• Coupons for backers who waived their boxes (but I'm tracking these, and will send all coupons to you soon)
• Magazine Issues #1 or #3 (but these are about to ship!)

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.

App Approval Pending...

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.

The Leather Boxes

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. 😍😍😍

Behind the Scenes

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:

• Mythulu got 100% caught up on lingering paperwork this week. Thanks to ChatGPT helping me draft initial forms, I wrote and delivered around 40 legal documents this week. Obviously, I still had to do due diligence to ensure the terms are correct, but I can't even begin to express how much time that AI is saving me as a business operator, just structuring initial forms.
• In one month, I get to give my first presentation at a conference! On Feb 8th at Superstars Writing Seminar, I have 15 minutes on the topic: "Dragons on Everest: How to Ignite your Author Voice". Landing your first speaking credit is very competitive. I had to audition for it, but it opens a lot of doors for me to be on conference panels and give workshops in the future, which is essential for helping Mythulu grow. Preparation cost me two days in October, and I need to invest two more days this month polishing my speech. 15 minutes is such a tight box for everything I want to share. 🌄

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.

Chat with us on Discord!

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

Cards Arrived + Box Problem (66% of orders affected)
over 1 year ago – Sat, Sep 24, 2022 at 01:32:09 AM

GOOD NEWS: Packs A & B are here!

BAD NEWS: Our 300-card carrying boxes are seriously delayed. Details below.

Dear Backers,

Customs released our cards! They just hit our driveway, which is a happy day! We weren't expecting them for another two weeks. This means all pre-orders and "Pack B Only" orders are immediately fillable.

The same day the cards arrived, our preferred box manufacturer messaged us that the next box sample was ready... but unfortunately, they botched it. (Details below)

As a team, we debated what to do. We want to honor higher-paying customers first, but if 30% of our orders are fillable now, we don't want to punish anyone for delays that don't affect their order.

We've decided to fill everything we can now. If you only ordered Pack B, we are planning to ship your cards next week. Please check your email and confirm your address right away.

For the majority of you, please read on.

 ALL ABOUT BOXES  

If you ordered a full set, we've promised you a 300-card-carrying box as well.  210 orders (66% of our backers) fall into this category.

After 5 samples ordered from various manufacturers at different price levels, we are unsatisfied with the quality of every box we've gotten back so far. Here's a candid look at the boxes we've been considering and the quality issues we're working to fix.

Box #1 had very poor craftsmanship. The box was too large (because they disregarded our size instructions for every dimension, especially the lid). Stain was uneven. The hinges were flimsy, screws drilled in crooked, and the latch was tarnished. I'm not surprised,  because this box cost half the price to manufacture. In its favor, this box is sturdy.

Box #2 had incorrect dimensions and was too small to fit our cards. On the other hand, this box had superior workmanship in every way. The snap-shut lid feels satisfying. Every corner was clean, with tightly folded leather and fabric. The stitching was immaculate and the producer used high-quality supplies. In addition to the size problem, however, our first design was also fundamentally flawed, allowing the lid to hit the card edges, which means the box can't close with the cards inside it---leaving us with two critical flaws.

Box #3 looks good at first glance, but would be the first to fall apart.  It was designed more spaciously because we suspected the card-edge thing might be an issue. This third manufacturer had mixed craftsmanship. The exterior is lovely with a clean, professional finish. However, close inspection of the gold hinges revealed a sturdiness issue (see video).  Manufacturer #3 was also unfamiliar with flocked blister packaging or velvet-lined wooden core. The best they could do was a foam insert, which did not work. The cards are poorly supported and tilt to the side. In combination with the gritty box bottom, this design will tear up the card edges over time. Hinges + interior flaws + manufacturer can't handle other options = this manufacturer is out of the running. 

When these three samples arrived and none of the boxes were ready-to-order, we scrambled. We went back to manufacturers #1 and #2 and required replacement samples immediately because the dimensions were wrong in both cases. We also communicated our other concerns, giving both box makers an opportunity to improve.

Manufacturer #1 produced an improved model quickly. It's still in the mail but has been in the mail without an update for two weeks. We are concerned they mailed the new box with a slow shipping method, instead of the 1-week shipping they used before. It's coming from China.

Manufacturer #2 seems to be using a computer translator to communicate with us. Because communication was poor and schematics had failed us already, I mailed a set of Pack A all the way to Chinaso they could put our cards in the next box and prove they fit.  💌

Unfortunately, Version 2 of Box #2 is still unusable. They tried to fix the cards-hitting-the-edge problem by making the bottom deeper, which I specifically told them not to do. (We had agreed to add space to the front of the box instead. They changed the plan mid-production and did not tell me.)  Despite increasing the depth on bottom, they also increased the height of the lid, which wastes space and just looks wrong. Overall, the biggest problem is that the cards are inserted too deeply, making them difficult to remove. Still a show-stopper. 

Moving forward, we're facing the following obstacles:

• Manufacturer #2 has a 25-day lead time to produce the box's wooden core---which tells us they aren't producing those in their own shop. Once we approve a design, total production will be about 45 days. We are breathing and trying to be patient with their process because tracking down a new manufacturer at this point would take longer than their lead time. Whatever design we ask them to do next, it HAS to be correct.
   
• Manufacturer #1 still uses cheap hinges and overall quality is unknown. It would last longer than box #3, but we hate to send you supplies that are tarnished to begin with. Also, their second sample might be lost in the mail, and we have no idea when it will arrive. We might be able to insist that they improve their hinge offerings and make it a requirement for earning our larger order. If we opt for box #1, I will ask. Sourcing new hinges and latches will add to production time (probably 2-3 weeks).
   

TIMELINE

Either way, we have the following steps ahead of us:

• Approve a design with one of these manufacturers (which may take another 30 days)
• Production time (+20-45 days)
• Shipping on the sea (+45-60 days). There is no affordable way to reduce this time for either manufacturer.

If we approve Box #1 today (new sample unseen) and shipping is flawless, we're still a minimum of 65 days away from receiving boxes and being able to start shipping all your orders. If anyone sneezes, it'll be 90 days, and we have very little control over this step.

If we pursue a third attempt of Box #2, there's an 80% chance they'll get it right the third time. I DO believe Box #2 is the box you would be happiest with in the end. If it fails anyway, we'll revert to Box #1. Trying again raises delivery time to 120 days out.

Although we are making every effort to speed things up, we also have to respect the humanity of our manufacturing partners. We will put respectful pressure on where we can. Our strategic advisor, Nathan, is fluent in Mandarin and helping us understand the cultural elements at play as we negotiate with partners a world away, who operate with different needs, motives, and culture than we do.

As I told a friend yesterday, "Hiring a manufacturer means you're married to them. It might be a celebrity marriage, but whatever happens, we're legally liable and totally responsible for whatever they produce in the end. Success requires communication, trust, accountability, boundaries, and a little courting time."

We will make a decision and update you ASAP.

OPTIONS 

2/3rds of orders are affected by this delay, so we cannot afford to separate all your shipments into phases. The sheer labor requirements for our distributed volunteers would be both expensive and risk new complications.

That said, I understand you're all eager to receive your packages. Some of you might have a particular birthday or event in mind. So we'd like to offer you the following choices:

•  (USA only) Upon request, I am happy to separate your order into two shipments. We can send everything else now and your box later. We will NOT do this by default. If you don't mind waiting for a single unified package, we would appreciate your patience. 💖
•  You may waive your box reward. I understand boxes were a KS perk, not the core purpose of this Kickstarter. If the box isn't a big deal to you, you're welcome to waive it. If you do, we'll send you a coupon for 50% off one item in our Mythulu store, with a generous 5-year expiration. (Coupon will not apply to Voice decks or services, but is valid for everything else). Choosing this option means your cards will ship immediately.
•  Wait for us to resolve the box issue. We will work hard to provide you with the most beautiful box within our budget.

 
 About Our Team

Mythulu is an all-volunteer team. With a weekly total capacity equaling about two full-time workers (with the creator actually working full-time but drawing no salary yet) we are striving to build this company into a self-sustaining masterpiece of creativity, cunning, and compassion. We are scattered across many states but share a common dream.  

This Kickstarter has been an important step forward in our strategic plan. Thank you for all your support. We are working hard to leverage every penny into our bigger dream to stabilize and expand the storytelling industry. 

Warmly, 

Laura & the whole Mythulu team

"Pack B Only" Tier ships next week.
over 1 year ago – Fri, Sep 23, 2022 at 04:20:14 PM

This post is for backers only. Please visit Kickstarter.com and log in to read.

Manufacturing Photos/Video + App Bug Diagnosis
over 1 year ago – Thu, Aug 04, 2022 at 02:17:50 AM

Printing is finishing up!

Cards are expected to hit the mail at the end of this week. Here are the photos and videos we received from our manufacturers.

Uncut Cards

We're printing 1500 sets total, with about 550 of those already sold.

The extra margin is possible thanks to your support reaching our 25K stretch goal. We are able to print a higher number of cards at lower cost per unit, giving us sellable boxes left over after fulfillment. We're excited to leverage these valuable resources to grow as a company and provide better supporting content and tools for you.

Photo Proofs

Before we sent everything to production, our card manufacturer printed two full sets and sent us pictures for review.  Our printing partners have wonderful attention to detail. We sent box files back and forth five times, reviewing details, checking alignment, and making sure barcodes were scannable. 

Drawing Mats (Video)

We sold a little over 100 mats, and are printing 150.  This gives us some merchandise buffer as well. We're excited to be able to offer these mats in our online store after Kickstarter fulfillment is complete.

Meanwhile, on the app...

Yesterday, our developer proved conclusively that the crashing bug we've been experiencing was due to a fundamental bug inside React Native, the dual-OS programming language we use to code our app.  It's a problem with a specific version of the language recently released. Because the bug is only visible in final builds actually installed on physical phones, very few programmers have caught onto the problem until now. 

Not gonna lie... It's validating and vindicating to know this particular bug wasn't our fault. 😂 Now that we know what's wrong, Autumn has assembled a stable build. 🥳 There's still a graphics scaling problem, but we're no longer dealing with a crash-level bug. 

Here's a recording of the app's latest build, showing the animation working (including dragging between slots). It also shows the card resolution issue we're tackling next. 

STATUS OF EVERYTHING 🐙 App Delays, Printing Progress, Merch, etc
almost 2 years ago – Wed, Jul 20, 2022 at 05:12:46 PM

Dear Backers,

I'm extremely sorry for the delayed update! It's been a case of "too many projects at once" as we push everything forward on our diverse awards.

We wanted to bring concrete news. Projects like the app perpetually felt like they were one all-nighter away from being brilliantly complete, so we'd wait for the next app export. Meanwhile, cards needed cleanup and QA, a dozen different manufacturers needed payments and spec clarification, governments needed forms, magazine meetings still happen...  and next thing we knew, three months flew by. Thank you for your patience. We’ve been working hard this whole time to bring you everything we promised.

THE STATUS OF EVERYTHING

CARDS - PURCHASED and in the printer's queue. 

These are recently purchased and estimated to arrive between (Mon) 5 September 2022 - (Mon) 26 September 2022. We're running about 10 weeks behind our intended delivery timeline. 

In part, this is due to steps arising during payment that we couldn't see while pricing things out (like discovering we needed to register as a business in CA, pay their annual $800 fee 😵, and then acquire an in-state resale license just to ship the cards here.  Even though we already have a Florida resale license (because that's where we're incorporated), it wasn't adequate and CA needed one too. 

While we were dealing with paperwork AND running QA checks, a respected Pack B beta tester submitted some serious and valuable critiques that forced us to go back and polish descriptions on about 30% of the cards. Some of them needed re-writing entirely. The GREAT news is that the cards are now better in tangible ways (similar to the Pack A updates we made). Examples of the Pack B improvements are included below.

We've requested photos from our manufacturer when our cards hit the press. It's an unusual request so we don't know if they'll do it, but our fingers are crossed. If they send us printing pictures, we'll forward them to you.

APP -  See the letter from our CFO below. Beta testers have the app in hand and we're repairing some critical bugs. 

MAGAZINE -

• Issues 1 & 2 have been digitally delivered. :) If you have any issues accessing your reward, please let us know.
• Physical Issues have been ordered, and Issue #2 arrived. We're waiting for #1 to get here, and we'll ship all the magazine issues simultaneously when they arrive.
• Issue #3 is about 70% done. All stories, articles, and art are licensed. Internal articles are in the final editing phase right now, and the next step will be to lay everything out in InDesign. Our graphic designer handles both the cards and the magazine, so the magazine issue assembly progress was frozen while we focused on polishing cards for print. Now that the cards are done, Issue #3 should move quickly.

MERCH - All here! Lanyards and hats came several weeks ago. Stickers arrived today!

ACCESSORIES - Neoprene mats are also in production. They should be shipped in the next two weeks. The mats are arriving from China, so they'll probably clear customs around the same time as the cards.

300-CARD BOXES included in larger orders - We've ordered three different samples, looking to maximize quality within our budget, and vet possible manufacturing partners for attention to detail. Basically, we're making sure the boxes fix the cards properly, protect them well, and display them beautifully. We'll issue a separate update when we receive all samples and make a decision about which one to pursue.

GENERAL LOGISTICS - We've rented a label printer to simplify shipping. We cannot order shipping boxes yet for larger orders until we finalize our 300-card carrying box size, but we've scoped out cardboard providers and are ready to order as soon as we're sure everything will fit in the shipment packaging.

App Status

We're feature-complete for the Mythulu app version 2.0, which means all features are coded and we're not adding new things, but we're still bug testing to make sure our existing code works.

We exported app 2.0 builds on May 14th, four days early, but our app hiccupped at the last second. In our final Android build, it kept crashing when drawing a card... which is kind of an important function. 🤦‍♀️

Twelve versions later, we're close to finding the problem. We've distributed the app to beta testers so we can now log more crash reports. The more information we have, the easier these bugs are to troubleshoot.

Because the app is redesigned from 1.0, this hasn't been quite as simple as releasing a standard update. We're also supporting the latest devices, Android and iOS versions, taller screen sizes, and a new handler for in-app coin purchases. 

We held back on sending the beta build due to 3 "show-stoppers": 

• 1. Image caching was broken on Android, resulting in art that was invisible. 
• 2. Google login was broken on Android, and Apple login was broken on iOS. 
• 3. Viewing cards on an Android layout crashes several devices.  

In Q1, we finished building several new productivity features that earned a lot of internal testing as we debated layout, positioning, and flow mechanics.  

In the month of May, we worked on taking our offline pre-cacher out of the feature requests and into reality.  This was one of those trickier things we needed to test on real devices, but we're confident it won't crash you out of the box anymore.  We also fixed the Google and Apple logins.

Viewing cards on Android is our biggest concern.  Android and iOS behave a little differently.  We're confident this is a small problem hiding in a moderately sized haystack. Debugging requires a physical device that crashes because the card display bug doesn't appear in our app simulator, only on physical phones. This helps us narrow down possible reasons, but also requires a 45-minute build-and-install process every time we tweak code to troubleshoot a theory. 

Bug fixes will have our full attention this week.  We intend to do the public release at the first opportunity, pending approval on the app stores.

Stretch Goal Expansion E-Decks

Meanwhile, our Flavor, Love, and Fear e-decks are mostly ready. ALL ART is licensed. About 75% of flavor text is written. We'll push these e-decks live with the new app.

Here are some of the beautiful cards you earned!

We haven't uploaded them yet because we don't want to push new cards while the old app still has a bug cutting text off the screen edges. 2-3 years ago, the ratio of most phone screens changed from 16:9 to 1:2, with a taller, thinner screen. The app production agency we originally hired selected height as the responsive variable instead of taking both height and width into consideration. We have fixed this now. 

Cards: Pack B Improvements

In the quality check phase, about a dozen pieces of art (8%) were flagged for not matching the artistic style of other cards, not being clear visually what the object was, or tentatively dubbed "nice" rather than exciting beta testers.  Another 10% had color grading errors.

Some of the art could be fixed with subtle changes like this: 

Other cards demanded a full art swap, like this: 

The list of edits needed was staggering at first. We triaged the most urgent ones and only fixed what really made a functional difference in card quality. 

For example, with our "Swamp" card, we received the critique, 

"Feels like it’s just listing different types instead of insights about what a swamp could be. Not sure what an artificial drainage site looks like or how it relates. Art focuses on the foliage and trees above while the description focuses on the water. Disconnects the two from each other."

Upon reflection, we realized the Swamp card had been written based on our preexisting assumptions and biases about swamps.🐊 Cards that run headlong into tropes don't match our ethos, so we dug deeper. With just 15 minutes of research, we realized what a special and underappreciated biome swamps are! This illuminating discovery inspired the following change:

As we make corrections, nothing is wasted. Prior text deemed too detailed for the cards (like where we listed off variations or overly specific situations) has been moved to expanded commentary in the app. 

I hope you appreciate seeing these edits in detail! We believe concise, razor-sharp descriptions are what make Mythulu cards so different from our competition. 

EVERYTHING IS NOW COMPLETE. The printer has ALL ART. All descriptions are finalized. Systematic quality control checks are DONE on all 300 cards + 12 insert cards. It's been a massive, massive project. 

New Tutorial - "Heart" Spread

This Heart spread is useful for building a deep, complex, multi-layered relationship. It's one of our favorite drawing structures and we hope you enjoy this tutorial.

Thanks for making tutorial requests! Next up: Main climactic event, Fight scene, playwright inspiration, and more. Editing has been our video bottleneck, but we have a dedicated video editor now. 🥳 

FAQs:

•  "I'm moving and my address is changing" - That's okay! We will contact EVERYONE and validate shipping addresses RIGHT BEFORE we actually send your packages.
•  "When will rewards be shipped?" - Our cards, boxes, and neoprene mats are all getting shipped by sea, which can take 2-3 months. We will ship cards as soon as rewards-per-tier are able to be sent, and intend to get cards in everyone's hands in time for NaNoWriMo. 

In Conclusion, FULL PRINTING PROOFS!

PACK B FULL PRINT PROOF:

 PACK A (2nd Edition) FULL PRINT PROOF:

Thank you again for your patience and support. 

Warmly, 

Laura, Autumn, and the whole Mythulu team