Delay Fish

Ah, delays. You gotta love them. So unexpected. So troublesome. So… so… delaying.

OK. So, the original plan was to ship the games by the first week of December (which also gave us a two week buffer to December 17th.) Figuring in manufacturing and freight shipping time, we needing to launch the campaign the July 4th weekend or the week after, wrapping the campaign up the first week of August.

If successful, we’d have a couple of weeks to get the design files to the various publishers by mid-August, which was critical IF we raised enough money to hit our second stretch goal of having the cards printed in the U.S.A. If we didn’t, then we’d have a couple of extra weeks of wiggle room to get all the games shipped out on time because apparently the Chinese do it faster.

Well, its almost August, and we haven’t launched the campaign yet. We’ve had a couple of setbacks.

Learning Curve

Professionally, we ran into an issue getting our bank account and Amazon Payments to work. Amazon needs some sort of letter or bank statement proving our account is legit, but our account was brand spanking new and it took almost two weeks for the bank to deliver said documents.

Finally receiving the bank statement, we faxed it into Amazon. After a week of not hearing anything, we contacted them and they claimed to have never received it, so we had to resubmit it all.

Speaking for Ourselves

We’ve also had a few health issues in the family. Chris is in physical therapy for his right shoulder again, and Lou was put on total ‘do not do any work on pain of scorn from your doctor’ because of her left shoulder. You can’t make this stuff up. Chris was joking that they should walk around side by side because at least they’d have two working arms between them. But this also means that Chris is stretching muscles, wimpy elastic bands, and picking up the slack in the evenings and weekends at home, which means he is NOT working on editing their Kickstarter video, creating company logos or writing articles for the website.

So, while we’d LOVE to blame the whole thing on Amazon and our bank, we really wouldn’t have been ready anyway.

Regrouping, and Moving Forward

We finally got to a point where, even though we might still make the deadlines if we dropped the Made in the U.S.A. option, we were feeling like we’d be running a half-baked campaign, seriously increasing the chances for failure and creating a horrible reputation for ourselves along the way.

It wasn’t easy, but our decision is to take a breath, regroup, and hopefully launch our Campaign before back-to-school so as to deliver the game by very early 2014.

We’ll keep you all in the loop. Thanks!