Nearly finished building an extra room on a small annex. Fun time working with a knowledgeable friend, we built it from the bedrock up. Scraped the earth, build foundation walls, leveled gravel, placed insulating sheets, poured concrete floor, framed it, translucent roof, windows, doors, siding largely done.

Still to do: finish siding, electrical, insulation, and paneling. It's going to be work room for our puzzle-making business.

Very satisfied.

Attach to a headband. Tell people it's an early Google Glass prototype.

When I was on chemo, the drugs would keep me awake for 3 days at a time. I lost the ability to make sense of numbers, alarming for me as a mathematician who can remember tons of numbers because each is like the face of an old friend. I sometimes lost the ability to make sense of time, I could not remember if something happened a day before, a week before, or months, and I could not sequence past events. steve made a short video about that strange experience.

After treatment, I slept terribly for a year and my thinking and memory were always foggy. Lack of sleep make a huge impact on my intelligence during that period (however I was extremely production and creative during that time as well. Weird.) I had resigned myself to my condition as my new normal, but my new new normal came around to be my old normal.

It is a kind moose. You can see him coming from far away, which can give great clarity. In any case, should you get covid and have your IQ drop a standard deviation, at least it would give the rest of us a chance to catch up!

Thank you so much! There is a free "explorers guide" coming out any day. 60 pages of cool stuff related to Abacabax. Just have to make the cover, but we got a big rush of business in our puzzle company and everything else is on hold at the moment.

Fantastic! Going to add color?

Would you like to order a bonus pack of irregularly-shaped pieces, perfect for completing those hard-to-solve dates?

:-)

I love this. I may be the only one in Norway with it right now, so it may take a while for you to get my party invitation.

Awesome! Can't believe how long mail took this last month. Thankfully, everyone has been very patient. Have fun! (PS: you can post and compare solutions on our Facebook page).

Awesome -- thank you! It's been a busy few months, with KS, book and talk. Usually not this successful, I'm more used to attempting ambitious projects and watching them crash and burn (well, usually wither and die). But the Puzzle-A-Day at least is really taking off.

We've gotten a ton of orders this week, and packed them all up this morning, so yours will be in the mail tomorrow! Hope it arrives trouble-free!

Canada seems to be one of the slow countries. I'm guessing their postal service is overwhelmed this season. Hope you get it soon!

They seem to be coming in to different countries at random times, but they've been arriving as far away as Japan and Australia, while some people in the UK are still waiting. Big variation in what's happening with post offices in different areas. Hope you get yours soon!

Awesome! If you've filled out the survey (so we have your address) yours will have been sent out on December 9th... so you should have it soon if not already!

Thanks for the shout-out goobster! Glad you like it!

Thanks! Here's the picture of the Family Tree that was a little hard to see on the video.

Thanks mk! :-)

I get your point. A lot of our customers have expressed surprise that we are delivering on time. I suppose they are the ones most experienced with KS and know that on-time delivery is unusual!

Yes, for us KS has been great for marketing. We decided last year to expand our hobby to a tiny business. We have many tiny businesses we're running at the same time and think puzzles could become the largest. Sales is the hardest part. We sold puzzles at some local fairs, visited a few local shops, got our puzzles in 3 stores in the city, did a mailing of samples to 20 stores, two of them bought a few packs, and we started to plan a sales road trip around the country for fun when corona hit and killed our plans.

Selling 2 puzzles a day from our webshop is definitely hobby-level, but that is 30x increase from before we did the kickstarter. We also picked up 3 stores, 2 in the UK and one in the US that want to sell our puzzles, so from a marketing perspective our KS has been a hit. 2 puzzles a day plus 6x $10k KS next year is over $100k in sales and that's no longer hobby but small business. And if we can increase sales 30x again next year then it's really good business.

We got a new machine we'll order this month with large cutting bed and double heads that can make 50 puzzles/hour. With enough sales we can employ someone to assemble and avoid manufacturing overseas, which we've tried and quality is a problem.

My wife's been enjoying posting updates on KS, which lots of personal touches and touches of Norwegian culture. Some have been loving the updates and many have signed up for a newsletter, so she's going to start a blog on our website and build this brand-loyalty by drawing our customers into a kind of friend group.

Fun stuff.

Well, we used it for marketing. We already had a product but no easy path to market. This was a cheap and easy way to get our puzzle out there. We hit our goal in 18 hours and when the campaign ended we were 968%. And now our webstore, which was getting about 2 orders a month is now getting 2 orders a day. Yeah, not killer sales but fine for a start.

We sold almost 800 puzzles in two weeks, which is a lot for us. Even after expenses and unexpected extra costs, it's still good money. We're probably going to run about 6 more campaigns next year, figuring out more and more of the process as we go to be more efficient.

Yeah, KS is taking a significant cut, but it was easy and fun.

If you've got recommendations for other ways for a tiny business to effectively market their products, I'd love to hear suggestions!

Ha! Found you! Now I know your real name. :-) (PS: mine is "Mike")

Thanks for ordering! Did you get an Early Bird 5-pack? (The name "goobster" doesn't show on my backer list!)

Shout out to wasoxygen who not only bought the ebook but sent in more typos. Awesome!

Can you try it again ooli? I've just added an SSL certificate, maybe that did the trick?

Good catch! Not so many people would recognize one right away!

Steve and mk were beta-readers, and invaluable. I am immensely grateful!

Thanks for the tip, I'll check it out. Looks ok on this side, so gotta go dig around and see what's up with that.

I'd love to discuss. There's been a lot of thinking that went into this...

Thanks! It was hard.