Hello from Keyboardio World Headquarters in Oakland, California!
Tonight was the final stop on our tour: San Francisco.
Because we were close to home, we loaded up the trunk of our car with older prototypes that we weren’t able to bring to any of our out of town stops. We ended up showing off aspects of a fair number of them during a marathon hour-long Q&A session.
Eventbrite hosted the meetup at their offices in San Francisco. We were on an actual stage. With actual microphones. It was remarkably professional feeling.
Tonight's was one of very few meetups we ended up having in a corporate space rather than a hackerspace. The bay area is home to many, many amazing hackerspaces, but with over 100 attendees, this event would have been a little to crazy to foist on even the largest of them.
There were many notable things about tonight's event, but one of our favorites was that it was the first time we got to snuggle with puppies during the meetup. It was excellent. If you do a Kickstarter roadshow during your campaign, we’d strongly suggest that you encourage your guest to bring their puppies.
The most eventful part of the evening actually came after the event had ended.
We made it 27 days and over 8000 miles without even a hint of car trouble. And then there was tonight.
Some very, very nice attendees helped us cart all of our stuff back to our car after we left Eventbrite. Jesse got everything into the trunk and tried to close it, only to discover that the trunk wouldn’t latch. We pulled everything out and tried again. No luck.
After a bit of digging around and some very, very poorly thought out attempted MacGyvering, we found a bungie cord and got the trunk closed up well enough to limp our way back home across the Bay Bridge.
It looks like the trunk latching mechanism is just broken. We'll figure it out on Thursday.
It could have been worse. It could have happened yesterday...or any of the 26 days preceding yesterday.
Oh! One other thing of note happened today: Kickstarter published our guest blog post!
https://www.kickstarter.com/blog/guest-post-a-cross-country-road-trip-to-makerspaces
If you’ve been reading our updates for the past month, you’ll likely recognize some of the spaces we’ve visited. If you’re just tuning in, the Kickstarter blog post is a great overview of the first two thirds of our trip.
As of right now, 1733 of you have backed us to the tune of $573,574!
The campaign runs for another 42 hours, finishing up at 7pm Pacific on Wednesday evening. If you think you’d like to upgrade to the limited edition mahogany Model 01 or you can sucker your CEO into buying a ten-pack of custom-engraved Model 01s for your startup, this is the time to do it.
Today, we drove 20 miles, bringing our total for the trip to 8372 miles. Some very, very rough math tells us that we averaged about 13mph for the past month. That’s about the comfortable hopping speed of a Red Kangaroo.
Tomorrow, we’ll be at home answering your Kickstarter messages, emails and tweets.
Wednesday, we’ll be doing the same. At least until 7pm, when we’ll be celebrating the amazing month we’ve had. By going to bed early.
<3 j+k