It’s day 21 of the Kickstarter for The Hawaii Project, Wednesday, April 22.

Today is a travel day, returning home from my parents house. I don’t get much done, other than contemplating where I stand. No wifi on the plane and it’s crowded, so I content myself with reading more of Dying Every Day: Seneca at the Court of Nero, Nero of the “fiddling while Rome burned” fame. It’s really quite interesting how much Seneca reminds me of Thomas Cromwell (most recently described by Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies. Both were from very modest backgrounds, rising to the heights of power as Kingmakers, and struggling with balancing their nobler instincts with the darker requirements placed on them from the political realm. Plenty of lessons there for you corporate folks near the top of the ladder.

Late in the day a reporter pings me, she’s trying to get an article on THP placed and written. She needs a quote from somebody from the books world from outside the project for some “validation”. Turns out my daughter’s fiancee’s mother is a librarian, and one of my beta testers, who really likes what I’m doing. I connect the two of them and voila a quote is born. That’s how the sausage gets made, people.

Tomorrow: Essentially one week left. I need to regroup and figure out where to focus in the remaining week. Absent some form of miracle, I won’t hit my target, and I need to figure out whether and how to try to make it, or just take my learnings and move on to the next stage of my project.

$8,345 pledged,  23%, funded, 115 backers.

It’s day 20 of the Kickstarter for The Hawaii Project, Monday, April 20.

If you’ve been paying attention, you probably noticed some days are missing from the diary. Sorry about that. Life has a way of getting in the way, as they say, and reminding you of what’s really important. Had a family situation that requires some attention, so I’ll be back on the job tomorrow, hopefully with more insight into how to jump start this stalled campaign. 8).

111 backers. $8,030 pledged of $35,000 goal, 10 days to go.

In the meantime, I have some plane time and I am discovering James Robb’s wonderful Dying Every Day: Seneca at the court of Nero, an account of the philosopher/poet/ethicist’s time as kingmaker to the mad emperor Nero, and how he reconciled his Stoic philosophy with his time wading through the mud to the height of Roman politics. Highly Recommended.

$7,690 pledged,  21%, funded, 108 backers.

Day 15. Midway through the 30 days of our Kickstarter. My Kickstarter is now “middle aged”. A little creaky in the knees but still moving. Youth has flashed by. Like a middle-aged tennis player, we’re not going to win on speed and muscle (aka a big press hit), we’re going to have to win with guile (no, that’s not me in the picture, I’m much better looking). Only, I’m not feeling very guilish at the moment. (I’m also pretty sure guilish isn’t a word?). Tomorrow’s task is to regroup and re-analyze the path to meeting our goal. Current one won’t get it done. But first, today.

Had our first beta customer cancellation, out of about 150. Bummer, but then, to lose only one out of a random crowd of 150+ is actually pretty good. Especially given how many Kickstarter mails they’ve been subjected to 8).

In the good news department: Bost Inno ran a follow-on article about 9 new Boston startups to watch, and we made it into that. And a local town library is interested in integrating The Hawaii Project into their website! Vaguely suggested they (or other libraries) might even be willing to pay for it! I set up an in-person visit for early next week. Failing anything else, maybe there’s a way to get the word out on the Kickstarter that way.

Oh yeah. I was going to give you an analysis of the impact of the BostInno piece. First, it’s great awareness building. It led to another press outlet getting in touch to do a live interview next week. These things build on each other, press isn’t a one-and-done medium – each thing builds on previous work.

Unfortunately the article doesn’t link to my Kickstarter landing-page-with-redirect (I’ll explain that post-Kickstarter in my tips and tricks), so I can’t see how many people visited the Kickstarter page, I can only see who ended up backing. The article got a 1.8k “FlameScore” on BostInno (it’s unclear what FlameScores are exactly – page views is a big component but not a 1:1 mapping), and generated 37 twitter shares and 31 Facebook shares. From watching the backing flow, it’s pretty clear the BostInno piece resulted in 7 new backers and about $500 in backing. If you’re trying to fund a Kickstarter on press, you either need a more compelling product than me, or more press 8).

Commercial: If you want to back us, you can do so here. The Hawaii Project. Do Good by Reading Well.

It’s day 14 of the Kickstarter for The Hawaii Project, Wednesday, April 15.

$7,565 pledged,  21%, funded, 105 backers.

It’s exciting to be across the 100 backer milestone, but I’m a little disappointed how few actual donors the BostInno article produced, even thought it was probably seen by a few thousand people. Tomorrow, I’ll produce some stats on it. Still, it was great coverage and there’s likely a tail to it. I already got one other potential press opportunity from someone seeing the article (from someone in Hawaii no less!).

But this morning, I just can’t face hawking (aka “pushing”, “promoting”, mailing, tweeting, posting, ….”) my product more today. I need to DO something. I’ve had an idea about how to make the recommendations much much more personalized than they are. Hint: it involves interest vectors, dot products, linear algebra and metadata. Sound sexy? I thought so. I hack til about 2pm, and it’s…..working. “It’s Alive”, he said to maniacal laughter.

Working pretty damn well actually. Surprisingly well. Not scalable, but that can wait for another day….psyched.

I have coffee with an old friend who’s leaving his job of 22 years and going back into the job hunt. After 22 years, it’s a little scary, I imagine. I encourage him to take some time off before making any decisions. (Rule 28 in my personal list of Gibbs Rules for worklife – I’ll post those some day). He asks if there’s any good startup events to go to.

Duh. Palm-to-Forehead Slap. I realize I totally forgot about events! Never even considered lining some up! Duh. I scramble. There’s a Mass Innovation Nights event coming, but it looks full. I submit anyway. Startup Stir has an event. I submit. There’s more events out there, but long lead times to get in….gack. Maybe too late for the Kickstarter, but I should be other there talking about….hawking….my product anyway 8). Note to self: next time, don’t forget the events. Talking to real people in person, not through email. Strange concept.

Today’s Music: Massachusetts Americana Singer-Songwriter Jeffrey Foucault. Check out “Train to Jackson”.

It’s day 13 of the Kickstarter for The Hawaii Project, Tuesday, April 14.

Notwithstanding it was day 13, it was a good day yesterday.

Coverage on The Hawaii Project finally appeared in BostInno! BostInno is probably the 2nd biggest online media outlet after the Boston Globe, and likely bigger in terms of startup news. It’s great news for the project, and an interesting case study in how to approach media about your project. I’ll do a deeper dive on this after the Kickstarter is complete – for now, it’s relevant to one particular question – when do you approach media? In an ideal world, your news story hits the same day you launch your Kickstarter – you want as many people as possible piling onto Kickstarter the day you launch.

I had been in contact with them on and off over recent months but not directly talking about THP or seeking coverage. I sent them a note 8 days before the launch with the launch material and asking if they were interested to cover it, thinking a week was enough lead time. Good news, yes, they are interested. bad news: my contact goes on vacation the day of my email, and gets someone else involved. The reporter is extremely busy! Working off a backlog of stories almost two weeks old! So my story goes into the backlog. It hits today, day 13 of the campaign, so start-to-finish time on this story is 21 days. Moral of the story for you entrepreneurs: especially for your most desired outlets (BostInno was one of my top hopes for good press), get to them early so they have time to do the work. They’re busy too, maybe busier than you 8).

I watch the online chatter for a bit, then, I’m off to Porter Square Books, a local indie bookstore. I’m meeting with Josh Cook, who’s been a bookseller for at least a decade, runs online for PSB, and is a recently-published author (I buy a copy of his book, An Unexpected Murder while I am there). I’m hoping to get insights into the book-selling process from the perspective of a bookstore and from an author, and in addition hoping to find some way of working with them.

I learn a lot from talking to him. Since some people might consider what I am doing trying to dis-intermediate bookstores (it is NOT), I’m a little worried about them not wanting to help me. Josh however is an open book (insert bad joke sound effect here). Very helpful, thoughtful, and open to sharing. He is dubious that a machine or an algorithm can just pluck the right book out of the air (I also think that’s too high an expectation), but he gets more interested when I talk about how I’m crawling high quality, trusted sources of writing about books. His take is that is why people come to PSB and ask for book recommendations – they are a “trusted source”. We chat about a wide variety of things including the recent s***storm that is the Hugo controversy. In the end it doesn’t appear there’s an obvious way to work together but I’ve learned a lot.

Head home, go play some tennis (sound mind sound body, remember?), watch an episode of Hawaii-50, then pass out. Barely remember my head hitting the pillow.

$7,410, 21% of goal. Tick, Tock, Tick, Tock….