Exciting future goal planning!

First things first: YAaaaaayyyyyYYYyyy!!! Less than a year after starting the podcast, we not only have a Patreon model that is sustainable, but you now get a full-length bonus episode every month from December on! 

(Also, Patreon isn't changing their payment structure after all, so everything is as it was before, and apologies for any confusion on that front.) 

When we started this Patreon we knew it was important to set goals, but we had very little sense of how long it might take us to reach them. Even in our most optimistic projection, we pictured hitting this milestone about 18 months after launching. Now that we're here in less than 8 months, we've realised we need to revise our expectations. In a good way!

It's now very likely that we'll hit the $1,200 goal sometime in the first half of 2018, but realistically, that's when Gretchen is going to be in peak book promotion mode, so it's not going to be a great fit for her travel schedule. So if we hit the liveshow goal too soon and then you have to wait like, a year for the show, that's not terribly exciting for you all. ("Hitting your goals too soon" is a great problem to have, we can't even believe we're in this position.) 

Plus, we already had the chance to run a small liveshow in Montreal in September. That wasn't a thing we thought would happen at the start of 2017, but then a conference for Lauren came up in Montreal and we figured we might as well take advantage of it! The Montreal mini liveshow went great! But we also know that if we want to do a bigger liveshow where we can invite more of you, and stream/film it for everyone else, it's going to be a much bigger production. 

So we want to space out the liveshows: add in a different goal at $1,200 and push the big liveshow up to $1,600 instead. But we figured we'd run our thoughts by you first since that does involve changing the Patreon as it was already set up.  

We're really excited for our new $1,200 goal. We've started talks with a linguist-artist to commission an illustration of the space babies speaking an English/Russian space pidgin, based on people's favourite quote from Episode 1. (We will not be sending actual babies to space, because, um, ethics and also it would cost millions of dollars.) 

We're super excited to be able to support another independent linguistics creator and supplement our own pretty basic graphic design skills with actual art! When we hit the $1,200 goal all patrons will get the full-colour digital art in high resolution to use as a phone background/desktop background/print it out and stick it to your wall, as well as some concept sketches so you can see how it came together. We'll also be sharing lower-res versions on social media as another way to entice people into the show, and we'll make space babies merch available to everyone so you can get it on various items as an attractive cartoon that has a subtle nerd reference should you care to explain it.