Kickstarter Rewards Update
I’ve mentioned the Kickstarter campaign that ran for Mossy Creek Mushrooms in the newsletter a few times, and a few small updates on the rewards being shipped out, but I’ve come to realize that not everyone is getting the newsletters, so they’re missing out on the information.
A few people have become concerned because the rewards are late shipping out. We understand the concern, so we decided it’s time to address the concerns in a more direct manner. In the Kickstarter campaign we were upfront about the possible challenges that might be faced advancing the business, and; unfortunately, we ran into a few of them.
Some of our spawn refused to grow, even though it didn’t show signs of mold. We had to reorder and take the time to find, and get rid of, the source of the contamination. While the process of growing the mushrooms once the kit is received is fairly quick, the process of getting them ready to ship takes several months. Having to start over a few months into development drastically damaged our ability to hit any sort of deadline.
On top of the first contamination issue, there was a brown fuzz that started infecting the pink oysters. We had to put a lot of time into finding a strain that wasn’t affected and would grow good quality mushrooms.
We also had some preliminary budgeting issues, and the money that had been set aside to cover the shipping costs for the rewards had to be used to buy the new spawn so we could produce anything at all. With that money sink, we are having to work to rebuild the finances to be able to ship out the rest of the rewards.
Mossy Creek Mushrooms is determined to only send out high quality mushrooms, so we had to make sure all of these issues were gone before we were willing to start shipping out kits. We hope you agree that late rewards are better than rewards that won’t yield anything. With the problems gotten rid of, we are able to go back to focusing on building up our supply.
The upside to the troubles we’ve faced as a business is that we are now better equipped to deal with possible future problems, and our equipment is much more advanced, allowed us to progress faster now that we’ve moved passed the problem stage.
We seriously appreciate the help getting Mossy Creek Mushrooms off the ground. Our small business wouldn’t have gotten nearly as far as it has without the help. Apologies for the issues that have arisen, and we will be more diligent about keeping everyone in the loop with the progress we are making. Some of those updates will be in the newsletter, so you may want to subscribe to keep up to date. If everything continues to progress well from this point out, we should be picking up with shipping out rewards by April. Please, continue to be patient with us, we are working hard to get everything out.