Thanks! (please keep helping)

Hi everybody,
Last year at this time we were getting ready to set up a complete set of pods for the first time in Seattle since WoTC closed it's doors and the pods went offline at the FASA offices. Thats right! The pods have been here 1 year now! So this weekend we have Roadkill's Heavy Mech Rotation tournament, which looks like it will be an amazing new format. The usual major tournament pricing and pass apply, and we are offering a pass for Friday + Saturday for $50, including tournament entry! I hope we see you all out here this weekend, especially some of you we haven't seen in a while.

I was really touched by the response to the last blog. It showed me that people really do care about what we are doing here. So I thought I would give an update. The weekend after I posted the last blog was pretty good. It allowed us to avoid a major financial problem and continue uninterrupted. The weekend after that (last weekend) was a lot of fun,.. but honestly not as busy as it needs to be. Thanks to everybody that showed up! We need to see a little more weekday business and a little more party business as well. I am working on a few sales right now, but if you have the option, please consider having your events here! If you have any contacts or leads on this type of stuff please pass it on! We also need a few more members showing up again on members nights. Members nights were amazing through August and the first part of September, but they have been pretty slow since, although it seems like it might be trending back to where it needs to be.

Honestly we are not out of the woods yet, it needs to stay very busy here for the foreseeable future if this place is going to make it. I am doing everything I can, I hope that the players will help too. This is not something I can do on my own anymore. September put us in a position that I cannot fix by myself.

It was really fun to see some people we hadn't seen in a while this week (Hi Lister!) and hopefully this will continue. I feel like September may mark the end of a few groups we had over the summer (who tell me they will be back next summer), and October may mark the return of some people we haven't seen since the spring. I hope that is the case, but we weren't open last fall, so we don't have a huge number of fall seasonal people yet. Hopefully that is starting to change, and I know some of the winter crowd are reading this (Paging DefTonyStark + friends to the debriefing area!... and where is Shaxx btw???).

I have personally put out about 10,000 flyers to local businesses who are helping us out. I will be linking a bunch of them on our website soon. Thanks to all of them for helping us to get the word out there! I have done a bunch of work on the website, finally starting to add the content that has been missing there for a while. A lot of our players have also been dropping flyers at a bunch of new places. Thanks for all the hard work!

I am working on getting share buttons on everything, if you see that please use it to help spread the word on facebook, twitter, and whatever other social networks you participate in! A lot of you have already been doing that, thanks to all of you! There are tons more plans for the website, I have been cranking out a lot of new material, but if any of the players want to do some writeups about the game or the pods please get in touch with me. I am (obviously) not a professional writer and it takes me a long time to do this stuff. I would love to see strategy information from some of our better players posted to the site! To give an idea of what I am picturing, if Gurn did a Siege Assault howto documenting some of the common tactics, I think people would learn a lot from it. Lots of different players have different strengths and hopefully some of them will share some of that information so we can continue to raise the level of play here.

We have been testing some facebook ads with some pretty good success so far, we will probably be doing more of that, but the most effective way that I know of to get the word out is if our existing community reaches out and pulls in new players the old fashioned way. The money that can be spent on promotions, is being spent in the ways that have proven effective. If anybody has any ideas that DON'T cost anything, I would love to hear about it.

We are working on some great new stuff for IRC... I know... I know... IRC.... but we have some really fun ideas for this that will make it worth your while to dust off your old chat client and join in. Currently we are idling in #theairlock on undernet, with plans to switch networks this week to a place that suits our needs a little better. An old friend of mine is running a network that should be a good fit. More details on that soon, but feel free to /j and idle in the meantime!

There is some pod work that needs to be done soon. I am getting ready to work on the joysticks again, and a few MFDs need a little love. I am hoping to be caught up on that stuff by the end of next week to get the pods ready for the holiday season.

There is more to say, but not time to say it... or probably to read it. So I leave it at that for now. I have gotten a few contacts lately from people that are trying to round up big groups to bring here. I appreciate this a lot. It is this kind of coordination on the part of the players that have let us survive this long. Sometimes though, it is hard to land that big group with the economy like it is, and the seasonal stuff that happens in the fall. If it is difficult to round up that group, please just show up yourself! I am hoping that there are going to be plenty of people here for you to play with when you get here!

More very soon!
--uglyman

Greetings from the future! (also HELP!)

I know, I know, a lot of time has passed....now it is a year later! Look at how much has changed!

The Pod Bay!. Photo by Tim Batzel

Welcome!

In case you don't know me yet, I am Kelly "uglyman" Harnden. Here at The Airlock in Kirkland, WA, we have a fully functional set of eight Tesla II simulators, from Virtual World Entertainment, running BattleTech Firestorm. If you don't yet know what that is yet, you are in for a whole new experience. We are making an effort to put out a bunch of new content to explain all of that, but in some ways, the pods are almost unexplainable. You really have to climb in to see how much fun this can be. As we roll out a bunch of new promotional efforts this month, I hope that there are some new pilots reading this. First of all I would like to say "welcome", I hope you will visit us here, and enjoy the pods as much as I do.

If you are one of our regular pilots, then let me say thank you. It is because of you that this place can survive.


Why should we read this?

I want to explain a few things, catch everybody up on what has been going on around here, and most importantly I need to let everybody know that I need help! The Airlock is in a certain amount of danger right now! I want to let everybody know what I am doing about the situation, and we will scratch the surface of what you can all do to help out. There will be a lot of opportunities for the pilots to make a difference throughout the holiday season..... but first.... we catchup!


A little bit of history.

For those of you who weren't around yet, In the very early days of The Airlock, I used to update a forum thread all the time titled "What is uglyman up to?". At that point I would say that %80 of the people who came through the door thought I was crazy, (they were probably right), and I answered the same 10 questions over and over again, followed by the same 10 suggestions, none of which I could afford to implement, and probably at least 8 of which were really good ideas. I ran into a problem where I actually didn't have time to sleep, fix pods, run the games, AND have that conversation over and over again. There simply wasn't enough hours in the day. I estimate that I have had around 6 or 7 days off since last Halloween. A wild year to say the least. Long stretches of that time were spent working 14 hours a day or more. Don't get me wrong, I am not complaining. I can't imagine anything better than the fun we have had here. The only really hard part has been missing out on a few family events, and really not getting to spend much time with my girlfriend outside of here. If we have built the foundation we set out to build, that problem should get better over the next few months.

Oh yeah, the forum posts... I began to document these things in my usual rambling way... oh... if you hadn't noticed, I am not a professional writer. I would fully expect a few mispellings and some terrible grammar. In fact I have always been terrible at this. If my writing is any good at all it is only because I happen to be writing about my favorite subject... the pods.

Anyway, I started to write, and I started to notice that people were actually reading it. It started to make a difference as people were more aware of what exactly was going on here. I had intended to continue writing but suddenly we started to get busier and busier around here. I started to have more repair work to do. There wasn't enough hours in the day to write anymore. At some point I will have to recount what happened in case you missed it. It was a truely amazing experience to watch this place survive month after month. I will save that for another night, because there are several other items to catch up on.

For history's sake I have posted all of those old posts here. Reading through them again I remember how tired I was. I was working pretty hard to get things set up at that point. I start to feel bad for that guy, and how much work he has ahead of him. There were parts of this that were really not easy. As I reflect on this I realize that many months later, I am more tired, working harder than that guy ever imagined, but still having fun. The last 13 months or so have been the biggest adventure of my life, by far, starting with a simple vacation. At some point I will also write down the story of how this place came to be. The regulars are tired of hearing me tell that story, but people keep asking.

The posts were not the only thing that fell by the wayside at that point. I had to drop everything and only spend my free time on the absolutely essential tasks. Solstice had set me up with a new content management system for the website and for the next few months I didn't do much of anything with it. It really didn't help that he got his dream job at that point and got almost as busy as me. 

Around the time of my last post, things started to pick up around here. We still had a dead night or two a week but the busy nights got busier. We met a lot of new friends and luckily most of them stuck around! The pilots took it upon themselves to spread the word. I started to find that people were finding our flyers in the strangest places. Word went out in the local BattleTech community, and things happened quickly.

After months of battling the poor condition of the pods we started to get on top of that situation. This really started to improve as the summer went by. They have been rolling along pretty smoothly for a couple of months now. It is time to clean and lube the joysticks again, I am sure we will get to that in the next couple of weeks. There is a monitor or two that need work and are just waiting on either money or available time at this point. Overall I am very satisfied with the results. None of this would have been possible without the help of Craig "Pharaoh" Evans, from Denver, who, after making a couple of trips up here to help us get set up, has put up with endless calls from me at all hours of the night.


Some big news!

We had our first Gunslingers tournament. Roadkill won. Everyone had the same reaction to that: "yup... thats about right".

Which reminds me, if you hadn't heard, Glenn "Roadkill" Elliott asked to be our SEC, which is an amazing help to me, as he is very experienced with not only the pods, but many types of tournaments and BattleTech as well! He has already run a couple of tournaments that went as smooth as I could possibly imagine. We have lots of ideas and lots of new events that we are planning. I expect that tournament nights will become the favorite around here very quickly.

Another important milestone is that I have been filling out some paperwork that marks one year in business! Last Halloween Craig Evans and I were putting the finishing touches on the pod setup, and even that has almost been a year now. Stay tuned for some announcements about how we will celebrate the one year anniversary of the official opening of The Airlock last January 1st! 


The Problem!

So how are things now? Well for the most part things are great, this place has paid for itself, which is of course rare for a business in its first months. July was a little on the slow side, but in August we had our best month yet. Every members night and every event was packed! If that level of business became the average over time we can keep this place going indefinitely! Very exciting to see a month like that so early on! It made up for July in a heartbeat. September started off very strong as well with some very busy nights around PAX weekend.... So what is the problem? Well... lets just say that the rest of September was a little bit too quiet. At this point we would not survive very many months in a row with sales as low as September. Fortuneately October has started off pretty well, but not well enough...

There were lots of reasons for this. Some were my fault, like the horribly neglected promotional efforts and website (which ironically became easier to start catching up on when we were slow for a couple of weeks). Some were simply the fact that a lot happens around Seattle in September, post PAX financial issues are common among gamers in this area for obvious reasons, school was starting for some pilots (Hi Chinook :p ), school was also starting for some pilot's kids, we were testing some new elements of the schedule around here, and of course there were the requisite pilot surgeries, illnesses, vacations and other distractions.

This wouldn't be a big deal except for the fact that there are a couple of big expenses on the horizon. The last few things that need to be taken care of to finish settting us up permanently here, and make sure this place lasts, are going to cost a significant amount of money. We also need to prepare for a slow month or two after New Years. Sales need to be very strong through the holiday season. A slow September has made this task a big one, and I am scrambling as fast as I can to prepare. We expect RedPlanet will be released in the near future. That is one of these looming expenses that needs to be dealt with very quickly. Several players have stepped up and purchased some games already. Special thanks to all of them. 

The major problem that we have is that the crowd of players we have now, the ones that are reading this post, for the most part you were the crowd that was very easy to reach when we opened this place. You were the ones that were paying attention, looking for pods, part of the BattleTech community, or simply walking by! The people we need to get in here now, are the ones that we have to go out and find. The ones that are not going to stumble on this by accident! Everything we have done so far has been without any significant advertising. We put out flyers, forum posts, the facebook page, and a few emails, and that is really all.


What I am busy with

So what am I doing? Well a lot actually! I have spent a lot of time in the last few days working out deals for cross promotion around here. Thousands of new flyers and coupons have been delivered. This has made a huge difference for us in the past, and we never tried it on this scale before. I am working on new material for the web and a whole bunch of new ideas for the social networking side of things. Social networking in places like facebook has been our most effective method of getting the word out so far. I am running some ads on facebook for the first time, and so far the results look surprisingly good! Overall the majority of my efforts are toward setting up better methods to communicate more efficiently and then use them.


How you can help!

So what can you do? Your job is easy... just show up and play! I realize that money is more than a little tight for people right now, but please, if you are going to spend money on entertainment, consider spending it here! We really need to get members nights back to the numbers we were used to over the summer, and we need to make sure that other nights are busy too!

Several people have told me that they are "waiting for RedPlanet". I understand how you feel. If that is the game you love, I hope to have it for you soon... and this attitude was fine before we took the hit in September, but things are a little different now. If you can't stop by and enjoy a few games of BattleTech, please consider purchasing a package of games for RP ahead of time, like a few of the other RP fans have already done. The reality is that I need to spend most of my resources serving the customers that actually support this place. Hopefully that will be both groups! Any more bad luck could leave me with some very difficult decisions to make.

If you can find a group of 16 or more friends who want to get some pod time on one of my usually slow nights, let me know and I might be able to put together some sort of discount!

Another way you can all help is if you know your event administrator, or any person in charge of booking team events, please let them know you want to have your next team building event here! Keep us in mind for birthday parties, bachelor parties (we have had a lot of fun with those lately!), sports team parties, or even if you just want to get some friends together and have the pods all to yourselves. We have party packages for just about any budget, and if you need more space, laughs comedy club is available right next door.

The party calendar is starting to heat up for the holiday season, book the dates now before it is too late!

I had some scheduling issues over the summer where I missed out on sales, by turning down parties when another party was booked, only to find that party would show up late or not at all. Because of this, I have to collect payment to hold the date. If you need to reschedule and provide enough notice I will make every effort to work it out.

If you have any ideas to get the word out about The Airlock without spending ANY money, please let me know.

I will be trying out some different methods of spreading the word on Facebook and Twitter over the next few days. It might seem a little spammy, but I only have access to that audience through all of you, so please help by clicking share, or retweating, or otherwise spreading the word!


Thank you!
Thank you all for reading, and for the support so far. I have a lot of people that deserve a personal thank you, but I will have to save it for another post so that I can get some other things done today. I never forget that the pilots are the ones that have made it possible for me to be here having the time of my life. I hope to see you all soon!

--uglyman