On last week's Whiskey Media Happy Hour we formally announced the Giant Bomb World Tour. In short, we're trying to find ways to meet up in person with our community in more places than our home port of San Francisco... as long as the user-base can hit certain paid membership goals. The genesis for the project started when our head of business development, Mike Tatum, jokingly mentioned that we'd be heading to Australia if we got a set number of Twitter messages from that country. Then a funny thing happened: we all sobered up the next morning and that idea wouldn't go away. Why couldn't we meet up with our community where they live? 

The quick dismissal was because it's expensive, that's why. As a small company we can't really afford to put people on cross-continent flights with a bunch of production gear. Plus, where the hell are we gonna host these things? That'll cost money too. Plus, those travel days will mean we'll have to work extra hard before these things just to make sure the site doesn't go stale. There's a high cost to doing something this dumb.
 
But what if we offered it as a member perk? We've pretty much already decided as a company that when it comes to our paid members, once you've made that investment in us, we only want to offer you additional things either for free or at cost. Believe me, there's not much money in selling a few thousand $15 dollar T-Shirts. But that's OK, because we just sold near 2,000 T-Shirts to the only 9,000 people who could actually buy them. That's pretty staggering when you realize they were available for three days and announced haphazardly on a live Internet broadcast. I'll take that kind of success as an indication we're still doing stuff you appreciate. 
 
So from that perspective we decided to use the same rationalization for the World Tour. OK, it's expensive. But what if we could get 15,000 subscriptions by the end of Summer? Then we could justify spending 10% of our revenue from the memberships to go to select cities, rent out a bar, and at the very least shake hands, say thank you and have some laughs. We might be able to even do more than that; but really, at the end of the day, if that's all it was, I'm pretty sure everyone involved would still have a good time. 
 
How do I know that? Well, because I'm going to PAX East this weekend for exactly that. Even though Giant Bomb is officially going so they can host a panel on Friday, I decided to log some unused PTO days and buy myself a personal flight to hang out with our community. It's going to be exciting to shake hands with the people I spend most of my days chatting with through small form fields.

So consider Boston the unofficial preamble of the World Tour. Ryan and I will try very last minute to find a bar downtown on Saturday that will host a group of real-life strangers (but Internet friends) to hang out, have a cold one, and talk video games and the sites we love. If you run into me at PAX make sure to hit me up for a beer (or contact me through Twitter), because I genuinely believe if you're a Whiskey Media member you've earned it. Just do me the favor and try and convince a friend or two to join our goofy alliance of nerds as well, I'd like to make it to more than just Boston under the same clubhouse spirit. Our International crowd deserves the opportunity as well.
 
And hey, if you think all of this sounds vague, don't worry... It most certainly is. Sometimes you just gotta point in the distance and let your arrows fly. As long as we hit our goals, we'll make sure to think up something stupid to make it worth your while.