Posted: Mon Mar 14, 2005 2:35 am Post subject: 200,000 -- Here's a plan
1. You don't want to raise 200,000 dollars. You want to raise 100 dollars from 2000 people. Surely your suite has an order of magnitude or more users. If not, then maybe this project shouldn't be funded by this large an amount.
2. You don't want to raise 100 dollars from 2000 people. No, you want to have those people donate 10 dollars a month for a year. Not much, right? In fact, you want to set it up so that they auto-pay the amount every month, with the 20 dollar delta going to transaction overhead.
3. You don't want to raise 10 dollars a month from people -- no, you are looking for NeoOffice "founders" that are willing to pay to found the project. Founders will get
*their name on a website
*a thank you email (not a php generated screen)
*an option, for 10 dollars more, to get a "cafe press" NeoOffice T-shirt. For 20 dollars more, you get a mug and a t-shirt, with the neooffice founders logo.
4. You want to announce to the world that you are looking for founders. Announce on MacNN, Announce promimently on your website. Have a founders drive, in which you look for 500 founders every 3 months.
5. Those who recruit 5 others to join become NeoOffice "Angels". Angels are listed in the help section of NeoOffice.
6. Those who recruit 20 or more people are invited to eat pancakes with you at IHOP.
etc.
If you do steps 1 and 2, I'll sign up to send you 10 bucks a month automatically.
Posted: Mon Mar 14, 2005 11:36 am Post subject: Re: 200,000 -- Here's a plan
roberts wrote:
1. You don't want to raise 200,000 dollars. You want to raise 100 dollars from 2000 people. Surely your suite has an order of magnitude or more users. If not, then maybe this project shouldn't be funded by this large an amount.
I think your comments are spot on. In the days since I orginally posted this topic, I have begun to realize that searching for one or two really big donors would take a lot of time (a friend in sales who sells to large companies reminded of this) and is very hard to do. Plus, I suspect that most large corporate donors would want to impose all sorts of administrative and performance terms that could easily use up any available time.
roberts wrote:
2. You don't want to raise 100 dollars from 2000 people. No, you want to have those people donate 10 dollars a month for a year. Not much, right? In fact, you want to set it up so that they auto-pay the amount every month, with the 20 dollar delta going to transaction overhead.
Also a very good point. What has really surprised me is the how displaying OpenOffice.org "do you want to register" dialog the first time you run Neo/J has resulted in a steady stream of small donations. Over the last month, Neo/J has received nearly $2K in donations! While this isn't quite enough for me to quit my consulting work, it has enabled me to work severely reduce the time spent drumming up paid consulting work and use that time to make a serious dent in the number of crashing bugs and test layout bugs.
This overwhelming support has been really inspirational. It reminded me how much of an impact a group of individuals like the Neo/J community can have.
Clearly, chasing after a few big donors was a bad idea. It isn't the first bad idea that I have had and it certainly won't be the last. :/
One question: do you know how to configure PayPal to accept recurring donations? Several people have asked for this feature but I have not figured out how to get this to work.
Posted: Mon Mar 14, 2005 12:40 pm Post subject: Re: 200,000 -- Here's a plan
roberts wrote:
3. You don't want to raise 10 dollars a month from people -- no, you are looking for NeoOffice "founders" that are willing to pay to found the project. Founders will get
*their name on a website
*a thank you email (not a php generated screen)
*an option, for 10 dollars more, to get a "cafe press" NeoOffice T-shirt. For 20 dollars more, you get a mug and a t-shirt, with the neooffice founders logo.
I like this idea. It is fairly easy to set up. The question I have is does anyone have any ideas for how and where we can display the Founders list? I am awful at web page design and I would hate to inadvertantly put the list in a place that either offends the Founders or offends everyone else.
Joined: May 31, 2003 Posts: 219 Location: French Alps
Posted: Mon Mar 14, 2005 3:31 pm Post subject: Re: 200,000 -- Here's a plan
pluby wrote:
One question: do you know how to configure PayPal to accept recurring donations? Several people have asked for this feature but I have not figured out how to get this to work.
My hope when I started (and then began laying things out in the wiki) is that we could get one or two people per language/region/country who would target the sites appropriate for them (and have some general coordination on the wiki so we're all listing/submitting roughly the same info on rougly the same schedule).
Does this mean that the NeoO Wiki pages could be translated into different languages? It may not be the most important thing to do, but it could make both the information local adapted/focused, and bring the NeoO closer to a "home market".
Joined: May 25, 2003 Posts: 4752 Location: Santa Barbara, CA
Posted: Mon Mar 14, 2005 9:35 pm Post subject:
Woof! Remind me to not go on vacation for four days. Catching up on reading is tremendously long!
Here's my take on my skimming (sorry if I am missing salient points here)...
Patrick's logic is on par in that to really burn rubber on development this beastie will need a full time staff. I think 2 is cutting it short, IMHO, since OOo in general is both fast paced as well as large. Those are two really difficult things to deal with in any environment, much less a volunteer one.
I'm glad that the donations have helped ease Patrick's contracting needs and given him more time to focus. Unfortunately, I'm a full-time employee and couldn't have more time to focus unless I quit my job...or more hobbies...
I worked the numbers a while back for starting a purely Neo style focused company/foundation and it's just not economically feasible. Note I say *feasible*, not sustainable...I could get the numbers to "break even" (assuming a lot of groupies wanted t-shirts) but I could not get it to the point where it would make money for anyone who didn't want to be a programmer and live frat style sharing a house and chowing down on hot dogs
(onto my LGPL rant...perhaps I should move this...) I'm still glad everything's GPL. In a way, for me doing OOo/Neo/etc. for all these years has been my "cop-out" public service instead of serving meals at the homeless shelter or going out to spay and neuter some pets. It's comforting to know that the work I've given away for free can still be had for free. Of course, that doesn't mean that you can't start a company selling subscription or integration services around it, or feel sleazy taking donations, but the effort I donated will always be there for the public for time immemorial as long as someone's interested in hosting it. Someone else can't completely take what I did for granted and profit off of it without giving a chance for someone else to continuing to serve the public good. (warm fuzzies
ok, so i wrote up a post a few days ago, and just realized it isn't here. this means i must have closed moz before hitting submit.
what? i am an engineer, leave me alone.
anyway, this is just a holder, i'll re-write the post and get it here soon.
but to answer the one question, yes, we are looking into translations of the wiki. it was discusses somewhere else for a bit... if you all are serious, then we should start a translation thread and get volunteers (and i'll set up the back end)
Thanks Max. This works link works. There is, however, one small technical hurdle. PayPal's subscription form requires my page to explicitly set the subscription amount or else the PayPal site presents a "link not found" error. Even worse, if I add a text field on my page that users can input an amount, PayPal will present a "link not found" error if the user inputs anything other than a number formatted in U.S. English. For example, PayPall cannot handle European numbers like "20,00".
I can work around by putting a drop down list of common amounts (e.g. 1, 5, 10, 25, etc.). Its a big uglier than I'd like, but since PayPal is so braindead about input validation, there's not much more to do.
Thanks Max. This works link works. There is, however, one small technical hurdle. PayPal's subscription form requires my page to explicitly set the subscription amount or else the PayPal site presents a "link not found" error. Even worse, if I add a text field on my page that users can input an amount, PayPal will present a "link not found" error if the user inputs anything other than a number formatted in U.S. English. For example, PayPall cannot handle European numbers like "20,00".
I can work around by putting a drop down list of common amounts (e.g. 1, 5, 10, 25, etc.). Its a big uglier than I'd like, but since PayPal is so braindead about input validation, there's not much more to do.
Patrick
Cool,
I think that Robert put in plain english what I wanted to say with my previous post:
- subscription
- recognition
...
Can the second (monthly) donate button be moved *under* its selects? Maybe I'm just still too tired, but I got a bit confused by the proximity of buttons when I saw the new page. (Or even better, nice CSS boxes?)
Smokey _________________ "[...] whether the duck drinks hot chocolate or coffee is irrelevant." -- ovvldc and sardisson in the NeoWiki
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