Will you be my patron? 💍
In this article, I’m announcing the launch of my Patreon page, of a Kickstarter campaign, and explain where I’m going with this.
Almost two months ago, I published a crazy idea: asking for monthly donations to help me keep crafting free software.
After many discussions with friends and other developers, I found the energy to take a leap of faith and actually do it!
The opportunity: Next Step for Trello
Almost three months ago, I crafted a small tool to help me plan my time more efficiently: Next Step for Trello (also read how it fits into my productivity workflow).
Then I realised that other people were interested too: my Chrome Extension got hunted on ProductHunt, and reached 3500+ users in a month, without much effort! I started receiving reviews and messages from very excited users: some of them were happy and grateful, others were frustrated about missing features.
After having spent hours fixing bugs and other critical problems, I figured that this excitement phase was the opportunity to ask users for support.
The first thing I had to do was to figure out what my users wanted.
Listening to users’ wishes 🌟
So I launched a survey, and announced it inside my Trello Extension, so that my users could know about it, and tell me what they want:
I closed the survey after 95 users had responded, because it was enough to let three top improvement requests emerge:
- Make tasks load and refresh faster
- Make it remember my favorite display mode
- Make it also work from the trello.com/my/cards page
And, because implementing those improvements would take me a lot of time, I also asked how much they would be OK to donate for that:
I was happy to see that the most generous donators were asking for the same top-3 features!
Ask users to commit by donating 🚀
At that point, I figured that I could group these top-3 features into a new version of Next Step for Trello, and launch a crowdfunding campaign towards the development of that version. (e.g. like Fontawesome did awesomely)
So I launched two crowdfunding campaigns:
- a Kickstarter campaign: Next Step for Trello v2.0
- and a Patreon page: Adrien Joly is creating Next Step for Trello
I’ve been pushing the former to the users of Next Step for Trello, as it’s a more clear and direct way for users to give a one-shot donation, to support the development of a well-defined set of improvements.
I started the latter on Patreon in order to support a longer-term vision of a process that I’m starting to follow with Next Step for Tello, as I’m going to explain in the next section. It’s also a good way to reassure users who want to make sure that Next Step for Trello will keep working in the longer-term.
What’s for patrons? 💍
The process I followed with Next Step for Trello is a perfect example of the collaborative process that I would like to keep doing exclusively with my patrons:
- Gather ideas and votes on software I should craft next;
- Provide early beta access, for testing and feedback;
- Improve the software and define a roadmap, based on feedback;
- Host live coding sessions on Twitch, to show my work;
- And keep my software free to use for everyone.
Plus, as stated on my Patreon page, I’m happy to make a custom version of my software for every of my most generous patrons! And I’m still open to original reward suggestions!
I know that Patreon campaigns are not usual to support software developers yet, but I would really like to prove that I don’t need to craft adult entertainment to make a living out of my code.
I would be extremely grateful if you believe that it’s possible, and if you support my process by becoming my patron!
TL;DR 📌
If you just want me to make Next Step for Trello faster, remember your favorite display mode, and work from the trello.com/my/cards page
=> support me on kickstarter. (one-time donation with rewards)If you want to encourage me to maintain Next Step for Trello in the longer-term, and be more involved in my future projects
=> become a patron. (recurring donation with rewards)And, if you are not ready to prove me right yet, It would help me a lot if you could tell me why, and what would make you want to donate! 🙌
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