[MlMt] Crowd Funding 2014

[Zvi Biener]

I like the nascent marketing idea: MailMate is the hacker's email 
client.

Not that you need too many interjections, Benny, but I, for one, would 
much rather you spent time thinking of how to fund and advertise 
MailMate and put development off for a little bit, if only to ensure 
future development. I also think the video of the real power-feature, 
customization, and generality of MailMate would attract lots of hacker 
types, if they only new about it… A Facebook page can also do wonders 
these days (people expect it, even).

Are you aware of Scrivener? It is also a home-made piece of software 
that answers to a need most people thought was already solved: word 
processing. But Scrivener has completely taken off. The guy who wrote 
and runs it is very nice and might be responsive to another developer 
asking how he might get a non-competing sourcing campaign off the 
ground…

My 2c.

Zvi
On 21 Oct 2013, at 10:34, Ryan Erwin wrote:

> Benny,
>
> Did you send a notice about the crowd funding opportunity to all of 
> your licensed users? I didn't notice one - I only saw notice through 
> the mailing list.
>
> If you don't want to send an email blast, perhaps you should send a 
> link inside of the MailMate updates. If you get a 5-10% response rate 
> to your offer, your doing pretty good. I also noticed that the crowd 
> funding link you sent in MailMate wasn't a working link. The link in 
> your emails is to http://freron.com/crowdfunding2014 but the valid 
> website link is http://freron.com/crowdfund2014/
>
> I think those of us on this list here are the most invested in seeing 
> MailMate succeed, we care enough about MailMate to get several emails 
> per day about it.
>
> Perhaps we can all work together on some ideas to help Benny promote 
> MailMate, point out the features that will show why every hacker needs 
> a copy of MailMate, and eventually put together a short, sweet, 3 
> minute screencast of what MailMate 2.0 could be, the post it on 
> indiegogo (why not kickstarter?) and try this again.
>
> Personally, I use MailMate more than any other program on my MBA, and 
> I carry it around with me everywhere. I would hate to see this program 
> stagnate, it's already so much better at search than Mail.app, but 
> there is still so much that could be done to make MailMate truly 
> great.
>
> Best,
>
> -Ryan in Shanghai
>
> On 21 Oct 2013, at 20:31, Benny Kjær Nielsen wrote:
>> Dear MailMate users,
>>
>> as many of you have probably seen then I posted a few times on my 
>> blog at the end of last week. First of all, [MailMate 
>> 1.7](http://blog.freron.com/2013/mailmate-1-7-released/) was relased, 
>> but more importantly I posted a personal message entitled 
>> “[Changing 
>> Priorities](http://blog.freron.com/2013/changing-priorities/)”. It 
>> describes how my financial situation changes next year and how that 
>> is very likely to affect my future work on MailMate. In short, you 
>> can thank my wife that MailMate exists at all :-)
>>
>> As part of the blog post I launched a somewhat crude [crowdfunding 
>> page](http://freron.com/crowdfund2014/). I wanted to get a feeling if 
>> this was an option with respect to being able to continue developing 
>> MailMate full time in 2014. I set a deadline November 1st which is a 
>> very short time, but it was also intended to be a quick experiment. 
>> So far, I've received pledges for almost $5000 in total. I'm trilled 
>> that so many quickly showed their support and I've received pledges 
>> ranging from $20 to $200 — and a single pledge of $500!
>>
>> But (unfortunately there is a but) this is only 10% of my unofficial 
>> goal number ($50K) and it's not very likely that I'll get to 100%. 
>> We'll see. In any case, it has inspired me to look into crowdfunding 
>> services such as [http://indiegogo.com](http://indiegogo.com) for 
>> crowd funding development of MailMate 2.0. This could perhaps be a 
>> $25K goal for 6 months of development to make it more likely to be 
>> reached. If I do that then I'll naturally send an email to everyone 
>> who has pledged money and point them in that direction. If you have 
>> any good ideas for “perks” (other than MailMate license keys) 
>> then please send them to me.
>>
>> Note that I have also announced a price change for MailMate. Later 
>> today the price changes to $49.99. See my comments about that in the 
>> [blog post](http://blog.freron.com/2013/changing-priorities/) if you 
>> like.
>>
>> And finally, note that I also posted on the blog about the 
>> configuration of [multiple 
>> identities](http://blog.freron.com/2013/handling-multiple-identities/).
>>
>> Thanks to everyone pledging money (or buying MailMate license keys)! 
>> I know that some of you are probably even worse off financially than 
>> I am and I truly appreciate your support.
>>
>> -- 
>> Benny
>> http://freron.com/crowdfunding2014
>> _______________________________________________
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>> mailmate at lists.freron.com
>> http://lists.freron.com/listinfo/mailmate
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