[MlMt] Crowd Funding 2014

[Ryan Erwin]

I'm definitely with Zvi here. As Ghandi said, "Speed doesn't matter if 
you're not traveling in the right direction". You've got to get the 
marketing side of MailMate figured out.

If you run with the "Hacker's Email Client", perhaps you can capitalize 
on the current NSA inspired anxiety and focus on features that make our 
email more secure. Maybe it's truly SIMPLE (as opposed to always a PITA) 
GPG integration, or your own security mechanism that even protects 
subject lines. The PirateBay guys are working on HEML.is but it's still 
in progress, and seem to be more of a chat program. Personally, I use 
email because I need to search and archive.

Retroactively encrypting all of my old emails on the server and allowing 
search of those encrypted messages without the server knowing my key 
(i.e. encrypted indexing) is sort of an enterprise direction.

Or perhaps you just go the Notational Velocity route of an email program 
that is insanely fast to use without your fingers ever leaving the 
keyboard. Keep the customization coming. Make it the VIM of email.

That's enough from me. Let's see what the rest of your MailMate 
advocates have to say about it.

On 21 Oct 2013, at 22:44, Zvi Biener wrote:
> 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
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> mailmate mailing list
>>> mailmate at lists.freron.com
>>> http://lists.freron.com/listinfo/mailmate
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