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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