Howard: I'm very interested in seeing Tapestry succeed; I've made a significant design commitment to it, and I'd like to see it work.
I offer the following recommendations that I feel may help you accomplish these two financial and product-strategy objectives: a) Increased revenue that doesn't require constant-input labor hours from you, and b) Better educational tools about Tapestry which can significantly influence acceptance / design-win rate The big problem I encountered using Tapestry was the long learning curve. It's a very powerful toolset, and it takes a while to understand both its philosophy of operation and the identity/function of the components. I suggest: a. Build a website that enables your many contributors to build documentation components. Let your community "write the book" about Tapestry. b. You edit it for accuracy and completeness. c. Have the website be a subscriber website. $20/year to subscribe d. Divide the subscription revenue 20% to you, 80% to the contributors. e. You decide which documentation components get included in your "book". The contributors contribute, and you select. The project that makes this collaborative documentation facility would (potentially) be in high demand from other open-source projects - many of which face the same set of hurdles you do. You already have several contributors that can write the "outline" or super-structure of the documentation. Use that as the "what we need" bill of materials. Each documentation element would get a unique section number, and knowledgeable Tapestry practitioners could sign up to write one or more sections. Each section would have a (published) "percent of proceeds" number associated with it, so people would know in advance what share of the annual revenue they'll get if they write it. The content could also be submitted to a print-on-demand publisher for those that like hard-copy. My guess is that you'd sell about 500 copies the first year of production. That's only $10K in gross revenue, but that's in the first year. Each year you'll sell more subscriptions, and the incremental effort to maintain the documentation would fall appreciably. After year 3, it may be $20-30K in annual revenue, and the workload would be a small fraction of the year-1 effort. That's enough detail at this point of the discussion. If this idea is of interest, not just to Howard but also to the other Tapestry stakeholders, let me know and we can discuss it further offline. -- View this message in context: http://old.nabble.com/-Tapestry-Central--March-of-Progress-tp27692591p27708826.html Sent from the Tapestry - User mailing list archive at Nabble.com. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: users-unsubscr...@tapestry.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: users-h...@tapestry.apache.org
