Writer, Agilist, Elder Geek
Basically, advertising is hated, in decline, and there’s some pretty questionable stuff going on with ad blocking. Helps sum up a few trends – and some I didn’t see coming. I wouldn’t be counting on advertising for your online projects.
– Steven Savage
Workable apparently dropped their free membership, and their CEO Nikos Moraitakis explains why at Medium in a must-read essay.
Two things stood out for me:
Limiting design choices to things that can scale infinitely at near-zero cost is a recipe for making mediocre products.
He’s got a point. When free is baked into your model you are automatically facing a series of constraints. You can see this in most any model, but when your constraint is “limit what we charge” for that is one freakin’ huge constraint.
When someone tweets “this product sucks” readers can’t tell if this is coming from someone who got the good version of the product or the bad, unsupported one. Oh, and for every paid user you probably have 10 or 100 free ones. They will be louder, by sheer numbers alone.
He’s right. Trust me. Been there. Also he notes people who get “free” are oddly hard to please.
Worth reading. Think I need to interview this guy.
– Steven Savage
We’re no strangers to Kickstarter here. Hell, Rob is writing his own series on the experience (which you should be seriously reading just for the resources). Our friends are using Kickstarter. I interview people using Kickstarter.
There’s also other sources of fundraising. There’s Indiegogo. There’s Rockethub. There’s specialist sites from Gambitious for games to – and I’m serious – Offbeatr for adult (and no, no link sorry).
Even tightwads like me get into the act. I got my Ouya fully knowing it was more of a lab experiment than anything else, but it was worth participating. I’m waiting on several projects to move forward now and really enjoyed being a part of them.