"Be careful with waterfalling rewards (having each category include all previous ones) — We had t-shirts in too many tiers; and they ended up being one of the most expensive rewards"
This was the thing I was worried about. Both in terms of the cost in time, shipping, and materials. That being said, if people really want t-shirts we'll find another, better way to make that happen :D
Doing tshirts seems like a simple way to raise cash or reward people, until you've done tshirts for the first time. Making sure you have a quality product, handling inventory and fulfillment, if you've never managed physical products before, it can be overwhelming, and I've seen that bite people in the ass.
I pre-sold tshirts to fund a music news website about ten years ago. I only sold about 35 shirts, but given that I was in school and working two part time jobs in addition to keeping my site going as a hobby, I found even fulfilling just those 35 shirts to be way more work than I really wanted, and I haven't bothered selling shirts since.
Although after everything was mailed off, I did make enough to cover hosting for pretty decent amount of time.
Could the overwhelming aspects be automated? I can see where you would need to design the initial shirt and verify its quality, but isn't the rest just exporting a portion of your database and giving it to a t-shirt printer that ships? (or maybe they don't do that for you?)
Or is the problem that people are manually doing something that cafepress or zazzle provide might provide?
Does anyone else find it awkward to back a project where the person running the project has never backed another project? I'm stoked about this project, It's just a feeling I've noticed consistently when looking at Kickstarter campaigns.
kickstarters are not the sole way people contribute to projects and communities. ibdknox has created some very popular (in the clojure community anyway) software (noir, korma etc) that a lot of people build on top of. Surely this should count for something.
Oh for sure, I was just curious about people and the platform. It's the only listed metric below a creators name, so if you didn't know who he was, it would be hard to verify. That being said, I've already donated to this.
You shouldn't be downvoted. It's a completely legitimate point to make. Kickstarters from people who don't contribute back is something that happens all the time.
In this particular case this one is from someone who contributes to the community in other ways, but that's certainly not always the case.
I am super excited, I have been doing backend development with rails and been kind of intimidated moving into doing more front-end stuff. I think LT is the answer.
Will it be open source?
I'm a firm believer in open source software and open
source technologies. I can guarantee you that Light Table
will be built on top of the technologies that are freely
available to us today. As such, I believe it only fair
that the core of Light Table be open sourced once it is
launched, while some of the plugins may remained closed
source. At some level, this is an experiment in how open
source and business can mix - it will be educational for
us all.
Yes, but the rewards also mention a license, that will apparently be based on 'pay what you think it's worth'. It all seems very vague to me and I'm not sure how it all will work. Might just be me though.
To me "once it's launched" means it's a cathedral design where no one will see what's going on with the project until some future date.
I'd prefer it if third-party contributions were allowed right away, and I'd be completely fine with only the core developers being paid. I think getting early feedback from users who care enough to contribute would be invaluable here.
Doesn't that just translate into "I believe in Open Source when it's stuff that I can use for free and as long as it doesn't take away from my revenue"? What kind of belief is that?
Open Source Business models have been under debate and development for a while now, making it seem like he needs to "experiment" here shows that he doesn't have much insight into the Ecosystem to begin with.
I really want to back this but $100 is pretty steep for beta access. Even $50 is a little pricey for a tool that I like the goals of, but find it unlikely that I'll use it for a commercial product anytime soon. Any chance you could move around the reward tiers?
Maybe I'm just spoiled from spending $15-$20 on Kickstarter games and getting beta access, but as long as Light Table looks like an awesome toy instead of something I can build commercial software with it's hard to justify dropping $100 on it. That said I'll probably throw in $50.
For developer tools you use every day, I think $100 is a relatively small amount and in line with what a lot of text editors and IDEs charge for (and less than many of them).
For a real product, yes. For a product that doesn't exist yet, may turn to vaporware, may be buggy, may end up poorly designed, may be unusably slow, might not be able to operate as well as described, etc etc, $100 might seem a bit steep.
Perhaps, but part of this is demonstrating the demand for a product of this kind. If Chris reaches the goal for funding, but fails to release a product, hopefully the fact he managed to raise that much cash will indicate to someone else - Microsoft, IntelliJ, Eclipse developers - that there is real money to be made in reinventing the IDE.
I don't see it as chipping in $100 for Lighttable itself (which I do want), I see it as showing there is a very real demand for new thinking in IDE-land.
People spend $2 a day for coffee. Two movie tickets in NYC can cost $30, or more. I think $50 is pretty cheap. Even $100 is not that bad. If it saves you an hour a month, it has already paid for itself. The coffee, well, not really.
It's only 25 days if you can wait until after the beta. :-)
It's only $100 so there's no need to forsake anything. I bought a personal license for IntelliJ IDEA, for example, and I upgrade to every new version. I believe in buying software that makes me more productive.
I find it kind of strange that people in the software business have such a hard time paying for software. I hope this doesn't rub off on the general population.
That's not how you should think about it. A programmer's salary is say 50k. If this IDE makes you 5% more productive, then it is worth paying $200 per MONTH. If anything, this is vastly under-priced.
But this is a beta product. No demo and nothing to base your decision on but a video. $100 is a lot to bet for a v1 tool that you might never wind up using.
And that's the interesting thing about Kickstarter – am I backing it just for the raw value of the product or because I want to see it actually get made? If the latter, am I willing to pay more?
Based on how the software world works, I'm not willing to pay that much money to take a risk on a software project. Failure is way too commonplace. There's lots of software projects many people wanted to see made that were a disaster once actually completed. See for example Duke Nukem Forever
And that's a completely fair point of view. In my case, I want this project to be real badly enough that I'm willing to put some money behind it... but I recognize it for what it is. A work in progress and a hope for a good tool.
I agree. The issue is I have no idea if I'd use this everyday, or just once or twice to try it out. I don't see any company I'd work for adopting, but if I knew it would be anywhere near as useful as some of the free tools I use for side projects (Processing, Flashdevelop, etc.), I wouldn't hesitate to back it for $100. I guess that's the risk Kickstarter and being an early adopter in general.
Looking at the shopping cart [0] it looks like august 2012 for earliest testing, october 2012 for pre-beta and december 2012 for betas. All estimated dates, naturally.
$50 gets you access in May 2013
$100 gets you access in December 2012
$200 gets you access in October 2012
$500 gets you access in August 2012
$1000+ gets you access in May
Ok, I will probably hold off on contributing then. I had alpha access for Sublime Text 2 for $60, and that seems reasonable to me. A $50 400 day pre-order is a little more than I can handle.
So the product will be open source, but you need a license to download it? So its open source, but not "free". Are there any well known licenses that support this?
I take it that it also means that the license will not allow for you to copy / redistribute Light Table? Does it still really qualify as open source then?
Will they allow for contributors to the core of the product and if so, what rights do contributors need to sign away?
In some ways it sounds like the Microsoft "Shared Source" where you are able to view the code for some of their commercial products for debugging purposes but not redistribute it.
One concern is they mention that it will make use of existing open source software; presumably they mean more BSD-style code or LGPL code rather than GPL code since the license they are proposing seems incompatible with the GPL.
Atlassian uses a model similar to what you're describing. If you buy a license, you get access to the source code, but you can't redistribute that source code. I don't know if that can really be considered (as the author refers it) "open source" though...
This is pretty important to me too. $50 isn't much at all for something as important as an editor but I don't think I'd consider switching if it wasn't GPL or MIT (or similar).
But of course it's important that they be able to make money too, I wonder how that could work.
Will pledge my $50 later today, I'll probably never switch from Emacs but I do want to see where this goes! Id make it 100 though if they promised to (properly) open source the core and the language plugins. Maybe that could be one of the things promised if they exceed their funding target?
$200k feels like a pretty random number -- and maybe even a bit high. Draw people into your story and elaborate on where the $200k will go. What kind of a team are you going to put together? A team of 8? A team of 2? Water-front office space? Time share private helicopter?
This is the moment to really create momentum for the project -- if I were in your shoes, I'd spend a bunch of time today really refining the project details on Kickstarter. (Other successful Kickstarter projects might provide some great ideas.)
The point being, that you should lower the goal and the main milestone. Esp. as long as you don't have a team to show... if there's interest it can go up many times over your goal anyway. People would ignore the goals if they can get something compelling from their individual deals.
$200k would be a good start, IMHO. I have developed simpler apps that have cost far more than that. I am guessing this is probably going to be at least 2 years of effort if its just one man, and if a bigger team then he will definitely need the funds, especially to hire quality devs.
I'd like to know too, but I'm not skeptical of the 200k figure. If this is going to work then it's not going to be a solo effort, so let's say one or two more devs and someone to do QA or support or design or whatever and this budget is looking pretty tight.
This is too much. I've never seen an editor that runs well on the 3 of them. If you had said Mac or just Linux, I could believe you. I am really interested, but I am afraid of this becoming vaporware.
Agreed. One reason I use it is BECAUSE it runs the same across all platforms, and is the slickest editor on all of them. I do development in multiple OS/environments daily.
Chiming in that it works wonderfully on Windows, although I had some problems with font rendering being ugly. Maybe it's just that I don't use ClearType, but I had to change some of the font options to get a result I'm happy with.
"font_face": "droid sans mono",
"font_options":
[
"subpixel_antialias"
],
Ah, okay. I was about to say originally that it is entirely cross-platform, then I realized there was some qualitative language in the parent post and wondered if maybe the Windows flavor was just flawed somehow.
Ignoring the usual "vim", "emacs" etc., do try Sublime Text 2, if all you're after is an editor. So far it's proved unfailingly excellent for me :).
FWIW Chris stated in a previous post that Lighttable would be built on embedding CodeMirror, which, being web-based, should make creating cross-platform builds much easier.
So will this be a native app or will it need to be run inside the browser? I'm guessing the prototype was a web app but the final product will be native?
I understood it as a piece of software that runs in a browser, not necessarily a webapp. Could be local code that runs in your average browser, could be a stripped down browser that only runs this app, or it could be a native app that includes a webview as it's main interface.
So I guess we don't quite know yet. Will be interesting to see how he implements it! I just can't see myself using something browser-based as an ide but I suppose if it runs in an embedded "webview" that could be best of both worlds.
I really hope they decide to move away from a browser based solution. I have personally toyed with the idea of making a web based IDE for front-end development, and had came across so many issues in my "experiments" that I decided it wasn't worth it.
Lets talk about editors..
CodeMirror/Ace as an editor.
While both Code Mirror and Ace ( A spin off from Mozilla's Bespin editor ) Have done a very good job, as Marijn Haverbeke ( Code Mirror author ) puts it, of "In-browser code editing made bearable". Neither are smooth / fluid / responsive enough for every/all day coding. If you read
I love the concept, and I'm going to be making a donation either way. I just hope that they move away from the idea of a browser based editor. Before investing a huge amount of time and energy into it, and end up with an inferior product, largely attributed to the platform it's running on.
As a front-end developer, I'm all for making as much as I can browser based / cross platform, and pushing the limits of the browser. But from personal experience the browser isn't the place to be writing the code to do it.
IMO it's a shame they stopped development on Bespin. It felt so smooth and fluid to code on because it used canvas. You totally forgot you were coding in a browser. Ace is great but it just doesn't feel the same eh.
If the guy is so excited about this concept, has he tried prototyping in as an (emacs/vim/eclipse/etc.) plugin? And if not, why? It seems that at least a few of those features could be shown off before he goes asking for $200K.
More details about the money and why you need it, what our donation will accomplish aside from the vague message about how more people get things done faster. How much are you paying yourself? How many other people?
More information about the end product (people are asking about OS for example), the timeline, and you and your qualifications to run the project. I gather you have been programming for a long time and work at Microsoft, but that doesn't prove you'll be able to deliver. For all I know you're a famous hacker, but not knowing that, not knowing if I can use the end product or when I will get it, and not being given a simple, compelling argument (rather than a detailed description of the idea) makes me less interested in participating.
That said I love the idea and really hope you are successful!
I've been programming professionally for 8 years, during which I've built websites large and small (puma.com, newbalance.com, etc), helped design the future of Visual Studio, and released numerous open source libraries and frameworks. While at Microsoft I was the Program Manager for the C# and VB IDE where I spent countless hours behind a one way mirror learning how people develop things. Since then I've steeped myself in the world of startups and OSS. I worked with the guys at ReadyForZero to build readyforzero.com, created the Noir web framework, built the SQL abstraction layer Korma, and released a host of ClojureScript libraries to make client side development a breeze - many of which are now featured in the canonical books for Clojure. Even more recently, I built Bret Victor's live game editor after watching his inspiring "Inventing on Principle" talk. I have a history of building useful software and a hunger for making developers more efficient, as well as experience leading and shaping the the future of a billion dollar project.
FYI I personally found your experience on the MS Visual Studio team the most convincing credential, may I humbly suggest that you lead with that whenever possible.
I'll happily chip in some money, but having read recently about how Star Command's money burnt down (http://www.1up.com/news/star-command-kickstarter-funding-qui...) I suspect you might have shot yourself in the foot a bit by offering the t-shirts at such a cheap rate.
I'm not upset that higher pledge tiers don't include the rewards of previous tiers. This is not always cost effective, especially when you factor in T-shirt production and whatnot. I do believe however that the higher levels should give more value to the backer, where value can be reasonable calculated. Specifically, I take issue with the higher of these two tiers:
> PLEDGE $1,000 OR MORE - 10 licenses of Light Table and acknowledgement as a backer of the project.
> PLEDGE $5,000 OR MORE - 25 licenses of Light Table and acknowledgement as a sponsor of the project.
How can a pledging 5x the amount of the previous tier give you only 2.5x the value?
You get to be a 'sponsor'. That's obviously twice as good as a 'backer'.
Honestly, I have no idea. In the end, these levels are primarily oriented at companies or other groups (education?), not individuals. What's one person going to do with 25 licenses?
Well, you get your logo on the home page for a year, which could be very good advertising if the project becomes big. However, I have no clue how much the advertising would actually be valued for a typical company.
The strength of his past contributions alone is enough to convince me to donate. You can't throw a football in Clojure land without hitting a high-quality contribution of his.
The current pricing structure is discouraging backers, in my opinion. You tell us that when it's released it will most likely be pay-what-you-want, but if we pay early and support the project we are pushed into $50. I can guarantee you that if you do pay-what-you-want, your average isn't going to be $50.
I don't know what percentage of backers are the kind that do it merely to "support" a project, but I would guess it's not more than 10-15% of all backers for a given project.
The rest want some value for their money beyond feeling good about backing. You state you chose $50 for a license because that is what you think it is worth. I think you'll find out that what you think people will pay you for something and what they are willing to pay differs by a factor of 2-3.
So most of the people that want what you are going to make, even a little, probably don't want to spend more than $20 or $25. The difference between that and $50 is made up from goodwill, but that's really asking a lot of people.
I would recommend making some more tiers between $5 and $50, where everything above $20 gets a license. This way you capture the people that just want the product, and give others the ability to show their goodwill as well.
This isn't the kind of project that really needs swag. Nobody really wants a t-shirt. If you do something like promise to list backers (and their associated tiers) in the "credits" of the app, that would probably be great for most people.
Dead horse but, without being able to see upvotes, Chris has no way of knowing if 2 people agree with this or 200. This is a wasted opportunity to help.
For what it's worth, I agree, especially on the t-shirt. I stopped reading after $20 because (a) I sure as heck don't want a tshirt and figured everything else would include it, but that doesn't matter because (b) I have no desire to "invest" more.
For awhile now though, there's been a $15 tier, and currently only 3 backers have chosen that option. Given the cost ineffectiveness of a t-shirt, particularly at a low price like $15, other than Chris' eternal gratitude, what sort of recompense would people want for that level of support? Almost 30 times the number of people went for the $100 beta access level, and only slightly fewer went for the $50 license, so apparently it's popular enough, but what's the best way to get support at a $10 or $15 level?
>but what's the best way to get support at a $10 or $15 level?
That's obvious: Include a full copy of the product at that level. Call it "no support" or something, but if you're going to be doing pay-what-you-want, then go ahead and start now.
He can obviously charge what he wants, but I think my parent was spot on. $50 is too much as the first tier where you actually get something [you want]. This is especially true considering the final product will be pay-what-you-want.
I think playing with support options or possibly upgrade paths ($20 get you free upgrades for 1 year, $50 gets you free upgrades for 2 years or somehting) might be a solution...though I'm not sure myself.
I agree. I was eager to contribute but saw the page and didn't do anything. The rewards just seemed kind of stingy and the target seemed high. It's software, zero replication cost. Everyone who contributes should get a copy, and additional rewards should encourage additional generosity.
$200k is presumptuous, really. If you look at the top-funded technology projects, they all have low goals and excessive results: http://kck.st/J7kUqn
A high goal on Kickstarter /is like a high price/ and seems to trigger similar supporter/customer behavior.
When I saw the Light Table video on HN I flipped out. I want this! But when I saw this campaign something cooled my jets. I'm not sure I'd pay $50 if it was for sale right now. If I'm supporting its creation, and speculating at that, I need a more alluring price and/or a story that makes me forget about all price concerns.
If I were the creator, I'd seriously consider pay-what-you-want.
I would argue few are as ambitious either. To put this into perspective, the VS team is numbered in the thousands. We're talking a small team, but a team nonetheless, and it's hard to imagine being able to keep a team together for a year at less than 200k.
In this case, it's not a matter of presumption, it's a matter of knowing the reality of what is involved in actually building this thing.
If that's what it takes, by all means they should get it. I think the best advice then is to simply make the offer as remarkable as the ambition, so we all get on board.
Edit: I did't mean to suggest the goal is unreasonable or unattainable. I was just trying to explain the not-positive reaction I had to seeing it. Like shopping, not all price reactions are logical.
If it's worth $50, give it to early-adopters/supporters for 50%, because unlike buying something for $50, they don't get it now (and there's many a ways for a project to not deliver). In this promotion phase, it's good to have exciting specials. (e.g. Notch's 50% beta Minecraft) Marginal cost of software is zero, more users = more evangelists etc.
Saying "license" looks non-free. I guess it includes the closed-source plug-ins (?). Good to clarify.
And they doing the opposite of this because they ask for double the price for early access, but currently it's the most popular option with 91 backers.
As of right now the $15 option has 0 backers. There is really no benefit to donate below $30 right now. I don't see why giving everyone beta access would be an issue. It gives some value to the lower tiers. Invite priority could still be from greatest to least but that last tier would see something eventually.
Being able to only pay the difference when buying a licence is another option.
Agreed. $50 for a license it too high. Lowering it to $15 for a license would put it in impulse buy territory for most people, and you'd likely get a lot more backers and receive more money. Personally, I don't know you at all, so I have no reason to trust that you will produce something good, and so I don't want to gamble $50 on it. But, I would gamble $15 on it.
The other software kickstarters I've backed have included a copy of the product for the lowest tier (usually $15), and then added swag like t-shirts at the higher tiers.
Something like this:
$15: Light Table license
$30: Light Table license and included in the list of contributors
$50: Light Table license, included in list of contributors, and early access to beta
$100: Light Table license, included in list of contributors, early access to betas, and t-shirt
Lowering the early access will get you more beta testers, and raising the t-shirt higher will make you have to ship less t-shirts.
That would be absolutely perfect. Plus, let's face it, this won't be a success in the long run if a lot of people aren't using it and there isn't a community behind it. The goal right now needs to build a large user base, not squeeze every last dime you can get in the fundraising portion. This is ultimately supposed to be a platform right? The profits will come from the long tail with upgrades to a large number of users and add-ons like new language support, etc.
According to me tools have practically zero chances of survival without communities rallying behind them.
This looks like such a cool idea. I think their primary concern must be to release a basic thing out first and then iterate over it. This way they will get both contributions and the product going.
Decide what your design goals are, define what code and quality goes in and out of your repo. Build something basic, release it and then iterate. Contributions and donations will follow. But if you are expecting mass adoption for a tool designed primarily for Clojure then, Clojure itself is in low adoption stage now. On top of that people who use clojure wanting to use will be fewer(Emacs + Slime really works well). So the initial payment model with only Clojure support may not bring them much money. This definitely has to be a platform like Emacs. And then the money can come from upgrades, major revisions.
Also it would have been nice if language used to extend this was Clojure itself.
We desperately need some modern GUI candy on an Emacs like editor which can be extensible by Lisp.
Out of curiosity, could you give an example of the software kickstarters you're talking about?
While in an ideal world, things like this could be free, in reality, the amount of time, effort, and people involved to build it in the time frame we're all wanting this means they need money and I'm not sure having rewards for $15 is going to accomplish that. That's the unfortunate reality of what is wanted, and what it takes to actually get there. :\",
I know that a game and IDE are not directly comparable, but they do have some things in common: 0 marginal cost and expensive to implement due to skilled labor requirement.
I couldn't change them even if I wanted to now that money is involved. But I think looking at this as buying something is also inaccurate. Ultimately kickstarter is a way of helping things turn into a reality - not a place to shop. It's basically a form of donation, that just happens to have some reward associated to it.
What data are you basing this off of? Have you ever tried selling products at significantly different prices and measuring revenue/profit? I have-as one example, I've sold the same PDFs at $.99, $9.99, and $49.99. The $.99 and $9.99 price points got about the same revenue, with $9.99 getting much higher profit due to transaction costs. But $49.99 got much, much more revenue and profit than either of the lower-priced options. And I've seen this over and over again, with a variety of products.
What you said is confirmation of my guessing. I'm saying if $50 includes beta (currently only $100 [EDIT: just saw $50 for beta added, thanks for listening to HNers ibdnox! Oh, wait, that access is much later than the $100 price point..]), then the amount he may be getting may be higher than the current amount.
FYI, no data to base off, just guessing, hence the words "think", "would" in my post you're replying to.
Yeah, but it isn't even remotely enough and the majority of what has already been pledged are from the hype wave of HN that will disappear in a day or two. You only get the hype wave once.
Of course it isn't a bad start. But, as others pointed out, the price point is pretty high as it is merely a bet on the product.
I myself would have considered buying/donating, although I wouldn't use the first version (not doing any Javascript or Clojure projects). But I see value in what is planned here and would be willing to bet twenty or even thirty dollars on its success. It would be a bet that the final product, which I basically bought, is good enough that people implement plugins for it that I could use (ruby/php/java/actionscript/etc).
But $50 is a pretty high bet in this case, and I would bet that I am not the only one in the described situation...
Can't you add new tiers at any time? You could make parallel $15, $30, $50 and $100 tiers. Also, nobody has actually paid yet, since the money isn't collected until the end of the period. People can change their amount and reward selection at any time before the backing period ends.
I agree with you in theory that kickstarter isn't a place to shop, but in practice it appears that offering 0 marginal cost rewards (e.g. software, videos, early access, media, etc...) at low tiers is a very successful strategy.
That doesn't mean you shouldn't give actual value to the people that are making this possible for you. People that donate the full license price over a year in advance without even knowing if the end result will be realized should at least get access to the beta. The people that pledged $100 can still get earlier beta access, but not giving any kind of early access at the $50 level is a deal breaker for me, and I know I'm not alone.
That's not a safe assumption to make of Kickstarter. If the intent is really to treat everything as donations then every tier should include "acknowledgment as a backer". As it stands today it's only stated for $1000+ level and that's not really acceptable if you consider everything a form of donation. I saw very little in the description or "rewards" that really treated backers as genuine donations rather than just simple pre-orders (that includes access to betas and/or user testing). It was rather confusing compared to nearly every other project I've contributed to on Kickstarter.
You're right that the tiers can't change much now, but the way it was structured and worded is indeed discouraging. I know I was certainly discouraged as a result, and I'm currently on the fence as to whether to contribute now or wait and see how it turns out. If this project doesn't succeed in making it's goal I would really recommend looking at the more successful software projects in detail and notice how they go out of their way to message and recognize backers in a way that makes them feel like their genuinely contributing, even if only in spirit, and orient their rewards accordingly. Adding buttons, logo stickers, t-shirts, posters, etc. are the kind of things that a community of supporters will desire and from what I've seen so far, go a long way in encouraging larger donations.
edit: removing suggestion to rollup rewards due to their potential for complicating things.
"Ultimately kickstarter is a way of helping things turn into a reality - not a place to shop."
I disagree, I think shopping is exactly what Kickstarter becomes. You can use the platform for a lot of different realities. But, really, I didn't back the pebble watch because I thought the guys were nice, or because I thought the world needed another watch, or another thing to charge at night. I backed it because I like having new shit, I wouldn't of done so if I didn't get something physical from the money. As much as kickstarter is the poormans way to vc projects. VC's want to see something for their money too.
Even if my only reason for backing projects was to see projects become a reality. I'd still be shopping in a way, shopping to find projects I wanted to push into a tangible place. But even at that point, I still think it's the minority.
Donation based projects are more than fine, i'd love to see light table exist. But don't underestimate affordable donations, or fair rewards.
Precisely -- I have argued before that crowdfunding is not an option for a startup or any other commercial activity. But if we see it as selling in advance, than it makes all the sense, and pricing and everything should be set up just as if they were selling an existing product.
However, if Kickstarter doesn't allow changes in pricing once the project is set, it might not be the best option. Why not simply set up a personal pre-selling page, accepting payments via PayPal or any other service?
"if Kickstarter doesn't allow changes in pricing once the project is set, it might not be the best option."
Can not change current reward level's, at least not after they have a purchase. But you can always add more levels. So as much as that does not alleviate the fixed prices, I think if the prices are well thought out, then more reward levels were added based on demand of the market, at that point I think it becomes a pretty successful platform for a startup or commercial activities. Although there are definitely exceptions.
"Why not simply set up a personal pre-selling page, accepting payments via PayPal or any other service?"
Awareness. If I started a new company that sold shoes, set up a seperate page. I would not have the instant credibility or the traffic that kickstarter has. As much as there is a small chance if the market demanded what I had, that I could push it viral without kickstarter. I do believe that the kickstarter platform has proved itself over the last few months. Multiple projects being pushed over the million dollar barrier, projects spanning from pure hardware to pure software. I think there are plenty of cases where kickstarter should be a last option. You're still preselling product, instead of equity, all while gaining awareness/free publicity while not taking very much risk.
On top of that, with not using kickstarter, you're losing not only the traffic, but the impulse buys. At least a lot of them. At the discounted prices, people jump on bandwagons. For instance, if I see something that has taken off, I will in a lot of cases "back" the project, even projects where I didn't think I wanted or needed before logging on to kickstarter.
Kickstarter isn't "supposed" to be an e-commerce site, but that's what the majority of its users seem to be using it as. That's the emergent use case that's become almost a standard for the site.
Regardless of how we might feel about it, pricing needs to accommodate this user behavior. Not the other way around. Expecting users to change how they use Kickstarter is a recipe for sub-optimal subscription, if not failure.
"That's the emergent use case that's become almost a standard for the site."
For the consumer electronics. I'd say it's absolutely about crowdfunding and supporting the creator for artist and artwork projects, which are the majority that I back, as well as many people I know.
You could easily change it if you want to, send out an update and everyone who's contributed will be notified of the changes.
I must admit that I'm having a really hard time justifying donating to this project, if it really will be pay-what-you-want when it's released.
Looking at the kickstarter page, it looks like you're completely missing out on the low tier donations that many other kickstarter projects get the most money from
Textmate is certainly cool. Then again, I've tweaked my Gedit to work like Textmate (and it's Free-as-in-Beer, and I can use it right now).
However, neither do what Light Table does. I'm also certain that there will be plugins for practically every language with a REPL, given enough time and the fact that it's open source.
You've hit the nail on the head. I'll back for $15, but not for $50.
Kickstarters are a bet: I expect 50% of them to succeed, so I have to be able to extract double the backing value per project for it to be worth backing.
I'm obviously not the only one, which is why the $15 price point is so effective..
I think its always hard for software kickstarters to offer anything interesting besides the actual product. As you've said, in this case, even merchandise doesn't really make sense.
The only tier, apart from a 15$ software tier(as its been standard), that would make sense to me personally(and financially) would be an option to vote on what language he creates support for first(after he's done with the initial Clojure version).
I don't mind paying for the software. If it ends up being as cool as it looks, I'll happily part with the cash.
But I would love the promise of open source and not open core. Especially since the current description is so vague.
"some of the plugins may remained [sic] closed source"
What kinds of plugins? Every supported language is a plugin -- will Python or Ruby end up closed? Or the inline HTML rendering?
If Chris promised a true commitment to keeping this open, I'd promise to pay up. With Kickstarter, I could even prove it.
How about a KS reward that would give me the access to all everything Light Table related that the team builds?
Also note that even GPL allows you to sell the software and sell the code separately. Ditto for other licenses. I'd pay for the code. Not sure how viable that actually is, but it's something to consider.
Lastly, how's the development going to look like? Are the open source parts going to be done in the open (as most successful open source projects do) or will it be Android-like code dump on the release date?
I think the $50 mark to get a license is a little steep.
Besides that, the video quality on the Kickstart home page is quite bad; I tried to see what was going on so I put it in full-screen mode and couldn't read anything properly.
The main thing holding me back is the supported languages. I don't use Clojure and I'm not a big enough Javascript fan. Suggestion: Add more languages if you reach enough backing
I don't use JS much or Clojure at all. If I were the developer, I would look at adding the top used languages post haste: C/C++, Java, Python, Perl, etc.
It seems like it might be particularly well suited for HTML5/CSS3 development as well, since it runs in a browser, and that would be great to have.
libclang could help a lot here, as it gives access to the internals of a C/C++ compiler all the way from tokenizing to code generation. It also has built-in support for all kinds of IDE features such as code completion and fixit hints.
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[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 253 ms ] threadSee http://zefrank.tumblr.com/post/20122841731/kickstarter-post-...
"Be careful with waterfalling rewards (having each category include all previous ones) — We had t-shirts in too many tiers; and they ended up being one of the most expensive rewards"
I pre-sold tshirts to fund a music news website about ten years ago. I only sold about 35 shirts, but given that I was in school and working two part time jobs in addition to keeping my site going as a hobby, I found even fulfilling just those 35 shirts to be way more work than I really wanted, and I haven't bothered selling shirts since.
Although after everything was mailed off, I did make enough to cover hosting for pretty decent amount of time.
Or is the problem that people are manually doing something that cafepress or zazzle provide might provide?
It's not terrible, but it's nowhere near as efficient as selling digital goods.
In this particular case this one is from someone who contributes to the community in other ways, but that's certainly not always the case.
I'd prefer it if third-party contributions were allowed right away, and I'd be completely fine with only the core developers being paid. I think getting early feedback from users who care enough to contribute would be invaluable here.
Open Source Business models have been under debate and development for a while now, making it seem like he needs to "experiment" here shows that he doesn't have much insight into the Ecosystem to begin with.
Just answer yes or no, thats how simple it should be.
Basically, what he is saying is "It's not going to be open source or free software." but in a way that makes it sound less bad.
Maybe I'm just spoiled from spending $15-$20 on Kickstarter games and getting beta access, but as long as Light Table looks like an awesome toy instead of something I can build commercial software with it's hard to justify dropping $100 on it. That said I'll probably throw in $50.
I don't see it as chipping in $100 for Lighttable itself (which I do want), I see it as showing there is a very real demand for new thinking in IDE-land.
It's only $100 so there's no need to forsake anything. I bought a personal license for IntelliJ IDEA, for example, and I upgrade to every new version. I believe in buying software that makes me more productive.
I find it kind of strange that people in the software business have such a hard time paying for software. I hope this doesn't rub off on the general population.
In this case, personally, I am.
0: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/306316578/light-table/pl...
$50 gets you access in May 2013 $100 gets you access in December 2012 $200 gets you access in October 2012 $500 gets you access in August 2012 $1000+ gets you access in May
I take it that it also means that the license will not allow for you to copy / redistribute Light Table? Does it still really qualify as open source then?
Will they allow for contributors to the core of the product and if so, what rights do contributors need to sign away?
That said, I think its an awesome project!
One concern is they mention that it will make use of existing open source software; presumably they mean more BSD-style code or LGPL code rather than GPL code since the license they are proposing seems incompatible with the GPL.
But of course it's important that they be able to make money too, I wonder how that could work.
Will pledge my $50 later today, I'll probably never switch from Emacs but I do want to see where this goes! Id make it 100 though if they promised to (properly) open source the core and the language plugins. Maybe that could be one of the things promised if they exceed their funding target?
This is the moment to really create momentum for the project -- if I were in your shoes, I'd spend a bunch of time today really refining the project details on Kickstarter. (Other successful Kickstarter projects might provide some great ideas.)
I say this to help your efforts – more specifics mean more likely support, imho.
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1613260297/shadowrun-ret...
The point being, that you should lower the goal and the main milestone. Esp. as long as you don't have a team to show... if there's interest it can go up many times over your goal anyway. People would ignore the goals if they can get something compelling from their individual deals.
I would back it up for Linux, for example, but a Windows version wouldn't be useful for me.
"font_face": "droid sans mono", "font_options": [ "subpixel_antialias" ],
Thanks!
FWIW Chris stated in a previous post that Lighttable would be built on embedding CodeMirror, which, being web-based, should make creating cross-platform builds much easier.
https://github.com/JulianEberius/SublimeRope
Lets talk about editors..
CodeMirror/Ace as an editor.
While both Code Mirror and Ace ( A spin off from Mozilla's Bespin editor ) Have done a very good job, as Marijn Haverbeke ( Code Mirror author ) puts it, of "In-browser code editing made bearable". Neither are smooth / fluid / responsive enough for every/all day coding. If you read
http://codemirror.net/doc/internals.html
You will get a good sense of why the browser is a very harsh environment for a code editor to adapt to.
Alternatively you can have a play with any one of the tools, that use Code Mirror and Ace.
Try to use them for an extended period of time and you will see what I mean.
I love the concept, and I'm going to be making a donation either way. I just hope that they move away from the idea of a browser based editor. Before investing a huge amount of time and energy into it, and end up with an inferior product, largely attributed to the platform it's running on.As a front-end developer, I'm all for making as much as I can browser based / cross platform, and pushing the limits of the browser. But from personal experience the browser isn't the place to be writing the code to do it.
More details about the money and why you need it, what our donation will accomplish aside from the vague message about how more people get things done faster. How much are you paying yourself? How many other people?
More information about the end product (people are asking about OS for example), the timeline, and you and your qualifications to run the project. I gather you have been programming for a long time and work at Microsoft, but that doesn't prove you'll be able to deliver. For all I know you're a famous hacker, but not knowing that, not knowing if I can use the end product or when I will get it, and not being given a simple, compelling argument (rather than a detailed description of the idea) makes me less interested in participating.
That said I love the idea and really hope you are successful!
And why should we believe you can deliver?
I've been programming professionally for 8 years, during which I've built websites large and small (puma.com, newbalance.com, etc), helped design the future of Visual Studio, and released numerous open source libraries and frameworks. While at Microsoft I was the Program Manager for the C# and VB IDE where I spent countless hours behind a one way mirror learning how people develop things. Since then I've steeped myself in the world of startups and OSS. I worked with the guys at ReadyForZero to build readyforzero.com, created the Noir web framework, built the SQL abstraction layer Korma, and released a host of ClojureScript libraries to make client side development a breeze - many of which are now featured in the canonical books for Clojure. Even more recently, I built Bret Victor's live game editor after watching his inspiring "Inventing on Principle" talk. I have a history of building useful software and a hunger for making developers more efficient, as well as experience leading and shaping the the future of a billion dollar project.
PS. Good luck.
Either way, I've put some cash in the pot :).
> PLEDGE $1,000 OR MORE - 10 licenses of Light Table and acknowledgement as a backer of the project.
> PLEDGE $5,000 OR MORE - 25 licenses of Light Table and acknowledgement as a sponsor of the project.
How can a pledging 5x the amount of the previous tier give you only 2.5x the value?
Honestly, I have no idea. In the end, these levels are primarily oriented at companies or other groups (education?), not individuals. What's one person going to do with 25 licenses?
I don't know what percentage of backers are the kind that do it merely to "support" a project, but I would guess it's not more than 10-15% of all backers for a given project.
The rest want some value for their money beyond feeling good about backing. You state you chose $50 for a license because that is what you think it is worth. I think you'll find out that what you think people will pay you for something and what they are willing to pay differs by a factor of 2-3.
So most of the people that want what you are going to make, even a little, probably don't want to spend more than $20 or $25. The difference between that and $50 is made up from goodwill, but that's really asking a lot of people.
I would recommend making some more tiers between $5 and $50, where everything above $20 gets a license. This way you capture the people that just want the product, and give others the ability to show their goodwill as well.
This isn't the kind of project that really needs swag. Nobody really wants a t-shirt. If you do something like promise to list backers (and their associated tiers) in the "credits" of the app, that would probably be great for most people.
edit: typos, and wording
For what it's worth, I agree, especially on the t-shirt. I stopped reading after $20 because (a) I sure as heck don't want a tshirt and figured everything else would include it, but that doesn't matter because (b) I have no desire to "invest" more.
That's obvious: Include a full copy of the product at that level. Call it "no support" or something, but if you're going to be doing pay-what-you-want, then go ahead and start now.
I think playing with support options or possibly upgrade paths ($20 get you free upgrades for 1 year, $50 gets you free upgrades for 2 years or somehting) might be a solution...though I'm not sure myself.
A high goal on Kickstarter /is like a high price/ and seems to trigger similar supporter/customer behavior.
When I saw the Light Table video on HN I flipped out. I want this! But when I saw this campaign something cooled my jets. I'm not sure I'd pay $50 if it was for sale right now. If I'm supporting its creation, and speculating at that, I need a more alluring price and/or a story that makes me forget about all price concerns.
If I were the creator, I'd seriously consider pay-what-you-want.
In this case, it's not a matter of presumption, it's a matter of knowing the reality of what is involved in actually building this thing.
Edit: I did't mean to suggest the goal is unreasonable or unattainable. I was just trying to explain the not-positive reaction I had to seeing it. Like shopping, not all price reactions are logical.
Saying "license" looks non-free. I guess it includes the closed-source plug-ins (?). Good to clarify.
Being able to only pay the difference when buying a licence is another option.
The other software kickstarters I've backed have included a copy of the product for the lowest tier (usually $15), and then added swag like t-shirts at the higher tiers.
Something like this:
$15: Light Table license
$30: Light Table license and included in the list of contributors
$50: Light Table license, included in list of contributors, and early access to beta
$100: Light Table license, included in list of contributors, early access to betas, and t-shirt
Lowering the early access will get you more beta testers, and raising the t-shirt higher will make you have to ship less t-shirts.
This looks like such a cool idea. I think their primary concern must be to release a basic thing out first and then iterate over it. This way they will get both contributions and the product going.
Decide what your design goals are, define what code and quality goes in and out of your repo. Build something basic, release it and then iterate. Contributions and donations will follow. But if you are expecting mass adoption for a tool designed primarily for Clojure then, Clojure itself is in low adoption stage now. On top of that people who use clojure wanting to use will be fewer(Emacs + Slime really works well). So the initial payment model with only Clojure support may not bring them much money. This definitely has to be a platform like Emacs. And then the money can come from upgrades, major revisions.
Also it would have been nice if language used to extend this was Clojure itself.
We desperately need some modern GUI candy on an Emacs like editor which can be extensible by Lisp.
While in an ideal world, things like this could be free, in reality, the amount of time, effort, and people involved to build it in the time frame we're all wanting this means they need money and I'm not sure having rewards for $15 is going to accomplish that. That's the unfortunate reality of what is wanted, and what it takes to actually get there. :\",
I know that a game and IDE are not directly comparable, but they do have some things in common: 0 marginal cost and expensive to implement due to skilled labor requirement.
FYI, no data to base off, just guessing, hence the words "think", "would" in my post you're replying to.
I myself would have considered buying/donating, although I wouldn't use the first version (not doing any Javascript or Clojure projects). But I see value in what is planned here and would be willing to bet twenty or even thirty dollars on its success. It would be a bet that the final product, which I basically bought, is good enough that people implement plugins for it that I could use (ruby/php/java/actionscript/etc).
But $50 is a pretty high bet in this case, and I would bet that I am not the only one in the described situation...
I agree with you in theory that kickstarter isn't a place to shop, but in practice it appears that offering 0 marginal cost rewards (e.g. software, videos, early access, media, etc...) at low tiers is a very successful strategy.
You're right that the tiers can't change much now, but the way it was structured and worded is indeed discouraging. I know I was certainly discouraged as a result, and I'm currently on the fence as to whether to contribute now or wait and see how it turns out. If this project doesn't succeed in making it's goal I would really recommend looking at the more successful software projects in detail and notice how they go out of their way to message and recognize backers in a way that makes them feel like their genuinely contributing, even if only in spirit, and orient their rewards accordingly. Adding buttons, logo stickers, t-shirts, posters, etc. are the kind of things that a community of supporters will desire and from what I've seen so far, go a long way in encouraging larger donations.
edit: removing suggestion to rollup rewards due to their potential for complicating things.
I disagree, I think shopping is exactly what Kickstarter becomes. You can use the platform for a lot of different realities. But, really, I didn't back the pebble watch because I thought the guys were nice, or because I thought the world needed another watch, or another thing to charge at night. I backed it because I like having new shit, I wouldn't of done so if I didn't get something physical from the money. As much as kickstarter is the poormans way to vc projects. VC's want to see something for their money too.
Even if my only reason for backing projects was to see projects become a reality. I'd still be shopping in a way, shopping to find projects I wanted to push into a tangible place. But even at that point, I still think it's the minority.
Donation based projects are more than fine, i'd love to see light table exist. But don't underestimate affordable donations, or fair rewards.
However, if Kickstarter doesn't allow changes in pricing once the project is set, it might not be the best option. Why not simply set up a personal pre-selling page, accepting payments via PayPal or any other service?
Can not change current reward level's, at least not after they have a purchase. But you can always add more levels. So as much as that does not alleviate the fixed prices, I think if the prices are well thought out, then more reward levels were added based on demand of the market, at that point I think it becomes a pretty successful platform for a startup or commercial activities. Although there are definitely exceptions.
"Why not simply set up a personal pre-selling page, accepting payments via PayPal or any other service?"
Awareness. If I started a new company that sold shoes, set up a seperate page. I would not have the instant credibility or the traffic that kickstarter has. As much as there is a small chance if the market demanded what I had, that I could push it viral without kickstarter. I do believe that the kickstarter platform has proved itself over the last few months. Multiple projects being pushed over the million dollar barrier, projects spanning from pure hardware to pure software. I think there are plenty of cases where kickstarter should be a last option. You're still preselling product, instead of equity, all while gaining awareness/free publicity while not taking very much risk.
On top of that, with not using kickstarter, you're losing not only the traffic, but the impulse buys. At least a lot of them. At the discounted prices, people jump on bandwagons. For instance, if I see something that has taken off, I will in a lot of cases "back" the project, even projects where I didn't think I wanted or needed before logging on to kickstarter.
Kickstarter isn't "supposed" to be an e-commerce site, but that's what the majority of its users seem to be using it as. That's the emergent use case that's become almost a standard for the site.
Regardless of how we might feel about it, pricing needs to accommodate this user behavior. Not the other way around. Expecting users to change how they use Kickstarter is a recipe for sub-optimal subscription, if not failure.
For the consumer electronics. I'd say it's absolutely about crowdfunding and supporting the creator for artist and artwork projects, which are the majority that I back, as well as many people I know.
I must admit that I'm having a really hard time justifying donating to this project, if it really will be pay-what-you-want when it's released.
Looking at the kickstarter page, it looks like you're completely missing out on the low tier donations that many other kickstarter projects get the most money from
"Kickstarter isn’t charity: we champion exchanges that are a mix of commerce and patronage, and the numbers bear this out."
However, neither do what Light Table does. I'm also certain that there will be plugins for practically every language with a REPL, given enough time and the fact that it's open source.
Kickstarters are a bet: I expect 50% of them to succeed, so I have to be able to extract double the backing value per project for it to be worth backing.
I'm obviously not the only one, which is why the $15 price point is so effective..
The only tier, apart from a 15$ software tier(as its been standard), that would make sense to me personally(and financially) would be an option to vote on what language he creates support for first(after he's done with the initial Clojure version).
Then I would be excited to donate :)
But I would love the promise of open source and not open core. Especially since the current description is so vague.
"some of the plugins may remained [sic] closed source"
What kinds of plugins? Every supported language is a plugin -- will Python or Ruby end up closed? Or the inline HTML rendering?
If Chris promised a true commitment to keeping this open, I'd promise to pay up. With Kickstarter, I could even prove it.
How about a KS reward that would give me the access to all everything Light Table related that the team builds?
Also note that even GPL allows you to sell the software and sell the code separately. Ditto for other licenses. I'd pay for the code. Not sure how viable that actually is, but it's something to consider.
Lastly, how's the development going to look like? Are the open source parts going to be done in the open (as most successful open source projects do) or will it be Android-like code dump on the release date?
Besides that, the video quality on the Kickstart home page is quite bad; I tried to see what was going on so I put it in full-screen mode and couldn't read anything properly.
$200k: JS and Clojure
$250k: JS, Clojure and C
$300k: JS, Clojure, C and ...
It seems like it might be particularly well suited for HTML5/CSS3 development as well, since it runs in a browser, and that would be great to have.
(And with a great plugin system).