Brainstorming potential improvements to driving Krita Dev Fund participation.

[Halla Rempt]

On woensdag 11 oktober 2023 03:55:16 CEST Emmet O'Neill wrote:
> Hey all. Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been brainstorming some
> actionable ideas to hopefully improve our development fund
> <https://fund.krita.org/>:
> Adjust the funding tiers down
> 
> So far we’ve based our pricing tiers roughly off what Blender has used
> <https://fund.blender.org/>, but I think our goal should be to maximize
> community engagement and bring more people into the fund.
> 
> Out of the huge number of people who use Krita, as of writing this we have
> a grand total of *1 diamond *member*, 2 titanium *members*, 3 platinum *
> members*, and 25 gold *members*.*
> 
> To me this says that our tiers are skewed too high, and may be excluding
> some artists or hobbyists who feel that they just can’t afford to chip in
> at the same level as people who use Blender, Godot
> <https://fund.godotengine.org/>, etc.
> 
> My rough suggestions for new membership tiers:
> 
>    - Micro (“Candy Bar”) - €2.50/mo (€0.10/day) : No extra perks for this
>    tier, just our sincere gratitude! (If payment processing costs are an issue
>    we only allow this to be charged in yearly increments.)
>    - Bronze (“Latte”) - €5/mo (€0.16/day) : The same as our current bronze
>    tier.
>    - Silver (“Margarita”) - €8/mo (€0.26/day)
>    - Gold (“Netflix Subscription”) - €13/mo (€0.43/day)
>    - Platinum (“Photoshop Subscription”) - €22/mo (€0.72/day)
>    - Titanium (“Pizza Dinner”) - €36/mo (€1.18/day)
>    - Diamond (“Video Game”) - €60/mo (€1.97/day)
> 
> Other than Micro, *each tier would be ~60% value of the next tier. *
> 

I think this is a good idea, we should give this a try.


> 
> *Important note: Under the new pricing tiers, existing fund members should
> be automatically upgraded to whichever tier is now appropriate for their
> current contribution. Hopefully people will be happy to be bumped up to a
> higher tier, and we'll be seeing a lot more names on our dev fund page!*
> Set a progressive array of obtainable milestones

Yes -- but this will probably be a lot of manual work. I am not sure how the system works, actually...

> 
> The final goal of Krita’s dev fund may be to sustainably support a team of
> 8-10 standard-rate full-time developers, but we’re obviously pretty far
> from that. This is kind of a hunch and a bit counter-intuitive, but I think
> people are more likely to contribute the closer we are to our next goal.
> 
> So, instead of focusing on Krita’s final goal, I think we should create a
> series of goals that are always within arm’s reach. As a rough example,
> I’ll take the current number of monthly dev fund income that we have and
> create future milestones so that it always seems that we are more than half
> way towards the next goal:
> 
> (Revised goals based on our current dev fund income: ~€5000)
> 
>    - Goal #1 — €7000 (hey, we’re already 71% of the way there!)
>    - Goal #2 — €10000 (by the time we hit goal 1, we’ll be 70% of the way
>    to goal 2!)
>    - Goal #3 — €14000 (by the time we hit goal 2, we’ll be 71% of the way
>    to goal 3!)
>    - Goal #4 — €20000 (by the time we hit goal 3, we’ll be 70% of the way
>    to goal 4!)
> 
> And so on... With the *next goal always being 1.4x the previous one*, or
> something like that, so that it always feels like we’re *on the verge of
> hitting our next goal*.

That's a simple matter of editing the front page, though again, I'm not actually sure how to do that... When I wanted to add Intel as corporate sponsor I also failed.


> Planning a rough Krita roadmap
> 
> For various reasons, Krita has shied away from creating development
> roadmaps in the past.
> 
> However, I think that not only are general plans a good practice for
> development and setting our own longer-term goals, but in light of
> fundraising, it’s important to convey to users what the future of Krita
> could be given the proper development resources. Doing this might also make
> people more excited about the future of Krita!
> 
> We shouldn’t be afraid of building a realistic and honest roadmap about
> what we want/intend to do, and we should treat it as a thing we do not only
> for ourselves, but also in the name of transparency and a courtesy to the
> people who are giving the project money.
> 
> (In my view, this doesn’t necessarily have to be super flashy or include
> precise timelines, and could be something as simple as a spreadsheet or
> kanban board of concise mid/long term project goals.)
> A “dev fund first” approach to fundraising

We're probably going to need a meeting like in 2022 about this: we did come up with kind of a roadmap from that meeting, but only parts got implemented, and we sucked at communicating the plans.

> 
> Obviously we appreciate anybody who contributes to Krita’s development in
> whatever way that they can, but the best path towards long-term,
> sustainable development is stable and diverse dev fund membership. As such,
> our #1 fundraising goal should always be to turn our community of artists
> into dev fund members.
> 
> As mentioned above, we first need to make dev fund membership affordable,
> convenient and accessible to our community of artists. Then we need to make
> sure that our users understand that joining the dev fund is the absolute
> best way to support Krita development. And finally we need to take every
> ethical step within reason to remind our community of our dev fund’s
> existence/importance.
> 
> And, I get it… None of us are into “marketing” nor do we want to sound like
> a broken record.

I sometimes have the feeling that I have to shoulder all this marketing stuff, and managing the dev fund and talking to corporate sponsors and things. I really need help with managing the fund.krita.org website at least!

> But, if we don’t take every reasonable opportunity to remind people of the
> best way to support Krita’s development, nobody will.
> 
> *(Quick aside: nicolas17 on IRC brought up the idea of showing dev fund
> progress in a small format on the front page of Krita.org, and something
> like that would be a good idea. I’ll add that our post-download page should
> ideally do something similar.)*
> Add cute tier-equivalent illustrations and daily cost equivalent info.

I would like that, but I'm not sure how to do that. Maybe Scott knows?

> 
> This is a small thing, but I’m kind of into it…
> 
> You’ve probably noticed that I’ve added little labels like “candy bar”,
> “latte”, and “Photoshop subscription”, to each of the membership tiers
> above. The idea there is to create a *monthly cost equivalent* to each
> membership tier, so that people can see at a glance that “for the price of
> a LATTE per month, you can become a BRONZE Krita member” or “for the price
> of NETFLIX per month, you can become a GOLD Krita member”. (If anyone has
> alternative suggestions for monthly equivalents, let me know!)

I'd avoid mentioning photoshop -- it's basically telling people "if you support Krita at this level, you might as well buy photoshop."

> 
> And for each of these tiers we could have a small illustration of Kiki
> drinking a latte, or watching a movie, or whatever. Giving our dev fund a
> bit of that Krita charm, fun and artistic flair. :)
> 
> Similarly, it might also be nice to have (in smaller/lighter print)
> something like a *daily cost equivalent* for each tier. Showing the user
> that being a silver-tier member only amounts to something like *€0.26 per
> day*, for example.
> 
> Obviously our dev fund layout would have to change a bit to allow for this,
> and we would avoid using any trademarks or direct references, but the point
> would be to show potential members that supporting Krita can be relatively
> affordable compared to all of the regular daily things that we sometimes
> buy on a whim.
> Probably not enough corporate users to expect many corporate sponsors
> 
> A lot of FOSS projects are used heavily in the corporate world, including
> tools like Blender and Godot and their growing use in professional studios.
> Krita just isn’t there yet, and though it’s probably worthwhile to seek out
> any potential corporate dev fund sponsors that we can, we shouldn’t try to
> rely on corporate sponsors for sustainable development.
> 
> Without knowing the details of our previous corporate sponsorships it’s
> hard to know exactly what to recommend here, but aside from making our fund
> more accessible to artists, we might want to come up with a separate plan
> for increasing studio/corporate Krita use/investment. That’s another big
> topic entirely though…
> 
> ------------------------------
> 
> 
> Anyway, I really wanted to keep this short but I’ve blown it. Please take
> some time to read these ideas and let me know what you think.
> 
> I don't think we're anywhere close to maxing out the potential for dev fund
> membership, but we might need to put even more effort and creativity into
> bringing our community of artists into the fold.
> 
> (Especially since doing so will make Krita's development model more
> sustainable, less reliant on app stores and unpredictable one-off
> contributions, and better for everyone involved.)
> 
> Emmet
>