Fundraising and the Development Fund.

[Emmet O'Neill]

Hey all.

Unfortunately Eoin and I had a conflict with today's rescheduled meeting,
but after discussing the funding situation for a while today I wanted to
share some of our thoughts and opinions on the topics of fundraising and
the development fund.

*1. While I'm not against adjusting store prices, it is not guaranteed to
have a positive effect on revenue.*

Given that Krita has had the same, relatively low price on stores for
years, and also taking the effects of inflation into consideration,
it can certainly be argued that Krita is overdue for a price adjustment. I
agree that it is probably worth more than we are asking for.

However, it's really important that we don't rely on the flawed assumption
that revenue will scale proportionally with price.

What we take in from stores has everything to do with what people are
willing to spend on a "product" that we also distribute for free.
In other words, we are competing with ourselves, and our model of success
on platforms like Steam relies almost entirely on users
being willing to support us by giving us cash for something that the
majority of them know that they can get for free from our website.
Changing the price obviously changes that math in unpredictable ways that
highly depends on the feelings of our users.

Whether we adjust Krita's price, and to what degree, should be based only
on what we feel that having it on a given store is worth,
not because we think it'll be a quick way to raise funds!


*2. We've failed to create compelling incentives for Dev Fund members.*

In a perfect world people would just chip in to fund non-profits, open
projects and public resources, but that's not really working for us.
This is clearly not a "if you build it, they will come" kind of deal, so we
have to get creative and come up with more meaningful incentives for
development fund members.

Right now, the only incentives we offer are (a) a badge that only works on
MyKDE-powered sites, and (b) gold+ members having their name optionally
appear on the dev fund itself.
We have zero integration or other incentives within Krita itself, nor do we
have anything cool for members of our most active community, KA.
We don't have yearly stickers or key chains or anything fun or cute that we
can award to members of certain higher levels either (factoring in the
cost, of course).

We're creative people, so we have to apply that creativity to coming up
with better incentives.
We also need to work with KDE to figure out how we can allow users to opt
in to limited data-sharing with Krita and KA to that end.

*3. Bringing Krita to Android for free probably isn't consistent with our
goals.*

It doesn't make a lot of sense for the Android platform (potentially our
biggest platform in the future) to live off subsidies from desktop revenue.
We should remember that FOSS doesn't mean free of charge, and if we are
going to charge users on PC stores for the convenience of getting Krita
through a store,
then it only makes sense to do the same for Android, especially considering
the resources that we're using to make it happen.

Bottom line: we are spending money to make Krita on Android a thing, and so
it needs to bring in some revenue or it will just be a drain on our very
limited resources.

*4. We need to constantly remind people about our development and funding
model in our public messaging.*

Our rivals have marketing teams, advertising budgets, and well-understood
business models. We don't.

It's important that the messages that we put out reinforce our users'
understanding of how Krita works and how their relationship to Krita is
different than most of the other software that they use.
We need to get people involved in the development process and conversations
around Krita, even if they aren't necessarily technical.
We need to get people emotionally invested in the success of Krita and help
them to understand that Krita is an asset to the art community at large.
And of course, we need to take every opportunity to plug our development
fund, and to show users how their support translates to a better tool for
everyone.

None of us are in the business of marketing, and I don't think any of us
really want to be.
But we need to have a clear and *consistent* message to our users about
what makes Krita different, why they want to support us, and how they can
best do that.

-----

Anyway, we have some other thoughts, but I know nobody wants to read a wall
of text so I'll leave it there.
Please let us know what you think.
Emmet and Eoin.
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