Brainstorming potential improvements to driving Krita Dev Fund participation.

[Emmet O'Neill]

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. *


*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

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*.
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

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.
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.

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!)

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
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