The State of thirty bees

[lesley]

This topic is linked to our blog post from here, https://thirtybees.com/blog/the-state-of-thirty-bees/

Join in, lets talk about how we can make thirty bees better for all merchants!

[SLiCK_303]

Thanks for the update, and your time, and all you do for this project.....

[lesley]

No problem. I want it to succeed. The project is not about money to us, it is about creating something better.

[Chandra]

@lesley Thanks for an open and direct message that inspires a lot of confidence in the team and the project. Clearly something needs to be done to make the finances better. Please continue with the great intentions you started the project with, and build a mechanism for the community to provide opinion and support.

Best wishes to all of us.

[nickon]

@lesley from previous post you should have getting an idea to where the community sees the "problems" and what needs to be done. I will be waiting for your input

[Beeta]

Mailchimp Account costs $1220

Evaluate Sendy.co as an alternative to Mailchimp! What costs 1220$ with Mailchimp can costs 12$ with Sendy.co

So you can save money and with some hours "earned" from the 1129$ saved (Lifetime sendy.co license costs 59$), develop a module to sync Sendy.co with TB => more $$ saved from TB merchants = a little more donations to the TB cause!

[nickon]

@lesley @FooLab or mautic (www.mautic.org)

[lesley]

@FooLab The features just are not there. We use Mailchimp to segment our lists ect. If we switch to sendy, we have to buy it, maintain it, and pay for the sends. Then we have to spend more time designing each email as well. A lot more time. Time is not something we have an excess of.

Also we use mailchimp to deliver all of the forum emails as well. Our server could not handle that much email.

[lesley]

@nickon I read through them, unfortunately for most of them we do not have the money nor the labor to correct / change / do a lot of them.

[nickon]

@lesley don't know about forum post. and mautic has it's quircks but for us it works pretty well we use it in our shops + amazon SES

[lesley]

@nickon it is a time and overhead issue. We don't have the time to maintain another software package.

[Beeta]

Sendy con segment too and can be integrated with Zapier too. I don't think that you need so much email design right know a good mail template is enough. With sendy once you have a good and simple responsive template you don't need to design every send... and maybe someone from the community can stand up and help you with that.

About maintain Sendy.co I don't think that is too much trouble as is not even near to be a mail server... paying 12$ instead of 1200$ is a big deal! :D

@lesley said in The State of thirty bees:

Also we use mailchimp to deliver all of the forum emails as well. Our server could not handle that much email.

With Mandrill, right? About forum email notification you can use something like the Sparkpost. You can configure it as SMTP and is a lot cheaper if not free. First 15K mail every month are free (I happily use it in some forum I admin). If needed the sparkposts paid account costs only 9$ for 50K sends. Mandrill costs 20$ every 25K sends.

I gave you same info, you choose! ;)

[nickon]

@lesley the homepage really needs some improvments. I was Just browsing on my Mobile Phone and clicked on partners to see the partners and I landed on a Page that asked me to become one. Had to open the Menu again, open the submenu to find what I was looking for. Also why dont you make some packages eg TB community, TB install, TB support, TB migrade(on the frontpage I mean) eg TB install could cost 100€ and provide a basic installation . You could also make an option to select the person (agency) that does it with TB itself beeing a bit more expencive and that extra money could go to the project

[hubbobubbo]

I agree that it seems a lot of money is spent on emails and hosting but that is not really a community issue so if that is the only outcome of this topic it's less productive than the rant thread.

I was hoping for some more info on the short-term plans. releases, priorities etc. To me, it is still unclear if the founders will have sufficient time to work on the at least the core functionality and if so, which are the things cooking/missing right now :-)

[Mediacom87]

Thank you for this article, it reassures me personally because I felt that I was a slowness for all of my module updates or to lay an article. The marketing part is very time-consuming, which explains why at PS there are 5 times more people marketing than developing the solution. I believe, but it's only my responsibility, that you should work only on the solution engine and leave the module management to the community. I understand that each payment solution wishing to be delivered basic with PS have to pay a package of money which I think normal since you showcase their solution to the detriment of competitors. So, either these brands pay to be present or they develop their own module and offer it on the shop. You have made the choice to put the priority on community and sharing, something that has been absent from PS for years, which is to your credit. But we must not forget you during the genesis of the project by supporting the criticism of some users who do not understand the ins and outs of such a big project. I would have loved to participate more in the development of this solution but having lost a lot of time on the development of my coworking space to make it a third place in the next years, I had a very very big drop in income (only one module developed last year instead of the usual decade). Knowing that each new development or update "you oblige me" to an additional test on TB :-) Do not let go, believe in yourself because we believe in you and in this project. Stabilize the solution, improve performance, and then add additional features.

[lesley]

@hubbobubbo The hosting fees we really cannot do anything about. As for the email I am looking into it, so I am not sure if we can reduce it or not. Its likely going to take a lot of programming time away from the core switching email providers, that is why we haven't in the past.

[hubbobubbo]

@lesley apologies, I think I expressed myself in a less than clear way. My point was that how you spend your money is not really a community concern, you should do it the way it creates the most value for you.

My point was simply that I was hoping for some more info on your current release and feature plans in the blog post and imho this thread started to focus on the wrong things (your cost structure). I think having an involved community is key but nevertheless, we will be counting on you and dekker for reliable communication, release and feature planning, core prioritization and so on.

[Guest]

Appreciate the update, as well as all of the TB team's hard work Lesley. TB has been a joy for me thus far.

[hfxracing]

Stay your course bud you and your team are doing fine!

[rand0m]

So, i wasn't following the forum for a while and now read the whole ranty topic. Actually I'd like to thank lesley and mdekker for all the work that they invested in this project, we have recently launched a thirtybees shop and it is working soo much better than what it was on PS! However I'd like to bring up a new perspective to this discussion away from the business model problem. Imo there is also just a lack of developers, which is why i actually think the whole discussion is really unfair towards mdekker because he did some tremendous work imo, especially since he isnt even working full time on it. I think one of the problems thirtybees has, which comes from prestashop, is that the codebase is just pretty messy and it is not very well documented. So basically what I'm trying to say is, that it may be worth a shot to try and make the project more interesting for devs or easier to get into. What I'd actually like a lot, would be a place, maybe a forum section, that is dedicated to discussing code related topics, being it questions to the codebase or maybe even tutorials or discussing module ideas, I just never felt there was a right place to do that. Also I think that there might be people who could contribute codewise but just aren't accustomed to github or just not sure if they are competent enough, at least I was/ am in that position and I think that such a section would help a lot in that regard, because you get a feel for what other contributers think. Last but not least I'd like to say that I think the way you handled the rant with your post is actually really admirable, thanks for being so open and communicative!

[datakick]

wow, what a storm. I was away this weekend, and I'm really sorry I've missed it. It seems quite late to join in now.

So I just say that I really hope that the community will heal quickly. Thanks @lesley for the blog post, it really reinforces the faith in the project. I sure hope you'll continue to inform us on regular basis, to prevent this kind of situation from happening ever again. I know it takes tremendous amount of time and energy, and I very much appreciate it.

[lesley]

Since there has been lots of interest in helping us out with things, I am trying to put together a post this week about things users / community members can do to help from all levels of expertise.

[Traumflug]

@rand0m

Also I think that there might be people who could contribute codewise but just aren’t accustomed to github

Github's issue tracker is pretty easy to use, so it's fine to discuss things there. Github's enforced pull request strategy is indeed [censored]. To get patches into discussions, don't hesitate to send diffs/patches to my email, I'll happily apply them. Unless the enhancement is obvious I'll apply them in a branch, first, then cherry-pick them to the development branch if found to be good.

[rand0m]

Thanks for your response, I guess I'll use the issue tracker then and come back to you when I have worked out enhancements I think would be useful. I still think it might be nice to have a place for a more casual exchange though. Also I think it would be cool if you could create and share content like tutorials on a centralized place, which would help me because I might get feedback from other developers and it would help beginners getting started. It would also benefit lesley I think because he could use content from the community. I mean I don't know if there are enough people willing to do that but I would certainly be happy to share the things I learned along the way.

[smarterweb]

first of all: a BIG thank you to everyone working on TB in any form whilst I really appreciate the update and response, I also wonder what's been happening in the last 2 weeks since this was posted. I was really hoping for some more regular updates on what is going on behind the curtains and what is being worked on right now. Like so many others, I am eagerly waiting for a stable release of 1.0.4 Does anyone have any idea when this release will be available? (I know... I shouldn't even ask about release dates...but hey, I'm also trying to make a decision whether this is the right platform for new eCommerce projects since the last stable release was 8 months ago).