disappointed / frustrated

[vincentdenkspel]

I will probably get some shit over me by posting this but so be it. This post is related to the latest crowdfunding project. I think this project is online for about 3 weeks now and frankly i find is very disappointing how may people (18 at the moment) have contributed to this project. From what I've seen on the forum it's my estimation that there are more than 18 active forum members. People asking for help because they either have an live TB site, a test TB site or have the intention to make the switch to TB. And i also think it is fair to say that not all of those member have contributed to the crowdfunding project. On other forum threats i read comments like " i don't make money yet" or "i don't have a live site" or something like that. I can't imagine that even if you don't make money yet, you can't spear $1, $5 or $10 or so. And why wait to contribute if you don't have a TB shop yet ? We all benefit from this.

I still really think crowdfunding can be a good way to provide an income for the TB owners AND give us (future) shopowners a stable, feature rich quality ecommerce system. To the people who already contributed : THANKS and for the people who didn't do that yet: I really hope you will contribute still (however small)

---

THANKS ALL THE CONTRIBUTERS !!!

I really think we can make TB great by means of crowdfunding.

[Baarssen]

I do support your post. However i dont have a Thirtybees shop live at this moment i believe in this project so i did my contribution to it. Come on guys, if everybody only makes a small donation its done and we all will have the profit of it.

As Vincent says, if you cant give much, just give a small donation of 5 or 10 dollar. It should also be a big motivation for the project owners to see how many people supports them. I think they will be more happy with 100 donations of 5 dollar then 1 of 500

[violinparts]

The best way to generate money is to sell modules. I will definitely buy a few modules that I will need such as Easypost, shipping tracking, modern email templates, etc.

[violinparts]

Also, try to go to venture capital for capital money.

[vincentdenkspel]

@violinparts There is a big difference Your contriburion when there is something in it for you (a module) and thus a short-term gain. By contribution to the crowdfunding project there is no short term gain for you, but definately a long-term gain (stable, feature rich ecommerce system)

Furthermore: Lets say a module costs €100 and TB gets 20% of this, than 125 people would need to by a module of €100. The less expensive the module the more people are needed for this amount. As I see how hard it is to get people involved in the crowdfunding project i don't think this is very likely at the moment.

[vincentdenkspel]

@violinparts based on the community involvement regarding the crowdfunding project i wonder if a capital venture would be intrested

[violinparts]

Up to you then. Crowdfunding is not realistic. Keep in mind, you compete against others that are also free - prestashop, opencart, magento, and a few others. Even now, there are free ASP.net/windows based shopping carts.

[vincentdenkspel]

@violinparts said in disappointed / frustrated:

Up to you then

What is up to me ?

I don't think it has to be OR, but rather AND. crowdfunding AND commission from module sales etc. etc.

From what i read various people are jumping the PS ship because the lack of bug fixes and help. You can't expect from TB to give support, develop TB and make a living all at once. Crowdfunding is at least a way to combine two of them.

[vincentdenkspel]

@violinparts Maybe you did or maybe not contribute, but from your reaction it looks like are opposed to contributing the the crowdfunding module. Is that right and if so can you tell me why ?

[violinparts]

There is no point on your part asking me individually. You are talking about crowd funding. Why don't you ask the crowd?

[vincentdenkspel]

@the crowd is a bunch of individuals. I was just wondering

[violinparts]

Sounds like you are just a whiner if not a complete jerk, an NOT in a business selling. As a seller, how much you think one makes for selling one item. After shipping, handling, etc, in most cases less than 10 percent. If you do want to persevere for a long haul, don't get into any Internet business. Or do some illegal work and ask people for ransom.

[lesley]

Ideally we would like to see everyone that uses thirty bees just donate $1 to these crowdfunding campaigns. If everyone did, it would only take less than 20% of the users to fund it. I don't want users to feel pressured to donate to thirty bees though. Its like in America, tipping is optional, but its not really optional. We don't want to be free and open source, but not really free and open source.

We want to make software so awesome people use it, make a ton of money from it, and say hey, let me help these guys out. The more money that thirty bees brings in, the more we can stay in the forum and help users by answering questions. The quicker we can fix bugs in the software. The more time we can just spend working on thirty bees.

We are just normal guys everyone in our community. We all love working on e-commerce and making cool things with it. Lets keep things civil here and don't point fingers or call people out. Everyone has their own reasons for donating or not donating to thirty bees.

[ipeary]

I hope I can help at moment, But I have intention to help for sure, I think you should use google adsense also, TB have a lot of fans now can help you around the world in it I have account and it's very good as start and number of visitor to my site

[lesley]

I don't think we would use adsense. We want to track and monitor our users as minimal as possible. Heck, we could just sell our data and make enough to fund things for a while, but we are opposed to the whole data selling idea.

[ipeary]

yes it's very bad to sell data, I feel a good soul in TB team, I'm you will reach your goal, I still in the first steps of my project and I fund myself with my own work, My currency very bad according to dollar, so I need to start to get some money, sure the first place Deserves donation is TB <3 Thanks very much TB team

[Manisch]

I took a look at the campaign a few days ago and also was a little frustrated about the current progress :/

I'm one of those who doesn't make that much money yet, but I donated 10$ and almost felt ashamed for it because it was the smallest donation :D But I thought every bit helps...

@lesley perhaps you could update your forum-signature. I would guess that people who visit the forum aren't that interested in a cloudways trial because they've already handled it somehow.

"The more money that thirty bees brings in, the more we can stay in the forum and help users by answering questions." is an important info.

Perhaps you can rewrite it a little like: "Help us to help you. With your donation we are able to spend more time in the forum to answer your questions".

You kow...picking up the people where they stand (:

[vincentdenkspel]

@manisch said in disappointed / frustrated:

but I donated 10$ and almost felt ashamed for it because it was the smallest donation

Why feel ashamed for it ? My point is NOT the ammount of money one donates. Every $ counts, whether it is $1, $10 or whatever. Thank you for your donation.

Perhaps you can rewrite it a little like: “Help us to help you. With your donation we are able to spend more time in the forum to answer your questions”.

Great suggestion !

[Traumflug]

The best way to generate money is to sell modules.

Agreed, there is quite some evidence that this is true. Still it comes with a major caveat: inevitably this focuses development work on modules, while the core software needs just as much attention. There's a reason why PrestaShop started to rewrite major sections of it. thirty bees comes with this reason as well, but tries hard to solve it without disrupting merchants businesses. And I think it's safe to say, thirty bees is so far successful with this.

thirty bees could also choose the PrestaShop way: deprecate existing, free features in favor of costly modules. But then one eventually ends up with not an open source e-commerce software, but with only a skeleton of that. Not very helpful and also not inviting to new merchants joining the platform.

That's why I consider crowdfunding to be better than selling modules. Price for merchants is about the same, but merchants get not only a new or renewed piece of software, but also a strong argument into the future of the platform.

I donated 10$

Big Thank You!

[vincentdenkspel]

@traumflug said in disappointed / frustrated:

Price for merchants is about the same

I think when there are enough backers crowdfunding is much cheaper for merchants. For example: when you want to buy modules that provide the same features as the elastic search module you will have to pay several hundred euros for a license with 2 years of upgrades.

People do not realize that you can't expect the developers to answer questions in the forums, develop a stable core system, develop module all for free.

[toplakd]

Donated. Now we are on 80%

There was no option to take 2 upgrade perks in one payment, so I rounded it to my currency :)

[vzex]

Is it ready yet?

:winkingface: :facewithtearsof_joy:

Come on, we are almost there!!! :thumbsup: :wineglass: :faceblowinga_kiss: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/thirty-bees-updater-module-software#/

[toplakd]

Nice. Few more to go :)

[toplakd]

The ammount would be double if there was GDRP word added into the sentence :)

[nickon]

I always said if TB asked for something usefull and realisc ppl would donate. Hell even I did and I don't own a TB store (yet) :-P Keep it going!