Goodbye

[Acer]

Proposed Solution

• Low Renewable Once-off fee for Entry (renews every year). Between $2 / $5 per year.
• All existing members pay access fee & get nice 'verified supporter' badge or whatever
• Aggressive marketing campaign to attract new users - actively take on Presta
• More users approach galvanizes TB to grow and actively seek out new users (without exploiting them)
• = Money for developers + new features
• = Free things are still free essentially
• = Sustainable growth with "Best of Both" Opensource and Monetizing's Benefits and none of their weaknesses 
• = Renewable yearly subscription 'milks' without overdoing it and works towards the sustainable part

Edited April 16, 2020 by Theo

[Chandra]

To me, discussing how much money to put in comes after an assessment of what is needed.

Also we need to keep in mind $ is not the only way to contribute; there has been lots of contribution in testing, free modules etc. by lots of folks and that is not trivial. @Theo is right a $ is not the same everywhere and in every stage of business.

For a relatively stable product, what do we need:?

+ Bug fixes in core and modules

+ Compatibility upgrades for new versions

+ Essential feature additions everyone needs

+ Forum and hosting

How many $ and hours would this translate to? Should we start with the requirement before design?

 

Edit:

I would also raise an unpopular question. Lesley started off and we all moved due to PS1.6 limitations at that point. Over the years, did things get better that may mean merging of paths now? Are there other ready alternatives that don't need us to take the trouble?

Edited April 16, 2020 by Chandra

[Mark]

Still no sign of any commercial metrics about this company.

Im not personally against you @lesley its just this is a company and I do not see it being run in any acceptable commercial fashion right now.

A few bucks a month or year from a few users is the same as what happens now and that will not ever make this platform into anything and it will go from one near death experience to another unless people wake up and realise its about PERFORMANCE FOR SITE OWNERS. Then THEY WILL HAPPILY PAY (and should be forced to) instead of going on a free ride. Until they have decent sites, prices need to be set to nurture people into downloading helpful modules not put them off. (Unlike PS that attempts to rape its early stage customers and scare them away).

Another thing I would propose is that features and moves forward are put to proper community consensus. Bugs are different, thats more of a developer choice.

Presently a few decide what goes on around here and it all depends on who likes who and gets on with who blah blah, extremely undemocratic, a hardcore group of less than a dozen decide everything.

The entire community should have the opportunity to be involved in features.

 

 

Edited April 16, 2020 by Mark

[rubben1985]

7 hours ago, Mark said:

Lesley isn't forthcoming with any data here on financials , downloads, installs, sites, modules any metrics whatsoever.

He mentioned earlier that he was up for whatever worked, but isn't providing any metrics so we see what this company is actually achieving and so we can see what can be done.

I should think another lesson from this is to make a company in which there is more than one stakeholder and key contributors have a stakeholding.

Its not cool to have only one person running a large scale business system like this.

@Mark honestly what you are asking here (financials...wtf) is not standard to be discussed in public. If I were Lesley I would not provide it either because it is internal information. You want something like that, you ask by private and it is up to him. I have been critic with not appearing but answering questions, being present and having a plan is all "we have right to ask" for the people in command of TB. No more

6 hours ago, lesley said:

I am unsure where you recent hostility against me or thirty bees has come from.

@lesley It is more frustration than hostility. Everyone should be (I am) really grateful to you, but you also have to be aware that once they jump with you in a boat (in this case their digital business ecommerce platform), they request attention if things are not following a clear path, at least a minimum. 

6 hours ago, lesley said:

From the start of this company / project those have been the values. I might not be capable of piloting the company or project much longer, but I am not going to turn it over to someone that will exploit the community. These people have been awesome to me and thirty bees over the last several years and I am trying my best to leave them in capable hands with my integrity intact. 

Agree with you at 100%. I saw the messages that mark said in pm to you, and if that is all, his tone and attitude is not good at all. But also the person that leads the company should find a way to generate income. And it is almost imposible that everyone will be agree (free is always better). 

 

4 hours ago, Theo said:

Proposed Solution

• Low Renewable Once-off fee for Entry (renews every year). Between $2 / $5 per year.
• All existing members pay access fee & get nice 'verified supporter' badge or whatever
• Aggressive marketing campaign to attract new users - actively take on Presta
• More users approach galvanizes TB to grow and actively seek out new users (without exploiting them)
• = Money for developers + new features
• = Free things are still free essentially
• = Sustainable growth with "Best of Both" Opensource and Monetizing's Benefits and none of their weaknesses 
• = Renewable yearly subscription 'milks' without overdoing it and works towards the sustainable part

@Theo 2-5$ is almost nothing for any business, even yearly. You said, 1 million users.... wtf hahaha good luck to get that!! even with an agressive marketing campaign... Do you know how much cost ads? in eCommerce a product that cost 100$ have usually a minimum cost of conversion of 15-20$ (well optimized). B2B conversion is much difficult. With that cost, only to cover marketing you need like a few years to pay THE ACQUISITION, not talking about maintaining the system and improving it. I understand you are in a poor country but TB need to pay the salary of the developers. Sorry if I sound hard, but it is just reality. But I also would like to say there are different way to at least allow "poor country" people to enjoy it, but price can not be linked to that

My personal 2 propositions (I have different ideas)

The first: freemium.

Free users have access to the software and community forums (we solve that poor country people can enjoy it), but not to official developers.

Premium services under suscription could include:

- bug (TB related) preferential resolution by the staff.

- specific premium modules

- I would add a very powerful thing, small customization services like Johnny from Panda does (and I am very glad to renew my support even if it is only the template): he defines small customization like works that requires less than 30 min of his attention. If you have active support he helps you. When help is too much he propose customization services (and usually I paid them too because they are "affordable").

Of course there would be other income sources like ads, marketplace (how it is now, I imagine it sells almost nothing),...

 

The second: even If I am not agree with Mark way of telling things, I think it is a good idea to pay a monthly fee depending on business income. "Easy" to set up with a fee per sale. (if you are starting you pays almost nothing, if you are successful, you return to the platform its effort). This is the reason why so many platforms with this model works: people risk nothing to use it, and everyone is happy to know that the only pay if they are earning money.

Edited April 16, 2020 by rubben1985

[Traumflug]

8 hours ago, Briljander said:

I definitely think one problem is lack of money.

Likely not. In early 2019 I was into hiring developers for thirty bees. This wasn't exactly easy, even with plenty of funds. A surprisingly large number of PrestaShop developers outright refused to work for thirty bees, simply because it's kind of a competition for PrestaShop. And freshmen refused to work for the project because they never heard of it.

Another datapoint, remember this effort of PS to make PS 1.6 community-maintained to keep it alive? They immediately found like a dozen developers volunteering for this. As we know, thirty bees does exactly what this effort wants to solve: keep a 1.6-compatible software alive. Still no such dozen developers volunteering.

A substantial part of the problem is people believing way too much in brand names. They prefer a buggy PS 1.6 over a stable and compatible thirty bees, just because it's named 'PrestaShop'. So far no solution for this aspect in sight.

[Traumflug]

4 hours ago, Chandra said:

Over the years, did things get better that may mean merging of paths now?

Merging with PS 1.6 brings probably nothing. Merging with PS 1.7 would bring all the compatibility issues PS 1.7 comes with: broken modules, broken themes.

[Acer]

39 minutes ago, Traumflug said:

A substantial part of the problem is people believing way too much in brand names. They prefer a buggy PS 1.6 over a stable and compatible thirty bees, just because it's named 'PrestaShop'. So far no solution for this aspect in sight.

It requires us to build more sites in TB and to promote it + an aggressive marketing / ad strategy where the PS users get educated that TB > PS hands-down.
Essentially an active resolution to take on and squish PS = PS users coming over to TB en masse. Continuing being placid is not going to help TB's cause.
It needs to take the fight to PS and win.
And no, with an effective message you do not need to spend big $ on an advertising campaign to be effective.

Without this 'active' marketing and promotion drive, it will take forever to build the TB brand.
And will probably in time, be reliant on some really excellent TB sites becoming TB ambassadors to spread the word just by their very existence. 

Edited April 16, 2020 by Theo

[toplakd]

PS took advantage with GDPR coming in place back in 2018, offering free module for 1.7 and 100€ for 1.6.

That particular module and it's 1.6 price made many of european PS 1.6 users switch to 1.7 even if that module actually does very little with help of being GDPR compliant, as only useful thing it has is that customer can printout all his data within "My Account". Most of other things one can accomplish without any module.

Yes, it would be nice if thirty bees had dedicated module, to help out with printouts if one gets the request for its data, but at the other end even both stock themes lack many things in connection with AEUC module and it's advanced checkout pages (community and niara both fail here). But not sure about Panda. In my modded version I made some changes where everything should work as intended no matter if standard checkout or advanced is used.

To continue after gdpr / theme insert ...

It's the trustworthy name that "sells" prestashop installations, not it's "good" core.

So to get some of that users I think a big amount of $ needs to be spent, as the one that thinks  geman car and german dog at house is a must, would be hard to convince to replace them with other brands

Edited April 16, 2020 by toplakd

[datakick]

These recommendations were discussed many times on the forum, for example this flame from two years ago. Unfortunately, not much was done in the last two years, other than code implementation. Stable and nice codebase is important, of course, but it's not what will attract users.

When I look at the last two years, I see a lot of wasted opportunities. There should have been massive campaign to attract ps16 merchants when support for their platform was ending. There was none. Third party developers with ps16 modules should have been contacted, and some incentive should have been offered to them in return for maintaining their modules compatible. For example, their modules could have been highlighted in the 'modules' page in your back offices. Again, this didn't happen. And since then, most of these developers either completely migrated to ps17 platform, or quit the presta-world completely.  And there are so many other things that could have been done.

Instead, the platform stagnated. The only area that was worked on was codebase. And that just not enough.

Two years ago, I wrote:

I wonder how accurate builtwith.com data are - they track ~576 sites

Now, this web tool tells us there are 509 active thirtybees sites. These two years should have been the best time for attracting new users. Instead, we lost some.

This inactivity is what drove my decision to quit. I have no problems working for free on an open source platform. I have problems seeing this work being wasted. If the situation changes I might revert my decision. But I don't see how it could change, unfortunately. 

Also - I don't want to 'take over', as some of you suggested. While I'm flattered, I don't want to do that. I would really hate doing all those things that I've just complained above. I'd be terrible at that, I'm sure. 

 

[toplakd]

Not to mention that I run 4 instances of thirty bees on my hosting (out of that 509 active)

1st is live shop

2nd is same as live, but for testing the updates before applying them to live

3rd is where i make live preview theme changes

4rh is completely stock to make compares to my 3rd one

Edited April 16, 2020 by toplakd

[veganline]

6 hours ago, Traumflug said:

In early 2019 I was into hiring developers for thirty bees. This wasn't exactly easy, even with plenty of funds. A surprisingly large number of PrestaShop developers outright refused to work for thirty bees, simply because it's kind of a competition for PrestaShop. And freshmen refused to work for the project because they never heard of it.

This could be a source of income.
There could be a niche market for Thirtybees developers that charges 10% commission and gives that to Thirtybees. I'm suggesting something for someone else to do, which is always a bad idea, but I will float it anyway!

Ideally the market would have some of the features of Freelancers.com / Peopleperhour / Upwork / Fiverr / Hubstaff.com / to justify the 10%. At the moment most of them charge 10%, Fiverr 20% and Hubstaff some cheaper system that I don't understand. There is abandoned code on Github for setting-up such a platform, which, again, I don't understand. I guess that the odd new customer who tests Thirtybees would quite likely check-out a freelancer market and pay for an odd job.

Maybe non-thirtybees income could go to the developer.

Maybe the odd Prestashop 1.6 module developer would be interested enough to register.

Oh, there were questions further up the thread about finances - who pays for the server etc. I can't find the post from December that answered that point, but remember it quoted data sale to Facebook as a way of raising the odd $100. I did find this link from December about how to try and promote for free
https://thirtybees.com/contribute/ways-to-help-thirty-bees/ 

-------------------------------------------------------------edit 

@rubben1985 I like the idea of a freemium system by which £X a year buys X minutes of help, and maybe a helpful prod towards DIY work or paid-by-the-hour work when the minutes run out. I guess that could be much cheaper than https://www.shopify.co.uk/pricing and optional. It answers the question of how shopkeepers are going to get things done if the Thirtybees set-up doesn't, and it can be done independently of Thirtybees at first and maybe with automatic promotion and referral in future; either way, a developer can just do it.

Edited April 16, 2020 by veganline
--------------edit

[Acer]

So we're at an impasse still.

Now, how do we take some action and fix this? Given what everybody knows?
No, not everybody is great at everything, so we all have our strengths and weaknesses.
Some are better at the Dev side of things, others better at Leadership / Running the show.

But maybe if we work together and somehow utilize our collective strengths, we can save this project and kick some proper PS ass?
In terms of money, 'the TB company', marketing, direction of the project and leadership?

@Traumflug @toplakd @datakick @musicmaster @rubben1985 @Chandra @movieseals @Occam @lesley @wakabayashi @AndyC @haylau @Briljander @zen @30knees @Sigi
 

Edited April 16, 2020 by Theo

[vincentdenkspel]

7 hours ago, Mark said:

Im not personally against you @lesley its just this is a company and I do not see it being run in any acceptable commercial fashion right now.

You have made that very clear. However, the fact is: it is not your company. 
"Acceptable commercial fashion" This is just your opinion. Maybe someone else thinks it is run in the right way.
I always tell my children: by screaming louder your point is not more valid.

Edited April 16, 2020 by vincentdenkspel

[wakabayashi]

Even it’s probably not important at all, I will give now my view on things...

Since months thirty bees is without a real lead. Since the health issue of Lesley, he has disappeared almost completely. But the problems began already earlier. Remember there was once co-initiator Michael, who suddenly left. As far as I know he gave up his company shares. See the source above. Technically he was replaced by Markus. But Markus never seem to got shares of the company. As far as I know he got some payments, but not near the market cost. Not too surprisingly Markus stopped to work too. Then there was only Petr left. Check out his posts, but in general he worked under even worse condition: a lot of support and commits/fixes for free.

I see a pattern in this three cases. While thirty bees revenues were growing, the spendings for development were (probably) decreasing. Now we are all in a ship, that is just driving randomly on the sea. Lesley can’t lead the project anymore as he states himself, all major Devs are gone. No one is in sight. There are only three possible outcomes now:

1. Thirty bees is taken over

Is the first scenario realistic? I have my doubts, especially when reading that the offered price for the company was 30 times, what Petr would have considered to invest. I am quite sure, that the valuation was not done properly. I would guess, that the income was used to calculate, but almost no costs. As it would be realistic that devs are always working for low or even no wages. As other already pointed out: the value of thirty bees can’t be very high right now. The code is open source. The value would be the brand, the amount of merchants and mainly the free cash flow.

With such a solution I also wonder, who would even be the developper? Hard to imagine that Michael or Markus come back in this scenario. And Petr? Well this post is in his goodbye thread, so...

2. A new fork

Some off you seem to think of forking this project again. Yeah it’s possible, but almost all off you, have no idea, what it means. It’s so much work, which again has to be done. Just creating a new fork doesn’t solve the problems. IMO a new fork would need multiple faces, that are ready to invest a lot of time, to maybe make money multiple years later. I read too many “I could do that” or even “this and that should be done”. Where have you been, when testers were needed for new tb versions/commits? Who of you has written documentations? Who of you has written concepts, how features should be redesigned and not only “the feature is bad/not working”?

It’s not my goal to offend any off you, but it’s just hard to believe, that we suddenly have a dozen off guys, who will invest multiple hours a week for tb for free. I also see best chances in the proposed freemium system of @rubben1985. But are we enough merchants, which are willing to spend 50 (or more) dollars a month? And even more important: can we hire the right people with this money? Remember money is not the main problem of thirty bees...

People who would be ready to pay 50$/month:

@wakabayashi
@Briljander
@rubben1985
@Smile
@vincentdenkspel
@dynambee

 

3. The project dies and all merchants have to find their own way of handling it

Option three is of course not very attractive. It’s the reason why this thread got hot so quickly 😉 Even if I share a lot of opinions with @toplakd. I am surprised how you can stay so relaxed. In my opinion every ecommerce company needs to get better daily. As I like to say: “You are either the shark of the ocean, or the fish of the ocean!”. We are probably all fishes. Ecommerce has become so hard last years.

Some of you might remember @alwayspaws. Even if she was very active here and dedicated a lot of time to here online store, the business never really took off. I know some merchants who made good money by selling smartphone covers years ago. Now you can buy them for 2$ on wish. This niche is just dead. I could go on with with hundreds of such examples, but that wouldn’t help. Thinking “my shop is working now fine, I am safe” is in my opinion too risky. Even if I have to say a fish, at least I don’t want to get eaten by shark.

For this I need to develop my shop further and further. Customer get used to the level/features that sharks like amazon offer. Your search/filters suck? Probably you will lose a lot of potential customers. Your mobile version suck? You are probably soon out of the game. Yeah this examples are not new, but new things will come again and we as a shop owner need to go on too. Most merchant’s here have no chance to technically handle that their own.

 

[Sigi]

to once again share my impressions, though certainly the least interesting. Just a few information in advance: I have never really had anything to do with e-commerce. I take care of a good friend's online shop for free in my spare time. He has almost no income, it is just a matter of the heart.
I first heard about thirtybees in a ps forum in a private message.
What made me a little bit suspicious before the migration to tb is the thirtybees page. Many old posts, an old version as demo etc, i couldn´t register here in forum for more than two weeks (maybe it was a longer time and there you lost a lot of new users?) until somebody read  gitter...
But since I had almost nothing to lose, I gave thirtybees a chance and took a look at it.  I am still excited about it.Super easy to use, clearly arranged and the support here in the forum I found brilliant. That's why I decided to donate 5€ every month even though I have no income from thirtybees and e-commerce myself, and not a big privat one. 

I think the first important step would be to get the thirtybees site in order(#Marketing, wich was mentioned a lot of times before me).

I have no clue at all, but I liked the spirit here and so I gave 5€ instead of clue. Maybe I would even be willing to give 10 but I couldn't give more for now.

 

Edited April 16, 2020 by Sigi

[eikichiz]

What about a subscription model based on support and crowdfunding model for bug fixing and new features?.

Edited April 16, 2020 by eikichiz

[Briljander]

3 hours ago, wakabayashi said:

But are we enough merchants, which are willing to spend 50 (or more) dollars a month? And even more important: can we hire the right people with this money?

Last year I spent about $10000 on custom modules, theme changes and bug fixing in third party modules that are obsolete so atleast I would be willing to pay $50 a month if I would get something in return, bug fixes and new features. But I am not sure we are enough people.

I do also agree that there is a need of developing new features, not just bugfixing and coremodications. 

 

[veganline]

4 hours ago, wakabayashi said:

I also see best chances in the proposed freemium system of @rubben1985. But are we enough merchants, which are willing to spend 50 (or more) dollars a month? And even more important: can we hire the right people with this money? Remember money is not the main problem of thirty bees...

 

I would like to see more easy paid help available.

This does not have to be "we"; it could be any freelancer, with or without co-operation from anyone else. A coder could just offer it right now on their own web site. and hope for referral from the Thirtybees web site later.

This could be pay-as-you-go, or it could be pay-by-the-year for so-many minutes and referral-on, like a car breakdown subscription.

The price would have to compete with free but time-intensive DIY and shopify.co.uk/pricing , given that Shopify throw-in the server space and an easy-sounding brand name as well. Developers could experiment with different prices.

This doesn't answer the question of how the core code could be updated, but if merchants pay for development they might want to put the work online on the forum; maybe that could be a condition of referral from Thirtybees.

Edited April 16, 2020 by veganline

[the.rampage.rado]

I'm afraid this is really bad news for the community that the team had fallen apart!

 

It's a real shame! Really!

And I'm totally with @datakick on the point that chances were missed. The platform should have been separated and distinquished from PS long time ago at least (1 year) with new features, changed concepts and then hopefully we were to advert it to developers so we can hope of more rich ecosystem with more modules and themes.

 

I really don't know how @lesley will continue from now on but the information that he wants to sell the company (probably in order to cover other costs in his personal life, which is more THAN UNDERSTANDABLE, I even didn't know that you're sick) is leading me to the idea that this ship is going to sink quickly if no sollution is found right away!

As @datakick said contributing to a free project is not at all wasted time. It comes with it's own renumeration (non financial).

As many of use COULD but DIDN'T contribute enough to keep this ecosystem alive and make it a thriving one it's now up to us to save it. And not because our bussiness depends on it but because it was part of our lifes for so much time. Now I never open the PS forums but when I have time I always come here or dig through the latest PRs to see what's everybody doing.

But this is not a job for one or two persons, the core team at the wheel shoud be at least 10 senior devs everybody with different views about the development of the project. So the future of the system does not hang in the balance if one of them is sick or simply sees no further motivation for him/her. This was also a big mistake in the beginning when only @lesley and Markus peeled off, they had to look for partnership with at least another 2 devs.

 

Regarding the donations - I would really think that a simple year-by-year breakdown of costs will help with keeping them coming in the following months, otherwise this is gone.

Regarding the idea of bringing new or motivating old developers to keep the great work and steer the ship in the general direction it has to go - I don't have quality ideas here. Hopefully when this corona-shit goes away people will look for new adventures ahead and some may consider joining the team. As far as coding - I'm the same idiot I was 3 years ago, didn't learn single language and now I'm working for some jerks, my company is in the BRIGHT RED and I'm only keeping it afloat because of santiments. My sites are making no profit and I'm trying to find something new to motivate myself. If I can be of some help for the project I would like to help (translations, documentation, etc.) I don't see much profit from making dedicated Bulgarian website about Tb at the moment (especially this virus-condition, before that also). I'm glad that recently I saw some other Bulgarian contributor @ github!

 

So if you come with some ideas I would be very happy to assist in anyway possible. Again - not because my company relies on the project, my company is dead (not because of Tb) but because this project was something I believed in and is still part of my life (as it had been for the last 3-4 years, I don't remember as far back! :P )

Rado

[Mark]

Its important to keep the core free yet professionally managed still funded out of salaries/ stakeholding.

Its amazing that the key devs in this have been so passionate for so long about this, with virtually no direct money or stakeholding and that one naive but nice guy who doesnt have commercial acumen has been "in charge".

Funding about 3 devs + internal systems and marketing will not EVER happen out of donations or a few paying a few subs, there's so much naivety here about what doing this properly would take.

Also, new/early users do NOT want to be paying $70-$150 per module, like prestashop.  Early stage users want to pay a few bucks or even trial for free.

Devs also want a lot more more than selling a few modules for $70 for their efforts.

So how do we incentivise devs to build high quality modules that customers can't be without and that scale as their does?

Monthly fees... starting low and ramping up with the site.

Instead of a Dev selling a module at $70 for life on prestashop (which early customers are very reluctant to pay and big sites laugh at) what we want is good devs making $300-$1000 a year from each client who are only too happy to pay... if their site performs as a result (means high quality modules).

 

 

Edited April 16, 2020 by Mark

[lesley]

I am going to try to address all of the posts that are relevant that might need my addressing in this one post, so bear with me. 

@Mark I understand what you are saying, but at the same time you simply do not understand how opensource software works or where income is generated in opensource software. I can say pretty confidently that both thirty bees, prestashop, shopify, magento, opencart, 3d cart, and others generate only a small fraction of their revenue through module or app sales. The same goes for monthly fees, save shopify. There are two main ways that revenue is generated one is to make strategic partnerships the other is to sell user data. Many moons ago when Dekker and I started thirty bees we promised not to sell user data. Has it hurt us financially? Sure it has. Will I sell user data? No. I am sure people can find a lot of things I have done wrong trying to guide thirty bees, but I am working with the best intentions and not going back on my promises. 

If you want to try a SaaS version of thirty bees you can, its opensource, you can use it, fork it, change it, do what you want with it. I didn't start my journey into ecommmerce with thirty bees. I was around long enough to see Magento fail with a Saas version, PrestaShop failed twice with a SaaS version. 

 

If you want commercial metrics, let e know where you reside and we can get a NDA drawn up that will enjoin you, it will require an escrow. 

 

@Traumflug is right about finding developers. @datakick was a godsend. We all approached so many other developers and none would really consider working for thirty bees. Sure, there were a few takers, but generally they wanted upwards of $120/ hr and wanted to learn as they went. 

 

@rubben1985 I am frustrated as well. This is not what I wanted, I have a ton of people that I am friends with that are in this boat because I led them to this boat. That is why I am actively trying to find someone to take it over and not trying to sink it. Me getting sick royally fucked up all of the plans I had thirty bees and my life. 

@toplakd I realize this. I actually saw this coming and the company paid one of Dekker's people that works for Mollie to make a free GDPR module for thirty bees. He basically took our money, Dekker said the module was good, he just needed to tweak it, it was never finished and he left. It was a narrow scoped module just to provide the basics, but it was never released because we made a bad investment in a bad person. 

@datakick There were several campaigns. Both mailings and me physically calling people. I reached out to everyone I knew / know in the industry with varying degrees of success. Every dh42 email includes information about thirty bees in it. I have a decent size list of customers that have downloaded our free modules (over 26k ) they have been marketed to constantly. Could I have done more? Sure, at the time I didn't know what more to do though. As I mentioned  in the past I did get into a partnership that provided money, but also took a lot of my time too. 

Builtwith is not accurate. I have seen internal metrics from a couple platforms as compared to builtwith, they skew both up and down. I would say its no more accurate than Alexa for domain rank. 

 

@wakabayashi You could be correct on the valuation. I shot from the hip trying to figure out a number. 

 

@Sigi Sorry about that, like most of our stuff the last 8 months or so, the forum has been under constant ddos attack or spammer attack. That has actually what has consumed more time than anything in the past 6 months, just keeping things up. 

 

 

[MichaelEZ]

TB needs some "mastermind",  that we all agree on. 

Here is my useless, but thankfull rant and sorry for my eng - > I know about this project for about a year now.. It literally saved our eshop when it was broken ( backend was loading in ages, and frontend just a little bit faster) - as I ´m just self taught it wasnt in my power to fix it 😕, so we had to pay some freelancer - which took money and didnt solve anything at all. As I googled around and find out about this awesome project - went for it and I end up totally amazed! When we did migrate, backend somehow end up even faster then it was before page broke.. same with frontend (after some changes in theme etc.).

Support seems, atleast to me - goldike - in forum, through PMS, and even way beyond via Skype - every time in need - I did receive help. Thats why I ´m supporter , and least one can do is put logo in to footer (we do have pretty good traffic - and sells, thanks to TB).

And I woud like to say one big thanks, to you all who are working on this project - and your devotion. Especially to datakick - i wish you all good things.

One more thing - when we did transfer from PS to TB it does not count our website as TB - it is still recognize as PS so those numbers might not be so accurate at all (builtwidth.com). 

 

[Acer]

That's great that you've had success with Thirtybees. And that you've supported the project. 

The thing is: yes, TB needs a Master Mind but it also needs @datakick, or a 'Master or Senior developer'. Without this a lot of that 'god like' support will just not be there. And the project will be in trouble. And without the Master Mind or Leader, Datakick won't be here. At least from my understanding.

So right now all this equals the project being in serious trouble. Captain-less and Head Engineer-less, this ship is adrift and it's only a matter of time before it hits the rocks and takes all our sites with it... 

We need to figure out a solution. Fix the Leadership issue with succession planning, sort out the TB Company issue, and get Datakick back + another Datakick clone or two if we can. 

Edited April 17, 2020 by Theo

[veganline]

1 hour ago, Theo said:

get Datakick back + another Datakick clone or two if we can. 

Does anyone know

• the going rates for Pay-as-you-go help?
  I searched "Prestashop PHP" on freelancer sites, and was quoted about half a day's average wage or £50 plus commission to the freelancer site - for a Prestashop fix tested on a default install of TB. I told the bloke that I was only contacting one freelancer at a time, so he had time to to test and think. The contact was info (at) mbit.ie and I posted his file changes here on the "tips and tricks" forum.
  I expect that proven problem-solvers with multiple skills charge much more to corporate clients.

And from Theo's suggestion:

• the cost of someone like Datakick hired collectively.... ?

Edited April 17, 2020 by veganline
corrections & format

[30knees]

Some type of escrow service could be an idea - people commit with hard money to support thirtybees. Upon the reaching of a certain goal, the money is released and goes to the developers.

It's easy to get people to say that they're willing to support the project but when it finally comes to actually doing so, things fall apart. That's why I think we need some way to show much (donated) skin-in-the-game we can actually generate here. And how much is needed?