So, lately I have been looking into the cost of software and how much should projects charge for a fund raising campaign. Alot of software projects do a good job
of having the target goal easily reachable and stretch goals for further funding. One project that had a great campaign which I admired was
OpenShot. The OpenShot team gathered enough funds to cover
their $20,000 initial goal but finished the campaign with an impressive $45,028. In order to reach all stretch goals Jonathan Thomas (project creator) even gave the
second last stretch goal for free and reduced the price of the final stretch goal. This proved to be a great move to gain extra funding and what is most definitely
the best feature a “video editing server” to free up resources on the client.
Then to the opposite side of the wall we have Geary the e-mail client. The Geary team decided upon a jaw dropping goal
of $100,000 on Indiegogo.com. The team may have been realistic in the cost
of software development but seemed to have no idea of what a realistic achievable goal would be. Their campaign lacked realism and I knew the day the campaign was posted
online that failure was the only thing to follow. Im not sure where the team went wrong, I mean what was really missing was some common sense but it could be down to inexperience
with running a campaign. Certainly many people in the Linux community backed my opinion.
I know in the past I pre-maturely launched a fund raising campaign when the project was really in its early stages. I did make a promotional video but
there was nothing impressive to show people what PhotoFiltre LX could really be or no functioning features to test/demo. The goal I set long ago was €3950 which was set far
below what would have been needed.
I may launch another campaign on Kickstarter in the future but not until the project is ready. At least at this point the project has
features to test but more effort needs to be put towards a more complete project first. I must admit it is difficult at times to keep going but recently I have been experiencing
some great financial support from the PhotoFiltre LX community, I hope this continues into the future.