Hey guys,
I wanted to share that the kickstarter will most likely fail to get funding at this point, but all isn't lost.
There were a number of fundamental things that I learned from doing this:
1) Marketing ourselves correctly is extremely important... attracting people to help us make the project better is key to making GNUstep better for everyone
2) I should have been more realistic in my goals on the kickstarter. We are, honestly around 10.3 in some APIs, 10.4 in others and 10.7 in others. An honest assessment of our states on a class by class, method by method level is what's really needed.
3) The period of the kickstarter should have been longer and the goal should probably have been around 20K instead of 50K.
The benefits of the campaign have been:
1) It has raised awareness of the project
2) It has let everyone know that we are still alive and that we are following cocoa and we are both a development environment and an environment which will allow porting.
3) It has brought us potential contributors whom I will contact ASAP.
So, in any case, I am certain that doing the kickstarter was the right thing to do. As I said at it's beginning, whether it's successful or not it's effects in the first couple of days made it very clear that the net effect was a positive one.
I will need the help of the team to decide what the next campaign should be aimed at and how best to go about that. I will send another email later to follow up on this. In the interim, if anyone has any ideas about how we could make it better, please reply here. :)
Thanks everyone for all of the input, I've learned a great deal and it will help us be more successful in our next attempt.
--
Gregory Casamento
Open Logic Corporation, Principal Consultant
yahoo/skype: greg_casamento, aol: gjcasa
(240)274-9630 (Cell)
http://www.gnustep.orghttp://heronsperch.blogspot.com