[Adium-devl] Open Issues for 11/17

[Juan Manuel Palacios]

	Being sort of an outsider as I am, I'll still allow myself the space 
to say the following (if I may ;-):

On Nov 18, 2006, at 5:41 PM, Christopher Forsythe wrote:

> I think we're probably getting ahead of ourselves in a way here, and
> need to really step back. We don't know what the actual demand is
> going to be here. I think we really need to be conservative here with
> what we do as we're going to be putting money up for this. I also
> think we need to think about who we're going to say we're going to
> pay and how much we're going to pay for things before announcing it
> on the development list ;)
>
>
> Anyhow, here's what we probably need to look at doing imho:
>
> - Drop the idea of the flash drives. Yes, the are neato. Yes, I'd
> like one. But we aren't seeing anyone ask for them and we need to
> start small.
> - Do we really need to start the store off with a 30 dollar polo
> shirt? I don't think we're going to want to start it off in that way,
> it may be a setup for failure on a product.
> - I think we should stick to 2 designs and expand from there based on
> demand.
> - We need to give Betts a cut. 1 dollar per sale is a figure that was
> being thrown around while talking to Skyler about this, how does
> everyone feel about that?


	I couldn't agree more with Chris on all of these items (and the rest 
of his message below), a move like merchandising could be great for the 
project if successful, but no one knows beforehand if that'll be the 
case. Therefore, if there's anywhere where the team should pay tribute 
to the "baby steps" phrase, I'm more than certain it's on this area, at 
least to begin with.

	The only thing I'd like to make a comment on is:

> - In-app shirt store promotion. Nothing gaudy, and it can be disabled
> easily. Thoughts?


	I'd be careful with this, I'm sure we don't want to clutter users' 
workspace with advertisement (aint we all got 'nough of that 
everywhere??). I'm thinking a menu entry like "Shop for Adium products" 
in the main Adium menu, akin to iTune's & iChat's equivalent entries, 
would serve this purpose very well, but nothing more, no popups or 
anything else of the sort. Choosing said entry could take the user to a 
"Store" section of the Adium site, maybe a tab between "Support & 
Development" and "Xtras"


-jmpp


PS: Hope my opinions don't upset anyone, being an outsider and all ;-)

>
> If for some reason we only sell half of our stock and are stuck with
> 50 flash drives, 100 polo shirts, and 200 tshirts we'll be doing this
> at a big loss. Half of the point is to get something out there for
> our users to be able to wear and what not, but the other half of the
> reason to do this stuff is to start monetizing Adium so we can do
> things like AdiumCON or Bounties or what not.
>
> We really don't know the demand here, and without knowing that
> setting the bar higher than it should initially be is probably a bad
> move.
>
> I'm sorry to rain on the parade guys, but it needed to be said. We
> know how many users download Adium, but we don't know our retention
> rates or much else on that.
>
> Chris
>
> _______________________________________________
> Adium-devl mailing list
> Adium-devl at adiumx.com
> http://adiumx.com/mailman/listinfo/adium-devl_adiumx.com