matthew-carroll
commented
1 month ago FYI @angelosilvestre
Open matthew-carroll opened 1 month ago
matthew-carroll
commented
1 month ago FYI @angelosilvestre
escamoteur
commented
1 month ago I forwared this to our project manager with a strong recommendation for funding but I can't do much more here. We are a small company with not that big funding
We've been working on Super Editor for three years. In that time we've enjoyed funding from companies including Superlist, ClickUp, Turtle, Clearful, Bringing Fire, and Reflection. Our goal from the beginning was to bring significant value to a large group of companies who would then each pay a little for that value, instead of taking on the burden themselves, and paying a lot.
While we've achieved a reasonable number of funding companies, we haven't achieved a workable level of funding volume diversity. Superlist has, and continues, to fund nearly all Super Editor development. In the interest of the medium-to-long term health and viability of Super Editor, we need to change this.
To every company that's currently using Super Editor, I would ask the following probing questions:
If you find that your answers to those questions are trivial - that Super Editor simply hasn't provided significant value - then it's fair enough that your company isn't funding any work. On the other hand, if your answers to those questions are dramatic, then we really should find a way for your company to help support this effort.
My ask of medium and large companies
If you're a company that employs 6+ developers, I would ask that you begin to fund Super Editor development.
It's never fun to sign up for a new financial obligation, especially when the psychology of open source makes you think of Super Editor as something that you could get for free. But it's time to shift that mindset and instead ask yourself what you'd pay if you had to build your own Super Editor. To take an arbitrary hypothetical, if Super Editor saves you $10k/mo, then it would be reasonable that you would support Super Editor at $5k/mo. You're still saving 50% of the cost, and your team doesn't have to shoulder the burden and complexity.
My ask to small companies
If you're a small company, spending money on anything is hard. You might not even make enough to support yourself within your own company.
As a starting point, I would again ask the question: If we weren't building Super Editor, what would you do? If your answer is that you'd pay somebody to build something similar, then I would suggest quantifying that and consider putting some fraction of that towards Super Editor.
If your company truly doesn't have the revenue to put anything towards Super Editor, then I would ask you to recruit one other funding client. You may not be able to help pay the bills, but you can help socialize the great work that we're doing and recruit a larger company that can pay the bills.
Where we go from here
Nothing is changing right at this moment. We'll continue to move forward down our existing feature path, and also fix bugs along the way. We'll operate under the assumption that we get all of this figured out and everything is great.
If we're unable to reach a more equitable funding distribution, then the next step will be a pay-as-you-go model. If you want a new feature, or even a bug fix, your company will have to fund that. This approach is regrettable because it creates a repeating funding friction, and because it eliminates the cost sharing that we could otherwise deliver to all Super Editor funders.
If even the pay-as-you-go approach doesn't yield funding to support Super Editor, then this project will devolve back to charity. Charity is the most unpredictable, unreliable model possible, and it often eventually leads to abandoned projects. This would be a tragedy given the immense work we've done to deliver document editing to the Flutter community.
Anti-Goals
A quick aside - I know some people will want to jump in with marketing recommendations. I've been socializing Super Editor for 3 years. I've mentioned it at every Meetup, in numerous interviews, we have an X account, we have a YouTube channel, etc. The reality is that if we can't drive enough value for the existing corporate users of Super Editor to help fund it, then there's no message we could deliver to future users that would convince them to come fund it, either.
Along those lines, if there are specific things we can do that would move us from "not valuable enough" to "worth funding", please let us know what those things would be.
Next steps
If you'd like to discuss funding Super Editor, please email me at "flutterbountyhunters at gmail" and we'll set up a quick call to discuss details.
If you can't fund Super Editor, please reach out to your business network and pull in some other companies that are getting, or would get, a lot of value from Super Editor.
FYI - I'll tag some corporate users here. Feel free to tag others if you know about them. @miguelcmedeiros @brian-superlist @Jethro87 @jmatth @KevinBrendel @hillelcoren @escamoteur.
PS - I've launched a very generous Flutter Bounty Hunters referral program to encourage outside devs to send funding clients our way. This referral fee is coming directly out of our side of the budget - rates for funding clients haven't changed.