FlamingLunchbox

• Soon to come, Curvy for iPhone.  As we’ve not developed for an iOS previously, please expect a slight delay as Robey begins the process of learning another programming language.  
• If you were a backer or simply interested in our Kickstarter project, you can follow along with our company projects and Kickstarter progress here on the FlamingLunchbox blog.   

When attempting to micro fund a Open Source project, where do you go?

A Google search for “open source funding” was rather unhelpful; there are some links to commentary on the issue, some links to open source companies that received VC funding, nothing that shows how to get a project jump-started.  A large part of this is because it is somewhat contrary to the traditional way Open Source projects are born. Generally projects are started internally, from need or extreme interest, and the external support comes after the initial development.  From what we can tell, a person would tend to donate or tip to existing projects that are already useful to them to support further development.  We, however, wanted to create something, but our current obligations were not allowing us to pursue it.  Some upfront funding would be necessary to give us the ability to spend less time on existing projects.

We want to be funded by people who would use the project.  As we’re not in a location with a strong tech scene for us to gather local support we had to turn to the Internet. We chose Kickstarter.

Pros and Cons of Kickstarter

The interface of Kickstarter is slick and well designed.  It makes light browsing enjoyable and easy.  There’s great community support at the local level and from larger newspapers and organizations.  There are, however, many projects on Kickstarter. Getting a more technically oriented project to stick out is a problem, especially as only so many projects at a time can be featured.  This is true of any sort of curated collection but it sure can be annoying when you’re trying to use something in a way that is different from the norm.  We were constantly trying to figure out how to make our project sexy enough to be picked for that front page.  

Kickstarter tends to be oriented towards projects with some sort of creative or cultural bling.  The rewards structure more easily benefits projects that result in prestige items. Movies and games produce by-products such as concept art, signed frames, art prints and limited editions.  Things where the perceived value is significantly larger than the physical cost.  These projects can even give away a copy of the finished work upon completion, something that could otherwise be sold.  An Open Source project focusing on something so basic as editing text produces none of these.  We chose our rewards the best we could and plowed ahead.

We have no idea what the success rate of open source projects on Kickstarter is.  It would be something interesting to research at a later date.

Social Media and Open Source Kickstarters, not the best of combinations.

Sounds great?  It is great, but certainly not easy for Open Source.  From our research there are two main ways that Open Source projects are funded.  You do it in your spare time after your real job pays the bills, or you get a major project funded by a large company.  

There are Open Source projects on Kickstarter that were successfully funded, however they are much different than our project.  They either had a much larger following prior to launch (perhaps located in a more tech central city), or they were more creative in mindset.  The following are examples of such projects: Pulse Sensor, Rockit 8 Bit Synth Kit, and HexBright.  All of these projects are more accessible by the general public than a programmer’s text editor, which is why social media worked for them.  All three of these had a significant amount of original Twitter traffic and ReTweets. Pulse Sensor was also noted as a Project of the Day by Kickstarter.  

A Programmer’s Text Editor incurred difficulties because it was so unique to the programming community.   The programming community tends to be one that severely dislikes solicitation for Open Source projects.  Coupled with the fact that our social media contacts included so few programmers meant that a social media marketing strategy would not be the best course of action.  Nonetheless we charged ahead and attempted to do the most we could using social media without losing all of our followers and friends in the process.  It wasn’t working.  

Therefore, to reach our audience we turned to forums.        

Our experience posting to Reddit and Hacker News

Reddit was a community we focused on and had used before, however we weren’t really able to get the project out to them.  We did get some discussion going on /r/chrome which is a small subcommunity of Reddit but our attempts to find interest in other areas was generally met with harsh criticism for solicitation or ignored outright.  It could be that we didn’t push hard enough but we didn’t want to cause too much irritation.  It also didn’t help that Reddit interpreted the link to the project page as an embedded video and placed it directly into their site.  This seemed to result in many people seeing the video without the project overview and other content.  

Hacker News seemed to be much more accepting of a discussion of the project. We received more attention and feedback there than anywhere else.  We would recommend that anybody trying to get an Open Source project off the ground check them out.  The environment is much more open to talks about raising money and more forgiving about solicitation... likely because of the VC base of Y Combinator.

Closing Thoughts

Once your Kickstarter is launched you must be ready to answer questions... lots of questions.  You’ll have to answer them with different levels of detail each time to slightly different perspectives.  The you have to figure out how to spin it and where to spin it.  Such brainstorming was definitely a large part of the work.   

Just answering questions and finding places to push the project took substantially more time than we expected.  The brainstorming about how to put the project together, writing the overview, doing even just the simple video that we did took more time than we expected as well.  And we’re just getting started.

But we made it thanks our backers and everyone else who helped word spread!  We’re incredibly excited and thankful to get started on this.  Expect further observations as the project progresses.

Application updates on the horizon:

1. 3 and 4 player versions
2. Computer opponents (Artificial Intelligence)
3. Android Capable
4. Creation of Information tabs

I submitted the update and... the javascript file remained the same.  I hit refresh on my browser and still nothing.  Some web searches turned up rather unhelpful information. But I did find this issue labeled WontFix and reply from a Google programmer.

Wait... I set cache-control headers?  I don’t remember doing anything like that.  In fact, I didn’t know I could tell Google’s cache how long to keep things around.  Some more research and I became fairly certain that these headers are controlled by setting default_expiration in the app.yaml file.  Mine was set to 24 hours given that the static includes change once a year this made sense to me.  Additionally the documentation only mentions that this effects the browser caching; pressing refresh should solve that right?

Well, turns out that this also effects how long Google will cache the page as well as how long any intermediary caches (Squid and such) will hold on to it.  Update the documentation please Google!  I would have expected Google’s cache to get a push out from the App Engine telling it to refresh its content upon either an update or a version change.

By the way, the “cache breaking parameters” mentioned in that issue report linked about is to use the notation “/static.file?someparameterneverseenbefore” for each update to ensure that the url is not recognized and any caches will check the source.  It does work, but feels awkward.  I would prefer that an update would send an expiration notice to Google’s cache at least.  I understand that intermediary caches would still cause issues but there are fewer and fewer of those around.