So I have just been blown away by the support over here.
We are nearing $17,000 in donations as of now! I plan on being transparent about where your money go.
So far we have spent:
$2000 on a server upgrade to provide us one year of runway
$500 bonus for @Croot_Lord for his hard work (original plan has $200 but the scale of this blew up and he has worked his ass off)
Going forward:
-I am going to make a donation to the guys on the Discord because they are trying to accomplish the same thing as us and we want both communities to support each other
-Going to pay CL $15/hr for all the odds and ends he does for us
-Need to spend a few hundred on changing our business structure
-Bringing on an intern that we will pay $1000/month to sit with the forum 8am-5pm and handle IT concerns as a side job (already got my guy and he is an IT wiz)
-Need to get liability insurance
The business is being run out of an LLC I previously used to design websites. It is a 50/50 partnership between CL and I.
I think as long as we maintain 500ish members that are willing to sign up for a (voluntary only) $5/month membership we should be able to float this thing exactly as it is indefinitely.
As far as folks that want to invest in the larger enterprise I am going to work on a proposal to develop our very own platform. I want to take the concept of TMB/Xenforo, but optimize software strictly to support the community. It will be an entirely new platform. Hoping to seed this with around $100k-$150k to hire a software guy and overheard - I know just the guy that can do this. I want to use this forum as a think tank to optimize our platform. Everything will be handled 100% professional (on the business side at least)
We are nearing $17,000 in donations as of now! I plan on being transparent about where your money go.
So far we have spent:
$2000 on a server upgrade to provide us one year of runway
$500 bonus for @Croot_Lord for his hard work (original plan has $200 but the scale of this blew up and he has worked his ass off)
Going forward:
-I am going to make a donation to the guys on the Discord because they are trying to accomplish the same thing as us and we want both communities to support each other
-Going to pay CL $15/hr for all the odds and ends he does for us
-Need to spend a few hundred on changing our business structure
-Bringing on an intern that we will pay $1000/month to sit with the forum 8am-5pm and handle IT concerns as a side job (already got my guy and he is an IT wiz)
-Need to get liability insurance
The business is being run out of an LLC I previously used to design websites. It is a 50/50 partnership between CL and I.
I think as long as we maintain 500ish members that are willing to sign up for a (voluntary only) $5/month membership we should be able to float this thing exactly as it is indefinitely.
As far as folks that want to invest in the larger enterprise I am going to work on a proposal to develop our very own platform. I want to take the concept of TMB/Xenforo, but optimize software strictly to support the community. It will be an entirely new platform. Hoping to seed this with around $100k-$150k to hire a software guy and overheard - I know just the guy that can do this. I want to use this forum as a think tank to optimize our platform. Everything will be handled 100% professional (on the business side at least)
