marcuslongmuir

We're looking for feedback on what we're doing. Happy to discuss views on monetization and what works / doesn't work in your experience.

Thanks again Kevin. We're iterating on our design and how we get these messages across. This is really useful.

Hi Kevin and Sam,

We’re MinoHubs (https://www.minohubs.com) and we build commercial and community tools for software projects. The barrier to building a successful software project is high - apart from writing the code, you need to build a community and potentially set up some commercialisation (backing, licenses, support etc.) which isn’t an easy task.

We provide customizable hubs that give projects:

Commercial tools

- Paid support - ability to offer on-demand consultation to businesses and developers.

- Licensing - ability to sell one time and recurring licenses to businesses and developers (coming soon).

- Backing - monthly contributions. In return, backers get more visibility in Discussions.

Community tools

- Powerful discussions with voting.

- Announcements - emails and notifications to project followers.

From Kevin’s initial feedback (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9746206) we understand that we need to be better at:

1. Leading the user through things to do after creating a hub.

2. Showcasing the benefit of using MinoHubs.

We’re working on those right now.

Our challenge is that, as Kevin also pointed out, we have a lot of features, but we’re also trying to appeal to an audience that would use different combinations of features; open source software, commercial software or projects that want to just use community features.

How do we reconcile that users want a wide variety of functionality with the issue that this might present too many features for us to convey concisely?

Thanks Kevin! We really appreciate the feedback.

Thanks. We were considering changing the permissions already.

We use GitHub to verify ownership of repositories that you specify on your hub as well as SSO, but seeing as your repositories have to be public to be of any real use, it makes sense to just ask for public repos.

We've just changed it. Thanks for the feedback :)

Pretty much nailed it. We'll be adding more functions to make projects' lives easier too.

Was there anything that you could suggest making clearer?

We're trying to give open source and other software projects a place to build a community and monetize.

If your code is hosted on GitHub, you can respond to bugs or other specific problems using issues, but finding a place to grow a community of users that can help each other, provide feedback, vote on feature requests and provide useful information to new users is hard.

At the same time, we want to help open source projects monetize in a more effective way than simple donations. We've built a paid support system that simplifies the flow for project owners into specifying their rate, accepting a request and getting paid upon fulfillment. We're also incentivizing backing; in return for backing a project, your posts are promoted in the project's discussion area.

If that explanation makes sense, could you offer suggestions for changes that would have made it more understandable the first time you saw it?

We'll be adding an example soon.

Thanks

How's this?: http://codepen.io/MarcusLongmuir/pen/rawRKR

You could also write a custom check that used the previous result as documented here: http://www.fieldval.com/docs/fieldval/Check%20Functions