Follow Kahn's marketing model.
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Dave - I did mean that tongue in cheek. I'm more thinking about places like NY Times, etc that lost a lot of looks because they tried to make people pay for something that has a lot of free alternatives. How quickly would an alternate SU forum spring up if this were to become a subscription site?
edit: (now that I think about it, the vray for sketchup forum comes to mind... kinda lonely there.)
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I knew you were not entirely serious but on the other hand, there are quite a few folks around who think everything should be given to them for free. I can think of at least several members of SCF who aren't shy about it, either.
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and if I need to give credence to my point: Just saw this...
http://forum.sketchup4architect.com/forum.php -
@andybot said:
Dave - I did mean that tongue in cheek. I'm more thinking about places like NY Times, etc that lost a lot of looks because they tried to make people pay for something that has a lot of free alternatives. How quickly would an alternate SU forum spring up if this were to become a subscription site?
edit: (now that I think about it, the vray for sketchup forum comes to mind... kinda lonely there.)
I take your point Andy, but how long and at what standard can a forum like this be expected to run / operate at it current level without some form of commercialization.
Some stats, currently directors are putting in well over 120 hours collectively and Moderators are putting in at least double if not treble this figure, not to mention the Top Contributors! They, a larger group must be putting in well over 500 hours per week.
While I appreciate the vast majority on SCF membership want and expect everything for free, there are a group of professionals that generally have no wish to sign up with a pseudo name and ask their questions openly. The reasons are obvious!
I have been contacted / advised by quite a number of these professionals that they would feel far more comfortable in a 'private' forum here and would be willing to pay for this service. Of course the service would have to be 1st class and probably 24/7 which now might be achievable with our current level of manpower available.
This is something we are thinking of moving on very shortly. The upside for the membership not wishing or in a position to pay for services would gain in a way as their questions would still be answered. They just would not get the Directors / Mods / TCs undivided attention first. However having general questions asked / answered would be good as it would be useful for redirecting the professional subscribing membership to when they ask the questions privately.
It would be a bit like the Google SketchUp model in a way! Its the Pro Users that pay for the development of SketchUp, whereas the (free) Google SketchUp Users benefit also. Of course the free users they can't have the 'Rolls Royce' service but I think most would not expect it! As we all know, 'Beggers can't be Choosers'.
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That's a good idea - having some sort of tiered approach with support for those who subscribe($) while still keeping the bulk of free users.
I like. -
Interesting idea Mike. Is there a thread on this yet? If not it'd be interesting to see people comments.
My initial reaction is to oppose such an idea. I spend less of my time here these days learning things and more browsing through novice or intermediate questions that I feel I'm in a unique position to help out with. On occasion I'll still run into an question worth posting about or find a cool plugin to try, but that's less frequent than it once was. Separating us pro users off from the novice community could hurt the community as a whole.
On the other hand if I were in a primarily pro user community I wonder if I'd be better able to sift through irrelevant content and find more helpful information more efficiently and regularly.
I wonder, have you guys looked at any models of other forums who have gone through such a transition?
-Brodie
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Actually, I wonder if the subscription would be worth more to the novices who are working their way up (and need extra support) than the pros who already know what they're doing. Just a thought...
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@andybot said:
Actually, I wonder if the subscription would be worth more to the novices who are working their way up (and need extra support) than the pros who already know what they're doing. Just a thought...
Probably true, but I wouldn't expect many of those newer folks using SU free to subscribe to a pay forum for support. But again, I'm talking from ignorance. I've never seen this sort of process play out in real life. Just speculating.
-Brodie
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@unknownuser said:
Sell sketchup pro for beer money.
Compared to most CAD packages, Pro is already selling for beer money.
And Free is Free. Nothing in Free that is likely holding someone back who is just learning to work with the program.$3-5k for an AutoDesk seat. More if you need to outfit multiples. Or a network license.
Add on some 3rd party stuff for production work (in my case, one client throws probably $10-15k / year at CAD for just the designing bits (the CNC end is a whole 'nother thing). And they choked on buying a $99 PDF exporter for SketchUp, until I demonstrated how easy it would be to use and send off to their clients (pros and non tech customers).I jumped at the Pro version a few years ago, mainly to use LayOut. Its not perfect, but its getting better.
And I needed import / export of DWG to share with architects and engineers. -
Quite true. As bmike and a couple others have said, SU is essentially using this model already. It's a bit like if someone would have told Kahn he should sell his product for $2 instead of $50 when others were selling for $750.
-Brodie
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