Progress report for 2023-09 (September 2023)

What is this post about?

At the end of each month, we plan to publish a report for patrons on the status of the project and the work done that month. We're just starting to grow our Patreon page and this post is just the first of many to come.

There is no guarantee that we will be able to spend this much time on the project each month, but overall this will give more transparency to the people supporting the project.

The purpose of this practice is to report back to patrons on what we've been doing over the past month, so they can unsubscribe if they feel the project has been abandoned.

Progress Report for September 2023.

This month we spent a total of 62 hours working on the project. Most of this time was spent on finishing what was almost done in the previous months - design and integration of the patreon page & canny integration with the extension and our discord.

Integrating a more accurate geolocation service was not that difficult, but designing a quota system & developing the update for the 'map' section were very time consuming tasks.

Perhaps we should have spent more time working in the first few months of the patreon era, but we were in a hurry to get patreon up and running by the 1st of September and didn't make it in time, spending over 100 working hours on v2.0.0 in August. After a quiet launch of the patreon page, the main developer (me) was just tired and needed a lot of rest.

So other than the v2.0.0 release, we haven't done anything meaningful yet. We plan to get back to work on the extension next week, with the top priority of finalizing both patreon and omegle support.

What about patreon?

Our initial expectations of a quiet patreon launch have not been met - we are still far from paying off the base costs of the extension, let alone compensating for the time spent. We expected much more active initial support from the community.

But we're confident that over time we'll be able to attract enough patrons to make it happen. To that end, some changes will be made in the nearest future.

First, we will give more recognition to patrons and overall visibility to the patreon. Things like an optional patron badge, a list of patrons in a separate menu tab (where patrons will be able to list their nickname, and for more expensive tiers, list their social networks) will be implemented in future updates.

Secondly, the patreon page itself will get more visibility. Most users don't even know it exists yet. We wanted to make sure that everything works as it should before promoting patreon more actively. We have multiple ways to make the page on patreon more visible than it is now.

Third, we will be looking for a major sponsor who would benefit from supporting the project on a long-term basis, but who would not be a competitor to the video chats we support. This measure will help keep the project actively developing even in the early days of the patreon page.

Finally, we will work hard. Patreon will have an important place in the life of the project, but there is still a lot of work to be done. We have a lot of room to improve the extension, the roadmap is available on canny.

Conclusion

So the first progress report for patrons has come to an end.

A little retrospective, some thoughts and insights for patrons. Perhaps with an increase in the number of patrons it will become more detailed, filled with screens and gifs. But for now, the time & energy we could spend on cool gifs, we'd rather save for working on the extension.

See you next month!

qrlk