graphic wrote:See above, weight your decisions 50/50 or 40/60 or whatever you want to do, between your elite founding whatever you want to call them and the product survey. Every elite founding whatever gets a "voting share" and the total of their votes adds up to 50% or 40% or 60% of your decision-making, and then the product surveys fill in the rest. That way we have these threads during the "idea" phase, not during the "this is what we've done, tell us what you think" phase.
Oh yes, that sounds a lot easier than our current approach. Oh, wait - it doesn't.
Seriously, if we would introduce complex voting procedures before every decision, we would still operate a naked forum in a corner of my private shared hosting account.
Also, I am still missing the answer to my question what exactly you would have expected us to put up in that survey.
If I am right in assuming that it would have come down to whether we may introduce a business model that may allow the site to break even at some point, or whether we are supposed to keep funding it out of our own pockets (Founders' pockets included), then I can tell you that the second option is no option.
As for the extra work you assume we have invested in fine-tuning the product based on the feedback we received here: so far, it adds up to approx. 10 minutes. Meaning I have spent much more time replying to this thread (about which I'm not complaining, just saying it), than making the actual adjustments. In addition, we will adjust the priorities of the upcoming task, seeing that we can implement a solution for photographers to earn free memberships earlier than we had planned. Not really extra work, just a shift in priorities.
graphic wrote:And nobody said the idea I've proposed would make 100% of the people happy 100% of the time, but it would give you guys an idea of what your customers think, before you act.
Actually, no. Because the only people we would have asked in this case are our existing members. Who are pretty much unaffected by the model, as they will be grandfathered anyway. So the actual customers are future members. Who would, naturally, not have participated in the survey.
"Market research" rather often comes down to people who don't know what they want asking people who don't know what it's all about to tell them what to do.
In addition, we have to take our manpower into consideration. I'm sure a lengthy evaluation process would have come up with a ton of great ideas. But that would still have left us short of developers who could then bring them to life.
All that doesn't mean we won't listen to feedback. We did that in the past, we will do it in the future. We will do our utmost to keep all decisions transparent, but I'm afraid we cannot make them all subject to intensive advance surveys.
Allstarflyer wrote:-Raise Lifetime Membership to $699.00 - assuming, for example, someone is a member for twenty years, that still beats the current first class model for pricing.
-Raise monthly membership for Business and First by $2 and $5 respectively.
-Raise annual membership for Business and First by $10 each.
-Raise the number of photo uploads per week for business to 30.
-Raise the number of photo uploads per week for economy to 20, raise the price for an economy email address to $29.99, give the economy users intellitext and other ads, and raise the economy yearly membership to $9.99 after the first three months.
Tempting as that may be, but as mr chips wrote, we also have to keep our competitors in mind. As well as the fact that we are still much smaller than the established sites.
And as long as I have a say in this project, there will be no IntelliTXT ads. Not even if a survey revealed that the majority of our members would prefer them.
Ideology: The mistaken belief that your beliefs are neither beliefs nor mistaken.
