Hi Alex, If I may offer a more general critique: While it's cool you have a video with a modicum of production value in it (which does help), I'm not sure what this project offers that differentiates itself from various mature technologies already available to us.
In the first half of your video, it sounds like your pitch is "I am building a platform on which you can set up, create, and sell apps," which sounds a bit redundant with operating systems in general, or maybe Google's suite of web apps. In the latter half, you describe a more general widget-and-plugin driven web-based platform, rather like Wordpress. So, OK: Why use your system and not Wordpress for my next project? I note that Wordpress has a big advantage over MoDomhan by virtue of actually existing, so it's in MoDomhan's interest to be able to answer that question in a clear, concise, and even surprising way. I'm not sure you'll be able to do that if your stance remains "You can do anything at all with this platform". You'll find yourself hard-pressed to inspire anyone that way. (And at risk of sounding snarky, towards the end of the video the use of phrases like "your imagination is the only limit" starts to invoke zombo.com.) You can already do anything at all with a computer in general -- I'd like to hear a single thing that MoDomhan can do that no other platform can touch. And when I say "a single thing" I mean that literally. If you pitched this *specifically* as a tool to e.g. let homeowners create virtual tours of their property (to use one example from your video), then you'd be hitting closer to the mark. I note that even mighty Wordpress positions itself this way. It's a rather general platform that nonetheless sticks to positioning itself as a blogging system, because that's a clearly defined and therefore sellable feature. That Wordpress experts can build all sorts of other stuff out of its is a second-order feature, as far as its public interfacing is concerned. I speak as one who himself launched a startup years ago around a general platform, in my case for networked board games. I, too, hoped that just putting the platform out there would be sufficient, and that people would come and build cool stuff and we'd all make each other rich. But it didn't work that way at all -- while we got a handful of interested hackers, all the actual use we got was from players of one particular game we happened to host. These folks just wanted to play the game, and couldn't care less how it was built. At the time I was too blind to see that, so I did not shift the business to primarily support and maybe monetize that one popular game, letting it serve as an ad for the platform as a side effect. Instead I primarily stuck to my "We are an open platform!" plank until we ran out of money, and then interest, and eventually the whole thing quietly passed away. I sympathize completely with the level of passion you clearly have for MoDomhan, and I hope you can find its true path to success. Best of luck! On Oct 13, 2012, at 6:42 PM, Alex Brelsfoard <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi All, > > Sorry for the slightly off-topic message, but I could really use some > feedback. > I'm trying to go live with a big new project (written in Perl), and I'm > using crowd sourcing to get it off the ground (http://indeigogo.com/modomhan > ). > > I'm really keen on pushing the open source technology part, and the fact > that anyone who can program in Perl will be able to contribute to and help > define MoDomhan. But I'm having a hard time getting the word out. > > Is this just a really tough time? > Am I not doing enough (facebook, twitter, regular SEO, adwords, emails, > phone calls, projects.mefi, boingboing, etc.)? > Or is this simply a really crap idea?.... (I seriously dig this project > though) > > Any advice or input would be really helpful. > Thanks. > --Alex > > _______________________________________________ > Boston-pm mailing list > [email protected] > http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm -- Jason McIntosh Appleseed Software Consulting [email protected] • www.appleseed-sc.com _______________________________________________ Boston-pm mailing list [email protected] http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
