I have yet again caught up with all the activations and put some more time into perfecting the process here. One of the realities of a hugely popular project is the technical support that comes with it. Unfortunately, until Shockey Monkey goes commercial (at a whopping $50 a month this fall) I have a tradeoff to consider: spend time on development or spend time on technical support?
To that end I have setup two mailing lists, one for development and another for announcements. Here is an email I just sent to the Shockey Monkey users:
Welcome to the Shockey Monkey help list.
First of all, thank you for using Shockey Monkey. I look forward to your feedback and feature recommendations so I can continue to evolve the monkey towards something that truely runs your business.
To that end, this project has grown significantly over the past year, as have its support demands. I am sure you will all agree that it is a far better use of my time to work harder on development than on support. I hope you’re willing to offer some assistance on this front, or at the very least ask questions through this list so I can answer them in public and point people to it in the future.
You’re more than welcome to unsubscribe from this list if you already get enough list clutter in your inbox, however, my future support until this project goes commercial will be restricted to official bugs/wishlist and this mailing list.
Thank you in advance for anything you may be able to take off my plate so I can dedicate more time to development.
Sincerely,
Vlad Mazek
Sounds fair, doesn’t it? I think this move will allow me to spend more time on whats really important and let users help one another until I get my foot on the ground. There are already so many people using Shockey Monkey in production to do some really awesome things and the tradeoff I had to make was whether I close the project or smash the roadmap deadlines and I think I chose what was in the best interest of all parties interested in Shockey Monkey. I just hope it works out!
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