Hey guys!
Saw an ad for your website on facebook. I thought "Well, I already use roll20 and won't change anytime soon - but I actually do have a hard time organizing and structuring my plans for my campaign" - so I checked your website out.
The first thing I see is a login/register page. Now, I usually do like to see what I'm registering for before I register, because I will hand out my email and such, but the website looked so small that I thought "Those guys must've just recently started this up, I bet they don't have a lot to show yet, but some functionality that might be useful. I'll sign up and try it."
So I did register. The next thing I see is a banner in yellow color definitely picked out to catch my attention. It says "Upgrade to a Hero subscription in the next 3 hours and get 20% off. >Details<".
This is literally the FIRST THING I SEE from what you've created here at this website. It's like walking into an RPG and board game store to have the clerk stand in your way at the entrance saying "We have a sale, pay only 30 bucks! You don't have much time!"
What would you say to that clerk? I'd probably turn right around and go home, surf the internet for all the other choices of places to buy things. If I had decided that
this is the store I'm going to - no matter what happens; I can think of a couple of things I would reply to that clerk:
"What the
****?!"
or "For WHAT?!"
or "Do I pay to enter?!"
or perhaps "I don't have much time?! I have all the time I want! I didn't walk in here to hurry and buy what you tell me to buy!"
or even "What the
****?!"
But you know, in spite of this annoying banner telling me to pay for whatever it is that is being sold, I clicked on to see something else, to see what was actually offered here at the site. So I decided to create a campaign, see if I could add some notes from the campaign I'm running, paizo's Pathfinder adventure path Serpent's Skull.
So I clicked create campaign, and entered "Serpent's Skull" in the name bar. For the short description I added "Pathfinder".
...
...
After
- Five tries
- Ten error popups with no message
- Giving up
- Checking out what features you actually want me to pay for (which I still don't know, apart from access to some forum which (judging from the size of this forum) I'd be pretty much the only one in and thus also the only value of the forum)
- Navigating through your website
- Finding another interface for creating a campaign
- Trying five more times
- Red marked campaign name field saying I did something wrong
- Removing the ' ("Serpents Skull")
- Removing the space ("SerpentsSkull")
...
...
I finally managed to create a campaign.
Now, I didn't bother to do anything else with the campaign yet, because at this point I am way too tired of your website.
I mean, why do you not offer me
your basic functionality ACTUALLY FUNCTIONAL or even
website features worth something to me before you ask me to pay you?
Now, this is just the background for the feature I am requesting - as the name of the forum asks me to do:
- Offer a website with useful, stable functions which I actually want to use
- Continuously develop this website so that it does not become better for me to just do the same work in hundreds of documents on my computer
- Offer this for free until you actually have good add-on features that anyone would want to pay for
and
- Humbly ask for donations.
By humbly, I mean the opposite of displaying a blaring yellow banner in my face telling me to pay you within three hours. Ask for contributions for your great work. People like to pay for good work. You may get a few subscriptions the way you're doing things, but people will get tired and leave. Build a loyal community and ask them for money when you can offer things in return, instead of asking people for money so that you can perhaps at some point offer them things.