What is Jeremy’s business model?

#1

TL;DR: Jeremy urgently needs new clients for commercial TiddlyWiki projects

It is my passionate belief that TiddlyWiki is more useful to everybody if it is free to use, with no financial barriers to long term adoption.

The conundrum is that TiddlyWiki is a relatively big, complex machine that requires a non-trivial amount of work to maintain and improve.

Our community is the magical ingredient that has made it possible to resolve that conundrum. Ethusiastic volunteers from the community spread the load by providing support to help others, making extensions and plugins, improving the code and documentation.

Speaking personally, the enthusiasm of the community is what gives me the confidence and motivation to want to work on TiddlyWiki. It’s the most satisfying thing I’ve ever done, and I’m incredibly lucky just to know that my work is benefiting others.

There is an old saying to the effect that everyone has two deaths: when we draws our last breath and the last time someone says our name. From a slightly more cheerful perspective, what keeps TiddlyWiki alive is the community of people using it.

But the harsh reality is that none of that is sufficient to keep me alive and healthy if I am to be able to work full time on TiddlyWiki. I need to earn money.

Many people in my position seek donations from their communities but that has never seemed an attractive option to me.

Firstly, I think the money would be flowing the wrong way, in the sense that I’ve always felt that I benefit far more from people using TiddlyWiki than they do. The collective feedback of all those TiddlyWiki users drives everything I do; getting that kind of actionable feedback in a commercial setting would be immensely expensive and time consuming.

Secondly, my experience from speaking with other open source developers is that it is almost impossible to get individual donations to the level that would match the salary of the sort of job I would be doing if I wasn’t working on TiddlyWiki.

So, since I left BT in 2011 to start work on TiddlyWiki 5, I have focused on doing commercial consultancy work through my company Federatial (https://federatial.com).

For the first few years I would do anything I could, drawing on my experience to be an interim Chief Technology Officer for fledgling startups. Even in those roles, I would use as much as I could of the TiddlyWiki prototypes that I was working on (one of those startups is still using TW-based tools I made for them back in 2015/16).

For the last 5 or 6 years I’ve been able to focus on projects that are entirely TiddlyWiki-based. That has transformed things for me, enabling me to work on TiddlyWiki all the time. I work on multiple projects at once, frequently finding commonality between them. On a really good day, I’m able to make core improvements that benefit multiple projects that I’m working on, as well as being worthwhile for the broader community.

I’m immensely grateful to all of my clients for their support over the years, and I’m particularly lucky that my contracts have tended to be long term working relationships that enable us to achieve meaningful things.

But, at the end of this year one of my most important projects is drawing to a close, and so it is suddenly urgent that I find new consultancy work to make up the shortfall. This post is therefore partly an advertisement – if you control a commercial budget please do get in touch!

I also want to broaden things – I’m not the only one who needs to earn money, or who would like to work on TiddlyWiki. I’d like to make TiddlyWiki be a welcoming platform for any company or individual who wants to try to earn money because of it.

I think there are opportunities for everybody who wants to explore earning money around TiddlyWiki:

  • Hosting services like TiddlyHost
  • Online training courses
  • Individual training sessions over Zoom
  • “Fix my wiki” debugging services
  • The sort of custom development that I do

So I propose a couple of concrete steps for the moment:

  • Establish a new “Marketplace” category here at talk.tiddlywiki.org for individuals and businesses to post commercial offerings for products and services related to TiddlyWiki. I suspect we’ll need to have tight moderation rules to keep it useful, but I hope it would encourage people to offer their services, and help to kickstart a thriving marketplace
  • Add a new front page panel to “HelloThere” on tiddlywiki.com labelled “Marketplace” that leads to a tiddler based on this post, along with links to the marketplace category
  • I’d also like to try something I’ve never done before that might be controversial: adding an advertisement for Federatial to “HelloThere”. I’d welcome people’s views on this

I will also post a more detailed advertisement for Federatial once I’ve set up the new category, with some case studies etc.

This is a bit of a new area for us, so I’m eager to hear what other people think. Please feel free to ask questions or comment, including emailing me privately if you prefer.

Best wishes

Jeremy.

20 Likes
New update to tiddlywiki.com with funding and marketplace information
Import / Delete a Tiddler dynamically
#2

@jeremyruston I am totaly supportive of your proposed approach including the market place but also prominence given to you our founders business services. Personaly I think its the least the community can offer.

Perhaps it to late for me to build an income before being forced into full time employment but I think the ground work should be started, but also to set the expectation that commercial efforts must return value to the community in a vertuose circle.

You are already in a good position to comercialise further but many in the community may still need to find thier niche and we must all attract business to tiddlywiki not only within the community.

Lets continue the discussion and build a consolidated effort to provide more solutions, including commercial solutions, but also promote infividual and business philanthropy into the community.

#3

If these two were added simultaneously I would find that extremely fair and not controversial at all, in light of the significant time you have invested in TiddlyWiki5 and the community around it for over a decade.

Having separation or disambiguation between services offered by the product founder vs other contributors makes a lot of sense to me. In practice I highly doubt there will be much if any overlap between the prospective work that would best fit the skills and abilities and be attractive to each of those two groups.

5 Likes
#4

Jeremy, I will be praying that you find something that pays the bills and plays to your strengths!

1 Like
#5

Mamma Mia!

I am shocked at the disclosure. But glad you made it!

I utterly agree that the commercial aspect of TW matters.

I written many posts recently (from intuition) feeling we not paying enough attention here to the commercial potential.

And that direction maybe requires a re-focus?

Just FYI, in the last month, two services I used for years have asked for money (monthly subscriptions) that were previously free. So, the pinch is not just on you. The net is getting much more commercial. Rightly, probably.

Initial comment
TT

#6

I noticed there’s no “Donate to TiddlyWiki” button on the main page. Is this something you’d be interested in?

I use TiddlyWiki every day for work and personal wikis, and I’d be happy to donate. I think others would, too.

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#7

I’d certainly donate too – if there was a Patreon account where I could pay monthly I’d do it without hesitation. TW is actively making it easier for me to do my day job so it’s only sensible I give back :).

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#8

It’s laudable you ask the community but really, whatever you need do to keep a roof over Ruston Towers, is absolutely fine with me. I can’t imagine anyone would think otherwise.

#9

There is the Open Collective https://opencollective.com/tiddlywikidotorg – which does not go to Jeremy, and we haven’t disbursed anything out of the main pot yet. It’s meant to do things like … pay for this Discourse forum, among other things.

cc @Peter

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#10

Just a query. Why not?

TT

#11

Asking again. Why does Jeremy NOT benefit from it?

TT

#12

Hi Jeremy et al. I have a few thoughts on this.

One is to say thank you for Tiddly Wiki. I’m 52 years old and have been working in web dev since the mid 90’s. I’ve always been centered in the realm of content, and in the service of making meaning have learned something of the various technologies and platforms. I always felt like an outlier, because I liked visual design, and code, and language, pretty much equally. By the time I found TW, I had become weary of the usual tools like Wordpress, was alienated by the dependence by most people on social media, and, ironically, had defaulted to letting Google or other commercial app developers provide the infrastructure for my personal information universe.

TW changed all of that. I had never really noticed it before, and figured it was just another wiki, which I had always found impenetrable. How wrong I was, and I’ve migrated all my writing and scrapbooks over to it, and now I spend a part of most days developing with it, or thinking about it. It brings together all the pieces in a way I had not even thought to hope for, and I sense behind it two currents, strong in equal measure: generosity and curiosity.

This makes me wonder if it is possible, then, to create a commercial product out of it, since in so many ways these qualities are anathema to marketing. In my 12-step group we say “our public relations policy is based on attraction, rather than promotion.” I feel like this is the only kind of group I would want to be a part of. But that will not get the bills paid.

My second thought is to suggest that maybe there is a place in higher education where you could land which would give you space and incentive to work autonomously. This has been my gig for more than 15 years. But I don’t like the thought of your time being wasted in the kind of performative technocratic theatre that I see so many of my colleagues consumed by.

So my third thought is to bring up Processwire, which is the CMS in which I have built most of my professional sites. It has similarities to TW, in that it caters to those who value flexibility and are able to build things from the ground up. It is a group project, but it is led by the chief developer and architect of the system. Processwire is free, but there is a suite of modules which are for sale.

This makes me wonder if there might be a way to make it so people can download TW and use it to easily create a site on a third-party hosted LAMP stack server. I know this hinges on altering, perhaps, the concept of saving and the one-file site structure. I’m not sure what the implications of this would be for the framework but I think it would allow for wider adoption. I’m sure you’ve heard this before, but I thought I’d put it out there again.

I hope very much that something will come together for you, and for all of us.

5 Likes
#13

Very good question! I’d guess @jeremyruston has an aversion to being explicitly commercial. He believes, I think, in sharing first, like here.

I should shut-up because I am not him.

But I do think the commercial aspect matters and Jeremy has given so much away I suspect he has damaged his own income by being so liberal.

Just a comment
TT

#14

An utterly marvelous letter. Kudos.

:heart:

2 Likes
#15

Jeremy - feel your pain.

Did contract work for years - feast/famine. I expect that you will find something soon. Probably a project that is ill conceived (so got to fix that), tight deadlines, and will have to deal with new people. Normally would not take it on, but the rent it due.

Of course, the moment you commit to that insane project, a long term relationship partner will approach with a cherry task - so now will have too much work!

A marketplace to promote your and skills of people in the community is an awesome idea.

Believe am speaking for the whole community in saying that if we can help in any way - do not hesitate to ask.

1 Like
#16
  1. Why not SAAS?
  2. Why not target students?

There is such a massive population of students on earth right now. And I am sure a big percentage of them are using other paid software for their academic uses. Why not target them? Why not give them something which makes TW their de facto for notes? Why not offer TW on a SAAS model?

I think a SAAS product for the global student community is something TW developers should look into.

3 Likes
#17

The very idea to “Explicitly Target A User Group” I don’t think has been done in TW yet?
I may be wrong!

IMO, it is a good idea to try that more.

Part of the issue is most people here are not marketing people; they’d likely agree on the idea but would have no real idea on what to actually DO.

Just a comment
TT

1 Like
#18

I agree.

TBH, IF, when I started on TW, it was clear you could PAY to get a bespoke TW, via a consultant-list of “Experts Who Can!”, I would have gone for it.

I’m not really interested in programming, only applications that work.

I think my orientation is pretty normal?

Just a side comment, TT.

1 Like
#19

I’m all in for a way to provide financial support to Jeremy, TiddlyWiki, and the community.

I know personally I would love employing other users to teach me more complex things about TW, or in helping me create a TiddlyWiki better suited to my way of notetaking via a Marketplace tab @ talk.tiddlywiki.

Can I offer the idea of both providing Federatial future work and clients, as well as accepting donations, rather than just future clientele? For users like myself going to Federatial would be like using a bulldozer on an anthill, and I feel like that would be a waste of resources on Federatial’s behalf.
however I very much want to provide what I can, however meager or impactful it may seem, to help TiddlyWiki continue to thrive, same as how I do with Wikipedia and other causes I donate to.

I honestly wasn’t even aware of [[TiddlyWikiDotOrg - Open Collective]] until it was mentioned above, but this absolutely seems like something Jeremy should have available, maybe a contribution option specifically directed to him and then the other ones for various other services such as talk.tiddlywiki, etc.

I think a popup on clicking the download TiddlyWiki button that says, “please take a moment to consider donating to TiddlyWiki to continue it’s growth” would be a great way to keep the same appearance as the main site has, while also bringing attention to the ability to give support to something we are all very fond of.

As far as providing proper work opportunities, I can only wish the best for Jeremy, and continue to spread the word about TiddlyWiki as much as I can in hopes that someone can come along and employ Federatial properly.

Edit:

Honestly this is a golden idea. We could even take it a step further and have a service available for a sort of tutor expert who can teach the basics of Tiddlywiki once it’s setup how that person would like.

having some way of qualifying as a skilled expert of tiddlywiki and then helping build a customized tiddlywiki to fit the desires of the person, and then having a cut of the funds to the expert and then the other cut to tiddlywiki (or if they are volunteers all of it to TW) would be awesome.

1 Like
#20

Right!

The “PENNY REVENUE model”, asking on access for money, is increasingly on the net and, whether one likes it or not, it is pervasive and pretty standard.

The other penny model is the “ADVERTISEMENT model” where any link to download plays an advertisement first that pays you fractional pence.

I dunno what is right for TW and @jeremyruston, what I do know is that money matters.

Basta, TT