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An Apology, a Major Update, and a Special Thank You!
🕑 Added 2022-09-21 22:15:12 +0000 UTCWarning, long post ahead! – Here's an overview of the most important points:
- Some insights into my radio silence last year.
- The steps I'm taking to hit a more healthy pace of content production.
- An overview of what I did work on over the last few months
- Teasing what is probably one of the most groundbreaking flashcard things I've ever worked on – going live tomorrow.
- And some pledge tier restructuring to go alongside with it that will see you all grandfathered into higher tiers with no changes to your existing pledges
Alright, let's dive in:
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Hi everyone,
Glutanimate here! It's been a while since since we last spoke. While I did chat with some of you over messages and have of course also been active in other places, we're nearing on a year since the last time I posted something on Patreon. Last August I set out to fix what has now become a pattern of me diving into longer periods of radio silence and clearly that failed fairly catastrophically. At the risk of these words sounding hollow: I am sorry, truly.
A Lesson in Humility and the Harsh Reality of Add-on Development
I think what I've learned over the past years is that, as a content creator you can very quickly and easily set yourself up for failure by raising expectations to heights that will inevitably get disappointed. Because you're the only check for yourself, if you overdo it, you can very quickly dive down a vicious cycle of not being able to deliver and then falling into silence in fear of producing disappointment. That's part of what happened to me over the last winter.
The other part is that I've been feeling like I'm working against an ever-moving wheel of progress: Writing add-ons is a harsh reality in that if the functionality you create is beloved enough and quickly adopted by the community, it will inevitably find its way into Anki proper and other add-ons. Don't get me wrong, this is a beautiful thing in a way, and at the end of the day everyone stands to gain from the Anki ecosystem becoming the best it can be. However, I would be lying if I said that it didn't feel demotivating every now and again.
So what can you do as an add-on developer who wants to fund their work sustainably? You have two choices: Be on the move constantly, hunting down the next big thing you can build and bring to your community, or decide to work on projects that are so far ahead of the curve in terms of innovation that they are safe from being swallowed up by this process, if only for a while.
But this takes a lot of effort and time, much more so than having a steady repertoire of add-ons that you can just incrementally maintain and improve over time. And should you bet on the wrong project, then you can quickly end up with your work made obsolete in an instant. This happened to me at multiple times over the past couple of years.
Lessons Learned and Applied
So where does all of the above leave us? What steps am I planning on taking or have I already taken to reach a more sustainable level of content production?
Three things:
First, rather than casting a wide net around all kinds of add-ons that improve Anki's quality of life in a small way, I've started intensifying development around a select number of projects which I would regard as key pillars (both existing and new ones). This has three purposes:
- Focusing on excellence in the projects which I feel have the biggest impact on students' workflows
- Avoiding the maintenance trap that smaller add-ons are, once they become too plentiful.
- Sidestepping the quick obsolescence of smaller add-ons as their functionality is merged much quicker into Anki than more ambitious projects
Second, rather than raising expectations months in advance only to then disappoint them time and time again, I am adopting a much more grounded approach of only announcing projects when they are actually ready. This means no overambitious roadmaps or ETAs that are impossible to keep and embracing an irregular, but sustainable rhythm of activity. It's my sincere belief that this model will allow me to once again settle into a much more healthy release pace.
Third, and as a result of the two points above, my goal is to achieve a more sustainable phasing in and out of Patreon exclusivity of projects, making sure that, as exciting new add-ons arrive as Patreon exclusives, old ones phase out of exclusivity at a more regular pace.
Projects That Did See the Light of Day
So what has all of this looked like in practice over the last few months? Well, switching to a different project management strategy takes time, but some of the results of that effort have already seen the light of day. Since the beginning of the year, I have:
- released major updates for Review Heatmap and Image Occlusion Enhanced, bringing both to Anki 2.1.50+, fixing some long-standing bugs, and rewriting key portions of them to bring them on a more stable foundation
- released updates for key add-on development tools like pytest-anki and anki-addon-builder that are essential to my own workflow, but also that of an increasing number of add-on devs out there
- worked on phasing Patreon-exclusive add-ons like Colorful Tags (released on AnkiWeb last week), and Exam Notifier (public release coming up next month) out of exclusivity in preparation of the additions ahead
Projects in the Pipeline
So what do I have in store in terms of upcoming projects? Well, in the spirit of what I just laid out I will be vague here, but what I can say is that I'm working on:
- two major native feature contributions to Anki that are likely going to hit sometime later this year / next year
- a number of major updates for Patreon add-ons. I can confirm that Cloze Overlapper is one of them.
- a number of completely new projects
Announcing Things the Right Way
We just talked about the importance of avoiding announcing projects too far out. So how about we put this into practice straight away? Tomorrow I will be releasing a project which I would personally view as one of the most ambitious things I've ever worked on. Both because of the learning journey it was to get there and because it marks the first step into a new future of flashcard making.
Super excited to finally share it with you folks! It's also going to be the first time in a while that I publish a YouTube video to go alongside a project. For those of you who managed to make it all the way down this post, here's a sneak peek:
Sustainable Funding
We've talked a lot in this post about sustainable content production, but funding of course also lies at the heart of Patreon. Frankly, I consider myself incredibly lucky in that regard. Not a lot of open-source developers get to morph their hobby into a viable source of income and I don't think I'll ever be able to thank you guys enough for that!
At the same time, I think it's reasonable to take an earnest look at your funding structure every now and again and re-evaluate if it's still up-to-date. This was especially important to me with the release of the aforementioned project and another one that's also on its way, as they are both quite different from the type of content I've released on Patreon so far.
Quite succinctly put: They both take considerably more research to create, potentially have a smaller target audience than your typical add-on, and especially for the second one, simply can't be updated as frequently.
So thinking through how I could best slot them into the existing pledge levels of this Patreon, I quickly came to the conclusion that it would probably make the most sense to restructure things. What I ended up settling on is the following tier structure (grandfathering you all into higher tiers, so no need to worry!):
- A $5 "Add-on Aficionado" tier that offers the exact same benefits as before, with the exception of no longer containing the "credits" benefit as I've made the experience that handling this takes too much time away from development (existing patrons do retain it of course)
- A new $10 "Spacebar Smasher" tier where I'm positioning special projects like the two I've mentioned.
- A $25 "Flashcard Fanatic" tier with the same exact benefits as before (but a different name from the previous $25 tier, so that I can assign any existing patrons at that tier additional benefits in the future as they are added)
In practice, for you as an existing patron this means that (for as long you continue your pledge):
- if you are currently pledged at the $5 Add-on Aficionado tier, going forward you will receive the same benefits as the $10 tier, without having to pay anything extra.
- if you are currently pledged at the $10 Learning Legend tier, going forward you will receive the same benefits as the $25 tier, without having to pay anything extra.
- if you are currently pledged at the $25 tier, well, I don't have any higher pledge levels yet, but any ones I add in the future you will automatically gain access to (and let me know if you have anything in mind in terms of reasonable benefits you'd find cool!)
For all of you who are currently in the $1 or $3 tiers: Please let me know if you want to upgrade and I'll make sure to secure you a spot in the grandfathered-in $5 tier. And of course you can also just retain your benefits exactly as is.
I hope that these changes make sense overall. If you have any questions or concerns, please don't hesitate to shoot!
A Closing Thank You Note
There are more grounds to cover like finding a more sustainable model for communication and technical support, and there are some ideas I would like to discuss with you as well in that regard at some point. But I think this post is already packed as is, so let's relegate this to another day. For now, I just wanted to leave you with this:
To all of you who have stuck around through these longer bouts of radio silence on my part:
Thank you so much for your patience, for your support, and for your trust in my work. I know this is not a given, and I truly, truly appreciate you for it <3
Thank you again, and onto better times.
– Aristotelis (Glutanimate)
