⛰️✨👏🏾👩‍🎤 Clients

[zspencer]

• ⛰️✨👏🏾👩‍🎤 Clients #1475 pay (or are gifted) 🥔⛰️ Space #1154 in 🥔⛰️Neighborhoods #892 by 🥔👩‍🎤 Operators #103.

In order for a Neighborhood to surthrive, it needs to create benefits for Clients. These may be:

• Individual people
• Informal or semiformal community groups
• Incorporated organizations

What they all have in common is they chose to trust the Operators of the Neighborhood they are in to:

• Steward and Protect their data
• Source, design or develop applications tailored to Client needs
• Providing Clients with support for those applications

How does Convene benefit Clients?

In broad strokes, software fits into at least one of the following categories:

• Pain Relievers, which reduce Clients material or immaterial costs

• Gain Achievers, which support Clients in accomplishing their goals

  In a Convene, Pain Achievers and Gain Achievers are called 🥔✨ Gizmos #709

While there are a growing number of Software B-Corps and Tech Cooperatives offering viable software services; the market is dominated by companies whose sole purpose is to concentrate wealth in the hands of their investors and executives; many of whom are happy to squeeze their captive customers for greater and greater profits.

How do Clients sustain the Neighborhood?

Clients may or may not pay for their spaces, depending on what the Neighborhood Operators discretion. That said, we've found that for every $0.03~$0.05 in hosting and infrastructure costs there's about $1 in Operator and Contributor labor and other operating expenses.

Operators may consider:

• Charging monthly or annual subscription and usage fees for Spaces.
• Offering professional services such as application design or maintenance and support contracts.
• Funding the Neighborhood through other service offerings.
• Soliciting sponsorships or other forms of marketing and advertisement.

[zspencer]

@zinc-collective/convene-contributors and @zinc-collective/convene-maintainers - To start preparing for customer development, I've started writing down what it means to be a Client in a Neighborhood

Some of this probably belongs in an OPERATING.md or help-desk style site... but I figure starting with a "Product Marketing" document is not the worst thing to do so we can start attaching sub-issues for particular use-cases and clients.

[anaulin]

surthrive 💖

[rosschapman]

Hey @zspencer. Do you remember where you put your notes? I was snooping around the Drive and found some archived work on Customer Development in https://drive.google.com/drive/u/2/folders/16aZahoVtGMOjy7N0eVjEw1PbEMtU7s9-. But perhaps you parked these somewhere else?

[rosschapman]

Would love to pick up this thread but closing the issue for now as part of migrating our biz dev and project management out of Github. ☺