So I just signed up a day ago on the forum with @widgetic. I’ve spent probably the night reading through the past two years of conversations, and whenever possible I joined the conversation and helped with answers. I just finished recording a video with feedback for the interface, and I was trying to post a link to it. And that’s when I noticed the account doesn’t work any longer. Why?!
Not sure if that’s an issue on my end. I did read through the guidelines… twice by now. Can a forum moderator (@Blocs_User maybe?) explain what the issue was, and why I received 0 notifications prior to any actions being taken against the account?
Sorry if that’s what it looked like @Norm. I understand you didn’t see my email message yet, and I can see how my intention to address the missing brics problem looked a bit off. I’d love to get my account back and ask about the best way to proceed, in private. There’s nothing your customers can buy from me, so I am not interested to “advertise” in the forum. I can refrain from posting at all.
But I’d like to express what frustrates me. Instead of receiving support and praise, new developers that look to join this platform are ousted. It gives me second thoughts about the long term health of Blocs and investing time and energy in it in the first place. Put yourself in my shoes, and you can see why I hope this changes.
So where should I take my questions about how to proceed further as a developer - cloud-based brics, a business model that makes sense for us (Widgetic) as devs, transparent integration, etc?
I just noticed a lot of duplication in the post copy across various threads. It looked like self promotion but rather than containing it in a single thread, you spread it across the forum.
But since you inquired of me directly, please see my response below regarding possible issues of the assumed/perceived approach you took (as @norm indicated) when showing up on the forum with your previous company branded account.
That seems rather misleading, given you have “plans” on your site: ://widgetic.com/plans/
But oddly there are no plans listed. Instead your site currently states “ Schedule a call”. While no where does it mention that the offering is free or open source, so obviously there is cost involved somewhere. Previously I see the site actually stated the plan costs were something like the following:
What information does a person actually get by “scheduling a call” if nothing is for sale to users with your service? Also the article “Pivoting From a Digital Agency to a $3k/mo SaaS Company” (excerpt below) doesn’t make it appear that you are offering your services for free to users?
Every integration offers our apps as individual products or bundled with similar apps. Users subscribe to them individually — for example on Shopify — and pay us a monthly fee. Sometimes they can pay yearly, depending on the platform we integrate with. It’s something you may want to explore. When we enabled this, with 20% off, we doubled our MRR!
For partnerships, it really depends on the deals we make, but usually we have a base price that we charge monthly, and then on top of it we charge for monthly active users. Sometimes partners prefer to integrate the app using our public APIs — in this case, their users are charged directly.
And finally, on Widgetic .com we offer multiple plans: free, premium and team. While team is for the enterprise, free and premium are mostly used by standard users. We charge $12/month/user for the team plan. Premium is $4/month.
A lesson we learned is that people like to pay fixed prices. Soon after we dropped our price/views model we simplified the product, increased the speed of our apps, and offered a better pricing structure to our partners.
Also on your facts page it mentions refunds, payments, subscriptions.
://help.widgetic.com/get-started/FAQs
So its maybe hard for anyone not to ascertain your sudden recent company branded presence here on the forum and the rather odd tendency of strategically targeting/bumping older dormant forum posts with veiled marketing towards your services as not being deemed advertising towards your brand of products.
If users are unable to acquire anything from you why are you then here seemingly targeting users? Also why then in your own words and materials is cost involved if users can’t buy anything from you? So it seems rather misleading and confusing at best what you were presenting here with your former branded posts.
At least that would be my quick assessment and assumption (since you asked) as to why you lost your previous company branded account. But since I am just a regular user, you are much better off inquiring directly from @norm, instead of me.
My intention was to explore Blocs the platform, the user need, and if there’s a fit with our product. If the product is easy to use, if the developer support exists, and there’s actual demand - the only issue left to address would have been feasibility. Mostly because our “brics” are cloud based (so we can offer them to a wider partner network). Hence the question of feasibility - which @norm didn’t address either here, or on my private emails that I sent.
That said, you’re looking at past iterations of our Go To Market (B2C) strategy. Maybe stick with the current marketing site (B2B)?
Not wishing to prolong any exposure being given to you, but your response strongly seems to serve and validate why you lost your original account.
If your above statement is factual in accordance to your intentions, then the previous conduct under your company branded user name does not match those intentions that you have now outlined. In fact your previous conduct which was removed clearly was in contrast and was not in accordance to you’re newly professed B2B agenda. But since you have chosen not to address any of that previous conduct, I suspect you are fully aware of these facts.
It seems clear from your own words and actions why you assumedly lost the other account. So your inquiry and reason for making this thread should now be fully resolved and answered.
I’d encourage you to go through both my previous content (if you have access to it) and my comments here. I’m coming in peace, with the best intentions. There’s a process we (and others) go through to make an investment decision and build for a platform - it needs desirability, viability, and feasibility.
Desirability - I reached out to users who hinted at issues our product solves. Based on that research, I have validated this as positive.
Viability - I reached to other developers to find out more about this, to determine if it makes financial sense for us as well (cloud based, SaaS).
Feasibility - needs to be addressed by @Norm. He’s busy or doesn’t want to have this conversation. So I have no idea if this is or isn’t supported by the platform. I will assume it’s not.
There’s no egos, and no offtopic discussions here. If you’re set to prove me wrong and this forum is about that, feel free to discount my activity and intentions. Or maybe take the conversation to Twitter.
But if you’re actually looking to have others build for this platform, try to be helpful and assume my best intentions. What I know so far is our product is a good fit based on research that I did right here in the forum. What I don’t know is #2 and #3, or if there’s any interest at this point to make feasibility a thing.
If you really desire you can evaluate directly #1, #2 and #3 by offering some custom brics via the Developer API, to essentially test desirability, viability and feasibility.
From what I recall in one of your former posts here, you actually spoke in somewhat diminishing terms regarding the presence of a marketplace and touted cloud based solutions as seemingly superior. You may wish to take into account that a marketplace and the API are each being developed for Blocs. I doubt that was very wise on your part in @norm’s eyes, along with many other various things in your former posts.
As I recall your image zoom example actually has some issues itself. With a few mouse clicks a person can make the image vanish from the viewing area. So given provided examples like that I would think users would need to make a decision regarding if that is really something they themselves would invest in.
The Developer API (like many others by the same name) allow 3rd parties to offer custom solutions. Your own site still has quite a bit of “coming soon”, so perhaps there is a bit of the cart before the horse taking place in various regards. As for why @norm has not directly responded to you, we can only guess. But if you’re stating that your not selling to customers and hoping to get a B2B deal to offer through Blocs, I’m not sure that is viable for @norm or Blocs.
Lets recall the fact that this thread is about your other account being banned. So it seems your original intentions were deemed unfit, not by me but by @norm.
It doesn’t work that way, things have a natural order. But I won’t insist if you are not familiar with this stuff. Some research on Google on this topic will help. I’m not comfortable to share any links here anymore.
Bugs and features alike are usually sent as feedback and fixed. A product is never finished - even if it’s bug-free. Good product people always plan future releases, based on data and customer feedback. For example, this specific interactive you point out one issue with has a few dozens of stories on ClubHouse.
Again, this is product related stuff, you may not be familiar with it since you bring it in the conversation as a bad thing. It’s a non-issue, let’s leave it at that.
That’s something you guys need to sort out and fix. It should be clear by now I was not and am not in the wrong. I obviously still know cloud is an alternative strategy, even if that was censored.
Developers should be allowed to talk, to explore solutions for building Brics, in profit, not at a loss… This conversation was about finding out if that pricing model is better than putting Brics for sale (#2 - viability). I’m not comfortable saying more… what happened is I wasn’t able to validate this.
Please don’t drag this conversation away from the topic. These are issues that should be addressed. You’ve definitely got more time on your hands than I do, and this isn’t helping.
You started this thread asking why you were Banned.
You asked for my feedback, I provided it since you inquired directly of me. @norm may have other thoughts and feelings, I can only provide my take on your banned situation based upon your own statements which I remember witnessing. You seem to be overly self assured with your approach both previously in your banned account and now with this account. So it appears you never truly wanted to hear from anyone regarding what you asked. This is obvious how you never wanted to address your own actions that lead to you being banned.
For these reasons, I’m not gonna partake in your charades here.
@andupotorac Thanks for being patiant.
Honestlay - I would never buy a single bit of code from you.
I feel that you are disturbing this great forum a lot.
It’s a non-issue, let’s leave it at that.