LiveCode Marketing Suggestions

[MaxV]

Hi all,
I'm a bit confused about livecode news policy: none!
Livecode closed the newsletter years ago, declaring to use just the blog.
The blog has a post every 2 months or more...
The Announcements section of this forum has a news every 6 months...
The current foundrising campaign is not advertised and it isn't on livecode website. I found it by accident. Do you know it?
When I read the livecode website I saw only huge Lego toys:

Is livecode aiming to reach the 0% of programming language market share?

[bogs]

Maybe it is only in metamorphosis, and will emerge a lovely butterfly (although it makes a pretty good butterfly now).

I too liked going through the newsletters (albeit in archive form, coming late to the game as I did). The Journal was also nice to flip through (Richard?). The blog, when it happens, is informative, but I usually only see it in a search.

[Mikey]

Right. It also might be dead because it doesn’t advertise in paper newspapers, too.

[capellan]

That could not happen until everybody stop programming in LiveCode.
A good marketing strategy for LiveCode is to position itself as
First Computer Programmer Language.

Not the Best, not the Only, just the First.

LiveCode could say this:
Any person that learn LiveCode could use that knowledge
to understand and learn easier other computer languages...

but first, we need proof that this is true.

Please, post also your ideas in this other thread,
to keep the discussion ongoing:
Why do so few schools try LiveCode...?
viewtopic.php?f=25&t=30140

Al

[FourthWorld]

That could not happen until everybody stop programming in LiveCode.

And since this discussion is occurring in a forum where we see posts every day from people programming in LiveCode, this thread title is self-evidently silly.

Threads about productive, actionable ideas for more effectively sharing LiveCode with the world are great.

But I must admit a certain eye-rolling sigh wherever I see Henny Penny thread titles like this one.

The inherent irony seems lost: if one has a good sense of marketing to offer useful suggestions, it would seem reasonable to expect that experience lend itself to understanding that needlessly alarmist titles like this one in a public forum are themselves a form of anti-marketing.

It's too bad really, because the discussion here itself is potentially quite useful, but it's trapped beneath a dismissably silly "The sky is falling!" title that nearly prompted me, and I suspect other, to just skip it.

[bogs]

And since this discussion is occurring in a forum where we see posts every day from people programming in LiveCode, this thread title is self-evidently silly.

Actually, from Max's point of view, it might not be so much. He came to Lc from (I believe) Rebol, which had a forum, where people were posting often, and there was actually a next version planned (that never made it after getting quite far), so I can understand the question, looking at it from that point of view.

You yourself have been in a lot of projects that were very active, right up till they were not I am sure, from all the reading I've done

[dunbarx]

On the other hand, I have never understood why every single person on the planet is not deep in the throes of programming for both fun and profit. Especially fun. All the time.

I thought the same thing about HC after the initial flurry, and up until it was abandoned.

So I am always concerned that LC is not "getting" to the people, and the people are not getting LC. I don't know if this is a marketing issue or just that most people are idiots, and do not know what is good for them.

But I worry that LC is small and vulnerable. Just like HC.

Craig

[FourthWorld]

Perhaps, but he also notes a current crowd funding campaign and other ongoing growth-oriented activities, and by the time we sort through the post we discover that the Henny Penny title is based solely on a gap in blog posts, completely missing the dozens of new builds released during that same time frame, the regular participation of core dev team members on the use-livecode list, the publicly-trackable progress on Github, etc.

So yeah, it'd be nice if the blog had new content these last few weeks. And as I've noted here before, they often publish guide blog posts, so anyone here who feels strongly about supporting the blog can write to Heather for details on how they can submit that ( support AT livecode.com ).

And I agree that burying the links to the LC/FM enhancements crowd-funder deeper in the taxonomy than the front page is arguably less than optimal, but perhaps not necessarily: that toolkit is a plugin for FileMaker, and can only be used by FileMaker developers. It is of no value to devs using LC without also using FM, and in some ways needs to be marketed carefully because in fact LC's strong DB support makes it potentially something of a competitor to FM and vice-versa. A delicate balance is needed with that messaging, one that at least doesn't mislead newcomers arriving at the front page of the site to believe that LC itself is limited to FM development.

That said, within the FM community they've been marketing that tool very effectively. Those of us in the LC community who also use FM see this. In fact, in addition to having had a booth at the FM conference in AZ a couple months back, just a few weeks ago Kevin and his business strategist did a road show through California, presenting the tool at local and regional FM user groups and even at the FM headquarters. I attended his presentation in Los Angeles; nicely done, and the tool has some pretty great features the attendees seemed quite interested in.

But it is, by its nature, peripheral to the main LC product. So when we think through the market dynamics in play, it's not hard to appreciate how having an alternate landing page for the specific market segment LC/FM is for may not be such a bad thing after all. A great many companies have segment-focused landing pages for their campaigns. In the modern SEM era the front page is no longer the front page for everyone.

That leaves us then with the core complaint being a gap in blog posts. LC certainly isn't the only business to have ever had a blog gap, given the various priorities any business needs to address. And for anyone concerned about seeing the blog kept fresh, that problem can be self-correcting by just contacting Heather to propose a guest post.

PS: I'm not sure I would consider REBOL dead. True, in contrast to LC it does not appear to have any direct revenue streams, which no doubt constrains development. But Sassenrath delivered an ARM build just last year, something we have yet to achieve as a truly supported platform, and the Red offspring seems to have a fairly active community, at least judging from the posts in their Facebook group I belong to.

[bogs]

I agree with all the points you made, I am just saying I can see the question from one who has followed something that didn't seem dead then suddenly was. Like Hc. Which I still don't understand how that happened.

About Rebol being dead, I guess in the truest sense of the word, it isn't 'dead', but, for instance, I couldn't get any of the later versions running on my primary Linux box (and we know how determined I can be ) and I sure wouldn't want to try to get help for a problem I might have in it.

[capellan]

I agree with all the points you made, I am just saying I can see the question from one who has followed something that didn't seem dead then suddenly was. Like Hc. Which I still don't understand how that happened.

I can tell you when HyperCard died:
Last week of March 2004 (Monday or Tuesday)
http://altis.pycs.net/2004/03/23.html#a102

"Well it finally happened, Apple removed the HyperCard sub-directory from
the main Apple site and you can no longer buy HyperCard from the Apple store.
Of course, HyperCard was never updated for Mac OS X and I'm pretty sure
the last update to HyperCard was version 2.4.1 back in 1998.
But the removal of the product from the Apple site is the final nail in the coffin."

I had been contacting authors of Academic publications that created HC stacks.
There are thousands of authors who published HC stacks along their publications
and they are always eager to learn that someone find useful their previous work,
but when I ask them to send me their HC stacks, I receive a broken stack (Data fork
or Resource fork only)... Effectively, nobody teach them how to backup their stacks
for future use.

Al

[bogs]

Thanks Al, that was insightful, but what I meant was I don't get how something so wildly popular and so far ahead of it's nearest competitor could go by the side, as Hc did. I read a lot of versions of the time, but I still don't get it.

[MaxV]

Well, I used the title to get the attention here.
I try to attract more people to livecode, but I noticed that the new website killed the attention of newcomers to livecode.
Nowdays the general perception is livecode = vaporware

I made some public talks about livecode in Universities, and in 2 years from a class full of students excited, last month I got the attraction of quite an empty class.

I fear that we are across the point of no return.

Also the releases are crazy, too many with too different dates:

• livecode 9.0.0 = 23 October
• livecode 8.2.0 =11 October
• liveocde 8.1.8 = 23 November ??

It's a non sense using 3 digits for a version and adding also: dp1, dp2, rc1, stable. New user will never understand. I don't want to argue about developing 2-3 versions of livecode at the same time, but when a new number goes out, no other old version should come out.

However, in my opinion, the livecode website is the worst enemy of livecode.
Take a look at livecode website:

and take a look at a competitor:

The competitor gives a immediate idea, on the other hand livecode website what idea does it give you?

[FourthWorld]

Nowdays the general perception is livecode = vaporware

LiveCode exists. I'm using it right now.

I don't think "vaporware" means what you think it means.

[Newbie4]

You are missing his point.
We get people (students) interested in trying LiveCode but when they go to the site, they get overwhelmed with choices, confused with pages that tell you nothing about the language and it’s features and get turned away with requests for logins and money.

The website should get people excited about the product and why they should use it and make it easy for them to try it.

Instead, it leaves them with doubts and confusion

[FourthWorld]

You are missing his point.
We get people (students) interested in trying LiveCode but when they go to the site, they get overwhelmed with choices, confused with pages that tell you nothing about the language and it’s features and get turned away with requests for logins and money.

The website should get people excited about the product and why they should use it and make it easy for them to try it.

Instead, it leaves them with doubts and confusion

What data do you have to support that? It's a serious question, because sometimes things that seem non-obvious to long-time members in a community can work well for raising conversion rates among newcomers.

Either way, sub-optimal marketing is not vaporware.