Fundraising Updates and Corporate Sponsorships
By Kenton Varda - 15 Aug 2014
We’re now nearly 60% funded with two and a half weeks left in the campaign. Crowdfunding campaigns usually end with a spike, so we will likely exceed our goal. Plus, we have a couple of really exciting announcements lined up for next week.
If you haven’t contributed yet, now is the time to do so! For all you Bay Area hackers heading to Burning Man, don’t forget to contribute before you leave, as the campaign will be over when you get back.
If you were hoping to get us to port your favorite open source app, note that there is only one more “Choose an app” slot left. Also, there are only five more LAN party invites available.
Finally, don’t forget that when you share our campaign with your friends, you should use the special referral link in order to get credit under our referral program. (See details below.)
Corporate Sponsorships
We have our first corporate sponsor: draw.io.
draw.io is a powerful web-based diagram editor, and we’re excited that it will be coming to Sandstorm. The developers decided to sponsor us because we are solving a problem they have struggled with: how to allow users – especially enterprises – to run the program “behind the firewall” on their company networks. Anyone who has developed enterprise-oriented web apps is no doubt familiar with this request.
Today, supporting “behind the firewall” is a big pain. No small developer wants to deal with getting their code to run in all the diverse environments found on corporate networks. No one wants to talk IT people through setting up their server over and over again. But with Sandstorm, you just give the customer a package. They upload it to their Sandstorm server, and they’re done. Updates are just a matter of installing a new version of the package.
Does your company develop a SaaS product for which you’d like to offer an “on-prem” / “behind-the-firewall” version, but don’t have the resources to support such a thing? Consider becoming a corporate sponsor. In addition to displaying your logo in our web site and credits, we will work with you to make sure that your app runs great on Sandstorm, and that Sandstorm meets the needs of your customers. You will also become one of our launch partners for our eventual enterprise release, where we’ll help you sell your app to corporate Sandstorm users that didn’t already know about it.
Or, perhaps your company is on the other side of the equation: you’d like to be able to deploy apps internally, and would like this to be much easier and more secure than it is today. Do you find that every time you install an app on your network, you are frightened by the possibility of security bugs providing hackers with a new back door into your company? We can help with that. We are developing a suite of tools that make Sandstorm integrate well with enterprise environments. As a corporate sponsor you will get early access to these tools and dedicated help getting them to integrate with your environment.
If you’d like to become a corporate sponsor, choose the “Corporate Sponsorship” perk (the bottom one) on our Indiegogo campaign. Feel free to e-mail me (kenton@sandstorm.io) for details, or to work out a custom arrangement.
Referral program reminder
We mentioned this a few weeks ago, but for those who missed it:
If you refer someone, and they contribute, we’ll give you your choice of:
a) 1GB bonus storage for every $10 referred (on our managed hosting service, for one year).
b) 10% of your referral total in app store credit. Remember that our app store will support a pay-what-you-want model for open source apps, so this basically means you can donate your credit to the developers of an open source Sandstorm app of your choice.
The top referrer will additionally receive their choice of a LAN party invite (see the $512 perk) or a seat on the app committee (with $256 voting rights).
In order to receive credit for your referrals, be sure that you are logged into Indiegogo, then use the buttons under the video on our campaign page to share. These buttons will generate links that track the fact that they came from you.
Tip: Don’t spam. It’s more effective and less annoying if you speak directly with individuals who are likely to be interested. Think of people you know who love open source, value privacy, or like to tinker with their stuff and void warranties.