Patreon Channel

[ahk7]

I'd only setup gh sponsor/opencollective If you do actually need the funds for hosting and possibly other costs otherwise you'll just sit on the money for which you have no direct purpose. But those that pay the bills probably know.

[joedf]

@ahk7 Well, currently the bulk is hosting services. There is the possibility of get code signing, but we ended up scraping that after Lexikos was understandably "done" with that fiasco.
So I'd say we've been fortunate so far to have a small "nest egg" to keep us afloat for a few years apart from personal funds from tank and I. That is provided costs stay the same.
I was thinking like OpenCollective would make the financials clearer for everyone, and provide a somewhat more confident influx of funds from monthly donors.
Notably, we do have some people that have set up small monthly paypal donations to us somehow.

Either way, I'd say it's true that we're okay for now.

[tank]

lemme be clear autohotkey foundation cannot endorse or host such a thing. but i happen to know there is money to be made in educational videos and think donation based live stream projects have huge potential for contributors.

[Joe Glines]

Sorry I'm late to the party. I don't receive emails from the forum and, although I frequent it a lot, I don't look at the notifications when I'm here very often. Here are some thoughts:
1) I make some $ off YouTube (around $120 a month) for my 1,000 plus videos. When you consider the amount of time I put into them, it isn't something that most should aim for as a "get rich quick" scheme. lol

2) I have 7 Udemy courses (6 paid & 1 free). Two of which I paid RaptorX to help on. I earn around $300 a month from those

3) I already collaborate with Hellbent, TABNation, Maestrith, Tank, Jean Lalonde, RaptorX, etc. These are a lot of fun to create however trying to do them jointly (with other people) on a "Patreon channel" would (in my opinion) be problematic to say the least. I'm always happy to collaborate with others for free content.

4) I pay RaptorX for his time to create the videos and I pay him a cut of what we earn. In reality, because AutoHotkey is so niche, it is really hard to make $. I do agree, it is an incentive and I'm not knocking what I make but but it isn't really worth the time I put in. Editing takes time! Laying out content takes time, promoting / marketing / sharing takes time etc.

5) RaptorX and I are working on a few new courses (Advanced objects / Classes, Excel, DLL calls, RegEx, etc.)

6) Just as an FYI - Very frequently I get "hate mail" about "making $ from AutoHotkey". I don't think anyone so far on this thread is of that mindset but wanted to warn anybody that does consider doing this that you'll need to have thick skin.

Cheers
Joe

[boiler]

That's probably the best insight we could get. Thanks for sharing it, Joe. It is a shame that you get hate mail about your efforts. As I mentioned, I'm all for people teaching for money, whether it's for AHK or anything else. And you confirmed that AHK's niche audience wouldn't provide enough income to support an even larger group of content creators, especially for those who aren't as inclined to creating videos as you are.

It does seem to be mainly a labor of love. We love AHK and contribute to the community in our own ways.

[joedf]

@Joe Glines Thank you for the insight and the hard work promoting ahk!

[Joe Glines]

You bet! @joedf I know you, Tank, and many others do a lot as well!
As I tell most people, AutoHotkey changed my life! I can't imagine living w/o it! I do what i can to get people to stop doing the mundane, invest in themselves, and work smarter, not harder!

[Joe Glines]

@boiler
Jackie and I did over 60 webinars (typically two hours each). Most have a couple hundreds views and were attended by 10-20 people.

Many of the webinars were really good lessons but most people just don't want to spend the time to "sharpen the saw"

[labrint]

Try Patreon @Joe Glines. I feel you re not getting the intended result first time round, but improvements can be made and try again.

May I suggest;

Team up with more people from here.
Set up a Patreon channel, with donations for early access videos.
Release videos after two weeks on Youtube to all viewers.
Answer patreons' questions consisely.
Use Facebook's AHK group to get more newbies (who haven't even been to the forum)
Answer some forum questions via video.

Re you Udemy courses, they would be great for a beginner but won't engage the intermediate level user. The forum and documentation caters for most beginner level questions. Even if you look at the forum, most questions coming in are not beginner level questions, so right off the bat you are at a lower audience numbers.

I would be interested in getting an A-Z on arrays,objects, classes, dlls, sendmessage/postmessage

Most importantly:

Keep videos short, avoiding chit chat in between of explainers. (Most people's attention span is less than 1 minute at a time. This is really important, 10 min video max, a direct and concise explainer to a user's problem).

[tank]

ok so Joe has necesary marketing and and research background to know how best to make such content refine to target audience. patreon has never really been a great vehicle for such content. the fact that joe provided the numbers for someone with his notoriety, marketing skills, and sobering income really substantiates that there really isnt the market share to makethis a worthy effort at this time.

[Hellbent]

A dedicated "Video Tutorials" sub-forum could help drum up activity.
No need to pay anyone, if you have an idea for a video you can make a video.
If you decide to take it further once you have an audience you will be in a better position to do so.
You can also ( as already pointed out by someone else ) attach a donation link to your user tag.

I would love to see more video tutorials, there are topics that I have never even bothered to try touching simply because there isn't some entry level material to start from.

As a personal message from me to anyone that wants more videos.
Be the change you want.
I started making videos about 6 years ago, not because I was good at making videos, or that I knew much about what I was doing. I was frustrated that there wasn't many videos covering ahk so I decided to use what little programing experience I had ( very little ) to try to change that reality.
For better or worse, you can do the same.

[labrint]

A dedicated "Video Tutorials" sub-forum could help drum up activity.
No need to pay anyone, if you have an idea for a video you can make a video.
If you decide to take it further once you have an audience you will be in a better position to do so.
You can also ( as already pointed out by someone else ) attach a donation link to your user tag.

I would love to see more video tutorials, there are topics that I have never even bothered to try touching simply because there isn't some entry level material to start from.

As a personal message from me to anyone that wants more videos.
Be the change you want.
I started making videos about 6 years ago, not because I was good at making videos, or that I knew much about what I was doing. I was frustrated that there wasn't many videos covering ahk so I decided to use what little programing experience I had ( very little ) to try to change that reality.
For better or worse, you can do the same.

I second you in what you said @Hellbent. The documentation is very extensive and presented neatly on the website (much better than AutoIT), but there are some topic (advanced topics) that require more extensive documentation and I would say videos as well, such as classes, arrays (including multidimentional 2D arrays),objects dlls, perhaps regex (even though I grasped it) and even sendmessage/postmessage. There are some third party apps that cannot be connected to via COM, or their GUI and ClassNN, that would require in-depth knowledge of listening to windows messages to filter out the messages and focus on what you need. The current documentation and videos lack this unfortunately.

Also, the idea of the forums being hosted here instead of patreon makes sense! Keeping everything orderly and in-house. I like that.

[boiler]

@Hellbent — Good suggestions. I like the idea of keeping things in the forum and encouraging people to post their content in whichever way they prefer — written or video. Some people are more visually oriented in terms of learning and for creating content, as you seem to be suggesting about yourself. That you are visually oriented is pretty evident in the incredible GUIs and related tools you create.

I would suggest that we already have the mechanism in place by posting in the “Tutorials” sub-forum and preceding the thread’s subject with [Video] so they are easily spotted and found in searches by those looking for them. And if a significant number of them are posted, it may warrant creating a sub-forum dedicated to video tutorials.

As for those who want to request videos on a certain topic, they could post in “Ask For Help” by preceding their thread’s subject with Video tutorial requested - . You could state what you’d be willing to contribute to the author of the video if you’d like.

[Hellbent]

Some people are more visually oriented in terms of learning and for creating content, as you seem to be suggesting about yourself. That you are visually oriented is pretty evident in the incredible GUIs and related tools you create.

I prefer a mix of resources ( theory , visual , audio , hands on , documentation , feedback ). I can maybe do without one or two of them, but without the visual/audio/feedback in the beginning I can find it a fair bit more difficult to orient myself to the material, to anchor it, to form the basic concepts for which everything else is built on. Without that base to stand on I am left with only questions and no answers ( assumptions ). I hate having to assume things for the base, it tilts everything that follows ( perceptions ).

I would suggest that we already have the mechanism in place by posting in the “Tutorials” sub-forum and preceding the thread’s subject with [Video] so they are easily spotted and found in searches by those looking for them. And if a significant number of them are posted, it may warrant creating a sub-forum dedicated to video tutorials.

I have to disagree with you on that one. While from a logistics point of view it is perhaps overkill to have a dedicated page for videos. From a practical standpoint having only a listing of videos is IMHO is much better for a number of reasons. I'm not really fussed either way, I just think one way is "better" than the other lol.