Jamkazam is moving onto Paid Subscriptions. Donors and volunteers' thoughts?

[StuartR]

HI Everyone

I am part of chorus of about 20 members that have been using JK for about half a year now. We moved to JK because we could not safely sing together in the covid pandemic situation.

JK has enabled us to sing together safely, in groups of 10 people at a time, which really would be impossible without it at this time. BUT... it has been a very trying experience. Most of the chorus members are not tech savvy at all. So a few of the more tech savvy people have volunteered to help with installations and trouble shooting for everyone. 

There has been A LOT of technical problems pretty much the whole time over the last 6 months. People not being able to get their audio drivers to work, people not being able to join sessions, Audio not coming through for sporadically, clients cra$ng, having to restart the PC, etc...

If we were not desperate to keep singing in these crazy times we would not have kept trying to use JK. I can't remember using any other software with as many technical problems as JK.

When things work well, people are pretty happy with the experience: good client features, ease of use, good audio quality, ability to collaborate live. These are great if they work well. 

But when you have to restart your PC 2 times during a 1 hour session, or just cannot participate for no apparent reason except for some obscure failure message with no apparent solution, it becomes an extremely frustrating experience.

We have had people quit part-taking in our JK sessions even when it was free. I am pretty sure, that most people will quit if they have to pay the $10/month fee (that you might normally charge for a really well working service like Netflix or Zoom), for what is still a very unstable software which is frustrating and challenging to use. Even promise of 1:1 support is not going to make people happy that pretty much expect a seamless experience for something they pay good money to use.

So, I think JK has a lot of promise, but it has not reached the level of maturity where people would be willing to pay typical service subscription fees.

I might also keep in mind, that the people who have been using JK so far, have been serving as a volunteer test bench which I hope has helped identify the software problems that have appeared nearly constantly. Yes, they have been using it for free, but normally you would have a Q&A department do such work.

I think it is too early to start to ask people to pay. Once JK becomes stable and people see that the value it brings greatly outweighs the level of frustration they have to put up with by using it, I think you can slowly start charging money for it without risking people giving up on it.

I may sound negative, but I really want the JK to succeed moving forward.

Thanks, Hans

Hans,

You raise some valid points. Please cut and paste this message into your email and send it to:

support@Jamkazam.com

Don't assume they'll necessarily see it here.