The worldwide quarantine has seriously affected Shmeppy’s growth (in a positive way). I’m on track to hit my growth target well before I expected.
As many of you know, I don’t have another job besides Shmeppy right now, I’ve been living off my savings for the last 2 years of Shmepping and have had close to no income during that time. So I don’t want to leave Shmeppy in its current free-to-use-state any longer than I need to.
My Long-Term Roadmap Snapshot assumed that (a) Shmeppy’s growth wasn’t going to suddenly explode like it has and (b) to hit my targets I’d need to expand on which markets Shmeppy is targetting by adding big features like mobile support and background images.
But with lots of new information, I believe a more straight-lined path makes sense. So I’m going to try and focus on the things that are most necessary for exiting early access.
Here’s an updated long-term roadmap:
- Allow users to delete their accounts.
- Allow players to join without an account.
- Allow exporting maps.
- Various international privacy law compliance work.
- Payment flow work
(5) needs to coincide with me achieving my growth targets, so if I get to (5) a bit early I’ll twiddle my thumbs and do other things (roughly in the order of the last long-term roadmap).
But if Shmeppy continues to expand at a pace similar to what it has been, I’m going to struggle to get to (5) before my targets are met (this is the realization that caused this change of plans).
I anticipate some questions and concerns, so lemme run through some of them real quick Q&A style, but please post in this thread as well.
Will you be doing any other feature/bug-fix work while executing this roadmap?
Yes, definitely. This is a fairly big-picture roadmap, showing the most important work I need to do. But bug fixes and even various features will be smooshed into my monthly roadmaps as well, so please continue advocating for them!
For example, I’m almost done with the “view map as player” feature and should have that out for ya’ll before the end of this week if all goes well (notably I have said this before, but all did not go well the last time…).
How much warning will we have before Shmeppy is turned into a subscription product?
I’m not sure on an exact number of months warning I’ll give or exactly how that warning will be given. It’s a very hard bit of communication, so I’ll be giving it a ton of thought. 2 months or more, certainly, any less than that seems unacceptably short.
I’m also super likely to do something like: on this date new GM accounts will need to subscribe, but all existing accounts will get X additional months of free access.
My hunch is that you’ll have 3-6 months of warning with which to decide what you want to do with your games once I settle on an exact date and begin my rollout.
How much will Shmeppy cost?
I’m basically certain that this will be the payment scheme: $5 a month for a GM account (maybe $4.99 
); players do not pay, nor do they even need an account.
You can of course have your players chip in for the cost, but Shmeppy will not help you charge them. You’ll have to do it via another service like Venmo. This is because payment processors take a flat fee alongside a percentage, so a payment split between 5 people would make it so very little of that money made it to me.
There will not be a one-time payment for lifetime access option.
What will you do after Shmeppy is a subscription product?
What I’ve been doing: making Shmeppy better. The only difference is my financial future will (hopefully) be less terrifying 
.
The last long-term roadmap still fairly accurately reflects my priorities, so I’ll probably resume my mobile-support work and then work on the region-select tool, etc.
There will come a time when I say “this seems like enough” and stop adding new features to Shmeppy, opting to focus on polishing what’s there and fixing bugs. This is not a product that will benefit from endless features being smooshed onto it, quite the opposite. But we’re pretty far away from that right now. There’s a lot of things that would improve Shmeppy’s usefulness without sacrificing much on its values.