[Feedback wanted] How did you choose your tiers?

[bdresser]

We've heard from some folks that the hardest part of setting up their Sponsors profile was choosing what tiers to offer and how to price them.

If you've already set up your profile, or know how you'll set it up once Sponsors is available in your country, let us know:
– How did you think about setting up your tiers?
– How did you price them?
– How did you choose what perks or rewards to offer at each tier?

We have two mock-ups for a small feature to help people through this step of set up. I've hidden it in the toggle below to not spoil your answers to the above. If you're game to give some feedback, check out the mocks and let us know which you prefer! cc @dthoma1

See the mocks

Which do you prefer?

Concept 1

Concept 2

[josh-works]

I really like both of these concepts.

I feel like both provide conceptual hooks upon which one can imagine building their profile.

If someone's like me, just exploring the sponsors tooling, I've been eagerly looking at examples of what seems to be working for others on Github Sponsors.

So, really, either of these could be good.

Maybe each package or tier could have a link to a few examples of others on Github Sponsors using that particular tier?

I know discoverability is still a work-in-progress, but I'd love to find examples of what others are doing.

Personally, my tiers came from how I want my "customer profile" to be. I'd rather have a few larger sponsors than many small sponsors. For example, Caleb Porzio currently has 1300+ sponsors. Most of those are probably small, and reasonably so, but my ideal sponsor "mix" isn't his.

How did you think about setting up your tiers?

I thought back to how I have seen companies spend on engineers, benchmarking my own cost to what a company spends on a full-loaded full-time engineer. ($200k/yr, easily, or $16,500/month)

Then I worked backwards from there. Could I deliver half the value of a FTE for less than half the cost? Yes, but in ways slightly different than "straight down the middle" engineering.

I'm still figuring all this out! I've just started this whole project, but I'm expitely chasing specific income goals, and then "working backwards" from there.

How did you choose what perks or rewards to offer at each tier?

Making it up as I go. Honestly, at such high tiers ($1000+/mo) it looks rather custom. I'm hoping to mostly get added to company slack channels to help them with a well-scoped problem. As I make progress at these tiers, I'll update the copy/offering.

I have not yet made it obvious on my sponsorship page, but I hope to work with companies on problems meaningful to them. So, they'll sponsor me, and we'll keep an ongoing conversation about what is important, and I'll shape my work to aid them in solving their problems.

In other words, I think a "land and expand" strategy will end up working the best. For the small number of companies I'll work with, I'll do regular "office hours", or "lunch and learns", or helping out their team with a well-bounded difficulty. Hiring? I might be able to help. Application performance problems? I can help. Team dynamic "stuff" going on? I can help. Growing the skills of their engineers? I can help. Dealing with legacy code? I can help.

I'm now mostly just free-associating in my response.

Great questions, though!

TL;DR: More examples! I just wanna see others being successful via Github Sponsors, and pattern match on their good decisions and trial-and-error!

[tallguyjenks]

I set my tiers up with the following things in mind:

• Make the minimum at least $5 like a Starbucks ☕ worth of 💰
• Have move low ➡️ mid tiers v.s. High tiers i.e. (5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 50) v.s. (100, 1,000, 10,000)
• Have a couple of REALLY high tiers you never know when someone with more money than they know what to do with wants to just drop a pile of 💰 and have bragging rights as your top sponsor. (I never expect anyone to take my $6K tier, but it'd sure be nice if someone did!)