Red Bubble is too expensive for what it is.
heat transfers? or silk screen?
$3.00 heat transfer or 50 cents worth of silkscreen ink and a $4 t-shirt. plus you can fit a T-shirt in a mailer. stamp. T-shirts ship cheap but Redbubble tax that shipping as well I bet
and adults wearing pot leaves? little tacky. you need an alternate design for people who do not want to be tacky.
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That’s cool (besides all you do fr this place) you put the question on the table and bring some transparency on it @LemonadeJoe
I have a couple questions/suggestions too:
So the overall costs for the platform is $8000 a year. Are the current different ways to gather money for this (supporters, auctions, sponsors,…) enough to cover this expenses? Just to have a datapoint of the actual “economy” efficiency and margins.
I wonder if one way for you to have more time for admin/development would be that you step out of the user support as a mandatory role, maybe by finding more people to do that? Don’t know how you’d feel about that, or if it really is possible. At least those people could buffer and filter the obvious user requests.
I understood that the co-op group had decided to give OG the remaining money (if any) of its activities. No idea how it works practically, nor if them or OGers would agree on that, but maybe a slight raise of the price per strains in the boxes may bring a bit more money to help you free your time? Not by a lot, I’m thinking $0.5 or $1, but that would be multiplied by many.
Also in the open source world there’s been a way for quite some time to raise money for project, ala wikipedia. Is by doing yearly fund raising, usually at the end of the year, where people donate for charity or stuffs like that. The amount of money needed and degree of completion is often displayed to give an idea… Maybe doing such an event on top of auctions could help to raise more money?
I’m also wondering if you have any idea of the income you’d need to free your time and leave decently. That would give a good datapoint. But I understand it may be intrusive to ask, so feel free to drop this. On my side, whatever you decide is fine anyway 
Hope that project can happen soon.
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We really try to keep the co-op cost neutral, and I only speak for myself, but I wouldn’t like to see the co-op turned into a revenue stream. It would basically go from free seeds to selling seeds. Selling seeds was not good for OG historicaly.
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Yeah the seed selling on ICM really brought out a lot of elitist bullshit that I think really degraded the forum over time.
Pz 
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If I could get a t shirt in a tall size, I’d be tacky as hell.
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Monetization is every forums downfall. Seems like the goal to revitalize overgrow has been reached ten fold. Why try to turn it in to something that requires so much revenue to drive it, that it may have the opposite effect?
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Maybe it’s just me but it does feel unusually quiet in here recently.
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ICMAG is a great example of how money can ruin a forum. They ran all the good people away from there when it became more about the sponsor / sales and not about the people and free exchange of information.
Now in order to keep the lights on, they sponsor anyone willing to send money and it doesn’t matter what the agenda is. It’s very sad considering how much valuable information is at that place. Monetization will never be a catalyst for fostering community. it does quite the opposite
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tall tees are great. I paid for a drive to another city to get a box of blank tall tees.
I was like the first guy on Spread Shirt back in the day. I already had a clothing line offline. Back then silk screens and equipment in my city had to be wood-crated, costing me $500 just for shipping on my silk screen machine.
Now you just go on Amazon for free shipping, buy the screen buy paint, make it in-house, the online guys are taking all the money.
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I think its important for folks to realize that OG is already monetized. Every site is really, they need to be in order to keep things running. When it comes to OG, I feel @LemonadeJoe has done a great job of walking the line to keep the money coming in but not interfering with the feel of OG. Many sites blast you with tons of ads but I dont see that here.
I see nothing wrong with a business owner trying to improve their profit margin. Especially when done in a way that doesnt change the vibe of the site. The big question becomes how to accomplish that so this conversation is quite helpful.
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Hard agree with this. I started as a Lurker here before joining after deciding I am comfy with making OG my new grow home. I feel like closing the doors in such a way would do more harm than good.
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I wonder how many photos from here are on seed packets. One might consider lower the resolution of pics displayed by status perhaps. That might lead to faster load times.
Say 800x600 for the masses, joined users get a higher rez. Not sure it is feasible with the software you are using but think it likely. Not usually popular to take away things, but I could see contributing being a prerequisite to high quality pics. Then again could just be added overhead for all the bandwidth it saves.
I could see custom emoji’s as a lure…all supporters get easy access to @George 's gifs? 
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That’s one dope logo 
Pz
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I agree, it is a nice logo! 
And not only that, I can almost always find that bong! 
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I totally agree. Some alternate designs for adults would be welcomed. I’m in a state that wearing pot leafs would not be appreciated.
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Redbubble does tax a significant amount. Though it is convenient that they do everything. There are others like Teespring and newer ones also. You want to represent overgrow on a shirt but not let people know it is affiliated with cannabis? That’s going to be hard to do if they google it.
Maybe something like this haha
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Would you define this website as a business or a community for the people? Members help sharing the cost to keep the community going is one thing, but paying the owner a salary as a means for a membership to something that was supposed to be for the community kind of changes vibe don’t you think?
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Living in California and being a old stoner, I must say that that’s a valid reason that I had not considered.
Thank you for pointing that out.
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Yea I do like this!!
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