Clearly document audience

[mtrythall]

We need to understand the two different types of user groups:

1. Who is currently using Gittip
2. Who we want to use Gittip

We then need to document who these people are, where they are, what they care about, and make them real.

Without a real understanding of the audience we don't know who we're designing for, what to say, how to say it, where to say it, etc.

[thefoxis]

For who is using it now, there's database, plus we can always do a Google Poll that saves data in Google Spreadsheet. Share through social media etc. Gives a decent probe without doing interviews.

Also I think we should talk to people who do a lot of Open Source. I know a few :)

[chadwhitacre]

Though we don't presort people (the way Patreon and Subbable do), there are two basic categories:

• Givers (tippers, donors, patrons)
• Receivers (tippees)

We have some basic stats on our Stats page:

• Gittip has 2486 active users (either gave or received last week, or both).
• 1582 participants gave money in the past week.
• 1318 received money.
• 414 did both.

[chadwhitacre]

Amongst givers, there's a further distinction:

• General Givers—Givers who come to Gittip with a desire to give, but nobody specific in mind. They need "discovery" features.
• Specific Givers—Givers who come to Gittip with a desire to give to a specific person. They need a nice profile page with an easy checkout flow.

Based on the content summary on IA (snapshotted below), I infer that we have roughly 25% general givers, and 65% specific givers (though this data isn't scoped to these categories by any means).

[chadwhitacre]

Some relevant threads:

• Re: reaching out to content creators: reach out to content creators gratipay.com#737.
• Re: requiring a certain voice of our users: Retire "I am making the world better by" in profile statement gratipay.com#1659. "The question is, am I going to be using my project's voice when I write my profile, or the voice you've chosen?"
• Browsing our communities indicates what we all know: Gittip's users are mostly drawn from the open-source world. PG: "The way to win here is to build the __________ all the hackers use. A __________ whose users consisted of the top 10,000 hackers and no one else would be in a very powerful position despite its small size." We very much aim to be a mass market platform, and we're starting in the open-source world.

[chadwhitacre]

Another way to slice the pie is:

• Individuals
• Groups

We started with a strong focus on individuals, and then gradually realized we needed some higher level of aggregation. Groups are supported in a two ways:

• Any given Gittip account can represent a group of people. We have a number of accounts like this, both givers and receivers.
• We have special support for groups that want to split the money they receive in an open and transparent manner. We call these "Teams."

The Communities feature is kind of related (and we sometimes confuse people with the difference between Teams and Communities and plain old accounts that represent a company/non-profit/etc.).

[chadwhitacre]

The individual/group distinction is orthogonal to the giver(specific/general)/receiver distinction. I don't have numbers to demonstrate this, however.

[zbynekwinkler]

@whit537 Nice wrap up 👍

[chadwhitacre]

Started a page on this: http://building.gittip.com/audience/.

[zbynekwinkler]

Where is it linked from?

[chadwhitacre]

@zwn It's now linked from the homepage.

[chadwhitacre]

Namely, http://building.gittip.com/.