https://getpolarized.io/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18219960

It's basically a offline browser with caching support, annotations, supports PDF and note taking.

I can't live without it which is why I started developing it and will continue to do so.

The user base is really passionate too. We have about 2000 active users so far and they're continuing to use the product. Very little churn.

They're also pretty active submitting issues, recommending product features.

They're also VERY engaged. 40% of our user base says they would be "very disappointed" if they could no longer use Polar.

We've setup an Open Collective to receive donations and have only received $88 so far.

https://opencollective.com/polar-bookshelf

Now I'm absolutely thankful for the donations but this really isn't sustainable.

There are two things I would like to purchase - continuous integration as well as a discourse.org account.

These would be about $200 per month. These would dramatically improve my performance and contribute back to the community.

Here's what I've tried so far to encourage community as well as donations:

- Twitter, discord groups are setup

- Links to these are in the product.

- We have a small 'banner' message at the top of the app that displays messages and one of them is about donations.

- One of the "What's New" message has a banner app asking for donations.

- Asked for donations on our Twitter and Discord groups.

Here's what I'm thinking about doing in the future to help resolve this:

- Make Polar evergreen so it constantly updates in the background and put a "please donate" message every time the app starts. This way I can experiment to see what works.

- Maybe put a 'state' of the donations in the app and that we've only received $88 and what our TARGET is... I don't want to be insanely aggressive with these ads though.

Thoughts?