Medium Difficulty Needs YOU!

Posted on September 12, 2012 by Medium Difficulty
You, our readers, have supported us by reading the site, sharing articles you love, and commenting on interesting articles. The time has come to ask you for help.

We’ve put a lot of ourselves into this site, including a large portion of our credit cards and disposable income on equipment, maintenance costs, hosting, business and marketing materials, and a lot more.

We’re at our limit. We’ve been developing, running, and growing Medium Difficulty on our own for an entire year – although we launched in March 2012, we’ve been working on it since September 2011. We’re proud of what we’ve accomplished, but we can’t rest on our laurels. We have big plans for Medium Difficulty, and we aren’t about to stop now. We need your help.


Donation Link for iPhones and Other Apple/Non-Flash Devices

What will you be buying with your contribution?

1. Helping Us Focus on Medium Difficulty

You may have noticed that content updates haven’t been as frequent on the site as it used to be. We have day jobs that we’ve been using to bootstrap the site to get to this point, but the obvious downside of day jobs is that you need to make them a priority. And when we got to the point that our existing finances were tapped? We needed to focus on our responsibilities.

That’s why the site still runs on a free hacked-together WordPress theme – we just can’t afford a proper one. Your contribution goes right to making the site grow, and helping us balance our time more effectively: we’ll be a lot better at finding excellent new contributors, improving the site, and continuing to raise our standard of quality, if we don’t have to choose between groceries and hosting costs .

2. Pro-Quality Redesign, Maintenance, and Hosting

Medium Difficulty costs $50/month to host between its web and email servers, which are hosted separately. On top of that, we have quotes and offers of support from programmers, web, print, and logo designers, illustrators, and UI/UX professionals who would love to work on the site.

Thing is, we believe in paying people for quality work. We’ve been freelancers and people who have to account for every hour of their day on a billing sheet, and even volunteer projects go a lot more smoothly if everyone’s being paid for their time. We’ve been slowly saving up – see point #1 – but it’s a long grind. You can help make the site look as good as it reads.

3. Laptop & Mobile A/V Editing Station

This will allow better coverage of events and conferences, like PAX and GDC, as well as enabling A/V editing for video content, podcasts, video essays, ‘rough cut’ behind-the-scenes content, and much more. We’re not looking for a free gaming PC. We already have those, because we’re giant nerds. We need a workstation with the power and mobility to help cover these events, and we learned that by going to PAX without one.

4. Medium Difficulty Store

Like any website, we want to make sure that Medium Difficulty puts as little of a drain on our personal finances as possible. Merchandise is the first obvious option for making money. But we’ve been around the Internet for a while, and we know that CafePress sucks and we want to sell things worth buying . Doing test runs and proofs of t-shirts, coffee mugs, notebooks, and other awesome stuff takes money, as does everything else. You can help us make excellent Medium Difficulty products happen.

5. Access to the Kickstarter Gated Community

We’re realists. $5,000 is a drop in the bucket compared to what it will take to make Medium Difficulty self-sufficient and the awesome site we know it can be. We’re all writers, so we know how important it is to pay contributors. We’re editors, so we believe in the power of well-made writing. We’re nerds, so we want to expand the site to criticism in a variety of media and play to each format’s strengths. These things will take far more than five thousand dollars, and we have the misfortune of being Canadian, so we can’t access Kickstarter as easily as others can .

At the PAX panel this year, Kickstarter Community Manager Cindy Au said that while Canadian access to KS projects is upcoming, the immediate priority is the UK and it’ll be a few years before Canadians get access. There are ways to work around Amazon Payments, but they aren’t free and we have to get started now.

We have IndieGoGo available to us, and it’s worked very well for some – but we don’t even have the resources to make a proper pitch.

That’s where you come in. Help us make Medium Difficulty the amazing site you know it can be .

Send questions, comments, and offers of support to . If you can’t contribute, we understand – but sharing this link would really help us out.

Thanks for reading. <3

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