Dear thounder,
this is the kind of letter a founder would never want to write, but now I reckon this is due if not for all the loyalty and interest you showed us.
Thounds is going to change, not sure how much dramatically but it has to, our seed program (reads: cash) terminated a while ago and no good financial news came since then.
This may result in a surprise for you, I know and the first question after the wtf abrupt might as well be: “Where have you failed guys?”
On many sides, to keep it general I’d say we never worried too much to reclaim our governance and then define a sustainable revenue model.
Beyond the reasons why we came to this point now it’s important to see if we can have support and start again.
You will understand it’s far from easy to keep such a platform alive yet improved with no paid wages since June 2011, and this indicator should tell a good metric of what words like involvement and commitment mean at Thounds.
We have now finished a batch of succesful Fender and SoundCloud contests (past three extraordinary months with servers paralyzed by the increased traffic and with a community that doubled now to 30K registered users) and today we need new enthusiasts, be them developers, digital media professionals or investors.
Our assets are:
a) We know why we missed target
b) You know already Thounds
c) API and Community
How can you help?
- Donate, there is a crowdfunding campaign on Indie GoGo to help with day to day expenses. You can give as cheap as a fiver and up: http://www.indiegogo.com/savethounds.
- Speak up, tell us how can you improve Thounds and if your idea is the best you will join us http://thounds.com/savethounds.
- The best five ideas are being offered to all the developers gathering at the first Hackathon event at H-FARM in June.
- Make some noise, share this message, tweet your impression, official hashtag is #savethounds.
Hello Thounders,
to write these few lines is hard for me. I didn’t expect a result as good as this while I was in university and I was creating the first pieces of this platform. To create a place giving everybody the opportunity to express through music has always been the main point of this project. And this is what pleases me the most: we succeeded in creating that place.
Francesco Fraioli
Founder and product manager
21st March 2012
We really enjoy to run competitions, and you seem to do too!
So, we are announcing a new contest is now open: it’s White Fender 2012 and on this we are giving away more prizes, we have a white Fender Stratocaster for the 1st place and then three Soundcloud Premium accounts for the next positions.
Don’t miss this chance because this will be the last Fender contest for a while!
The first competition of 2012 has its winner, it’s Marco Mangraviti that has received more comments than any other. His top score has been followed by Bence Koczka, Yosif Bambin, Lost Brand, Piero Furlan, Piotrek Wojnar and many more thounders.
Marco is receiving a black Fender Stratocaster guitar, that he can’t wait to show off on stage with his band.
We are happy to announce Alessandro Donadei is the winner of the XMAS competition on Facebook!
The competition ended at midnight of the 6th January, counting nearly one hundred tracks recorded with our Facebook app and amongst the ten most liked, Alessandro resulted to be the thounder with more friends (317 at the time of closing) followed by Mateus Oppeln (174), David (156), Giuseppe Antonio Mazza (83), Francisco Manzano Garcia (64), etc
Alessandro is receiving a red Fender Stratocaster guitar, that will help him to record many other thounds.
Time to meet our promise: more Fender guitars for you thounders!
Last Fender contest has been such a success, it started in November and finished after 4 weeks and thousands new users who joined our community, we have been so excited we have bought another Fender guitar for you and there you go.
The rules are always the easiest:
Record a new thound from the contest page (link below)
Get all of your friends to comment that thound
Win a black Fender Stratocaster if you score the highest amount of users that commented
General rules:
Comments will be counted as from unique users.
You can apply with as many thounds as you want.
In case of even amount of comments the earlier recorded thound will win.
Thounds users who already won a prize during 2011 are not eligible
Thounds.com can suspend users with suspicious activity if no valid answers are given upon request
We will ship everywhere in the world for free.
You have time until Wednesday 18th January 2012 23:59 CET
Following server downtime during the weekend we asked our community to decide whether to give two more days or not and they have decided for more time, so:
You have time until Friday 2nd December 2011 23:59 CET
It’s raining today and makes it not very happy then, so we thought it was a good idea to cheer you up and start a new contest to give one Fender Stratocaster away.
The rules are the easiest:
Record a new thound, choose a nice title and type in the tag #fender1111 when prompted
Get all of your friends to comment that thound
Win the blue Fender Stratocaster if you scored the highest amount of users that commented
Comments will be count as from unique users.
You can apply with as many thounds as you want.
In case of even amount of comments the earlier recorded thound will win.
We will ship everywhere in the world for free.
You have time until Wednesday 30th November 2011 17:00 CET
UPDATED
Following server downtime during the weekend we asked our community to decide whether to give two more days or not and they have decided for more time, so:
You have time until Friday 2nd December 2011 23:59 CET
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