Numba Fan-Merchandise

Numba Community Support
1

(I’m not sure exactly where to post this …)

I get the impression that the Numba dev-team is very small, because it is always the same few people who are answering all issues here and on GitHub. It seems that there’s too much work for such a small team. I have an idea on how you might be able to raise money to hire more people to help you.

I’ve been joking in my posts here that I already have all the Numba fan-merchandise. That’s not true, of course, because you don’t sell any fan-merch. But I think you could! Things like t-shirts and posters would probably be very easy to sell. There are companies that can handle all of the logistics for you, and I see that some of you are located in Berlin, where I know there is a big art-scene, so you could get some cool designs made.

I would suggest charging premium-prices like $50 for a t-shirt or poster instead of just $20 which is common. People will know that the money goes to support the Numba development, so they will be willing to pay a premium but still reasonable price. And for the wealthy developers and companies who might want to support Numba with more money, you could make cool posters that are signed by the dev-team for e.g. $1000 a piece.

You could also make the merch in limited editions, and get new designs made whenever you run out, so people will hopefully come back and buy more, because repeat customers are always the best source of revenue.

I think you would be able to raise enough money to hire at least one more developer. But instead of hiring one person full-time, you could try and hire people from the community for individual short-term projects. I imagine it is very hard to find people with the know-how you need, but some of the people in the community who have already contributed to your development on a volounteer basis, might be able to take e.g. 2 days off from their job every week for a couple of months to help improve Numba, and they could then be paid from the money raised from the merchandise sale.

I think this could actually work, and it might be a new way to help fund open-source development in the future.

Why not give it a try?

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@Hvass-Labs thank you fro raising this point.

I would like to respond to this with some questions and maybe some critique, so no offense intended. Also, this is my very own personal and highly biased opinion (maybe even experimental) so don’t anybody go flame-war on me, thanks :pray:

I like the idea of Merch a lot and I would love some too. But we (whoever “we” is) would need to find someone who can take of this. Assuming we find such a person, how will we compensate them? Numba is not a company, we don’t have a legal entity to even collect or payout funds. So, while the idea is nice, I don’t see a practical way to execute this plan. Having an impartial body with governance and the ability to collect and distribute project funds would be a first step. We have now been thinking about this for years, but haven’t yet found a workable solution. so that would need to be in place before we can even think about the whole merch story.

Regarding the term “Numba dev-team”. This term is so loosely defined in our context, it could be anything. I generally don’t think that the term “team” is even applicable here. Numba is created by a set of individuals that have, for themselves, found a way to contribute to Numba on a regular basis (.e.g by finding and employer who is willing to pay them to work on Numba or by being a Student with copious amounts of spare time and motivation). In this sense, the dev-team is basically everyone who has ever contributed to Numba… Alternatively, we could also ask about the active dev-team? This is different from day to day. It depends on who contributes on a given day, so the team is different every day. Essentially, the team is not exactly quantifiable, or necessarily enumerable to a useful extent on any given day. Maybe the best analogy is the concept of Qi / Chi Qi - Wikipedia. This is loosely defined as life-force and in general is not tangible and only visible and perceivable by the effect it has on the material world. So, maybe you can think of the Numba dev-team as non-tangible Qi and the effect is has on the material world is that better and better Numba releases keep “appearing”.

So, having outlined, that the dev-team is non-tangible, think the concept of “collecting money to grow the dev-team” doesn’t make sense. This is a strategy I would employ in a startup, if the startup would like to grow. You need more hands, you grab some VC money and you hire some people – simple, right? In this particular open source context, the idea of growing the dev-team would mean attracting more developers, somehow. Convincing people to go find themselves an employer to pay them to work on Numba. Or, convince the existing employers that pay the current contributors to hire more contributors. In that sense, what we can do is create a welcoming community, with helpful answers and good, healthy communication, enforced community guidelines and transparency about the roadmap. I.e. to create an environment that is likely to help people to make the choice to start contributing – we don’t need to find money, we need to find people and then convince them to find their own way to add value. For example, anyone with sufficient Numba skills could volunteer as a Numba consultant and offer paid services (implementation/optimization/debugging/training) within our ecosystem. If that goes well, they can use the money they make to hire more people etc… Or, look at bodo.ai – these folks run a commercial entity based entirely on an open-source core and then offer these commercial services to customers. You get the idea. Maybe it makes more sense to think about how to “grow the ecosystem”?

And to go full-circle, people love merch! So maybe finding a way to produce merch will attract more developers (rather than actually funding them).

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Thanks for the long explanation! You didn’t say anything offensive at all, but I appreciate the trigger-warning! :slight_smile:

I didn’t realize you are all volunteers? I thought Numba was a project under Anaconda, and Anaconda was a real company that somehow had found a way to make money on open-source and could hire full-time employees? I thought yourself and people like Stuart Archibald were paid to work on Numba and other Anaconda projects full-time? And that you have offices and everything? That’s the impression I got from reading about Numba and Anaconda!

If you are all volunteers and you don’t make a dime on this, and you’re not rich so you could use some income from all the work you do on Numba, then I would suggest you start advertising that fact, so people would be more willing to help you out! :slight_smile:

Even though I had a very large audience for my TensorFlow tutorials, I think I only ever made around $2500 in donations, and $1000 of those came from a single individual (a well-known person who got rich on his own work and could afford to make such a donation). So donations are really hard to get!

I think a much better way to generate some revenue for the project, would be to sell cool merch! I think that would be much more successful than asking for donations.

If you’re not operating within a legal corporate framework of some kind, then I think you can start the merch-business without any form of incorporation. It is only when you get a significant amount of revenue (the exact amount is different in each country), that you have to start charging VAT and pay taxes etc. But at that point you could probably operate as a 100% non-profit organization, so you don’t have to pay taxes, and your paperwork would be much easier.

Here is what I would suggest:

  1. You’re in Berlin right? I’ve lived there many times and know it well. Go to Mauerpark Flohmarkt on a Sunday and buy a few samples of the artwork you like, get the contact-info from the artist, and ask if they might be interested in participating in the project. There’s some people selling really nice photos of abandoned buildings, that I really like and I think those would make for great posters with a cool Numba logo in the corner or something. But there’s all kinds of artists in Berlin, and they’re all struggling to survive, so I think they would be very interested in participating!

  2. I would suggest you offer the artist a fixed payment per t-shirt / poster. Don’t pay them upfront since you don’t have any money. Just make a small written agreement that they get e.g. 5 Euro per poster or t-shirt that is sold.

  3. Find a company that can do all the manufacturing and shipping for you. Lots of YouTube channels sell merch like this. You just have to setup a little shop on their website and upload the artwork, and then they take care of everything.

  4. Charge premium prices - but still at a level that people can afford. I’m thinking USD/EUR 50 for a t-shirt or poster.

  5. Make them limited editions so they are perceived to be more rare and valuable. I would suggest starting with editions of only 100 copies. I think those will fly away very quickly! Depending on the demand and the cost of changing artwork for your products, you can increase the number of limited copies.

  6. If it works out and you start to generate significant revenue that you need to pay out to the developers, then you would either need to setup a non-profit organization - or even simpler would be to get another non-profit organization to simply make your merch-business a part of it, so you don’t have to do any legal paperwork yourself. I’m thinking another open-source foundation of some kind that would be willing to help you out.

I think it will be pretty easy to get started. Even if it fails to become a commercial success, there is minimal risk of losing much money, you would just have wasted a little of your time, but you will have some artwork you will enjoy later in life, to remind you of all the super-cool work you did on Numba! And you will probably make some very interesting new friends in the Berlin art-scene!

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I am sorry if created the suggestion that that I am not paid full-time to work on Numba. Anaconda is indeed a company (no offices though, since the pandemic) and Anaconda does pay me (in hard currency) to work on Numba for a large portion of my day-job. But I consider this more of a “sponsorship”, since I am given a lot of freedom in how, when and what I work on. As for the other contributors, I can’t comment on that. As for how Anaconda makes money, I am also not the right person to comment on that either.

But what I can tell you is that I perceive the Numba ecosystem growing, there are multiple stakeholders, both individuals and companies, e.g. Anaconda that contribute in different ways to the project.

Thank you also for your suggestions on finding artists in Berlin, it all sounds wonderful!!

1 Like
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Hi, just to jump here and address one point: Anaconda is a real company that makes money selling software, just not Numba. :slight_smile:

Most of the Numba maintainers are paid by Anaconda and are part of our open source R&D group, which currently includes about 9 people (not counting me) who work on a variety of projects. The goal of this group is not to make money for Anaconda (although we do sponsored open source work when it is strategically aligned with the project goals), but to improve the productivity of the Python ecosystem over the long term. We believe this is both an ethical thing to do (since much of our for-profit product depends on Python open source tools), and also something which will grow our potential customer base (commercial Python and data science users) over the long term. The size of our open source team is limited by the overall financial success of Anaconda, but we are growing it this year. We have open positions for a Numba developer and a Jupyter developer right now, for example.

I won’t speak to the difficulty of contributing to Numba (compilers are hard, Numba has 9 years of history and evolution which makes it hard to understand, etc), but this is something I know the team thinks about a lot. It is a hard problem to solve that requires incremental progress on many fronts.

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To follow up some more, there was a vision meeting today where we as a community outlined what each of us wanted from Numba. It may very well be worth a read to learn more about who makes Numba and what Numba will be and look like in the future!

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Thanks for the explanation to both of you!

Since Anaconda is a real company, it would be super-easy for you to start the merchandise sales. Just find an artist you like, setup an internet store with a company that handles all the logistics (printing, shipping, payment, etc), and make all billing go to and from the Anaconda corporation.

If you don’t really need the money to fund your work, I think you should still do it, because I think people would really like to have a cool Numba poster or t-shirt.

You can also make a 50/50 split of the profits with the artist, if you don’t really need the funds to support your development. But if you do need the money, then I think the artist will accept less than a 50/50 split because it is for a good purpose.

I quickly skimmed the meeting summary and it looks like several of you are concerned about some of the things I’ve been talking about recently: Both getting new users started with Numba, and making the code-base easier for outsiders to understand and contribute to.

PS and off-topic: I can see from the meeting summary that one of you is named Benjamin Graham who was also a very famous scholar and investor. He was Warren Buffett’s teacher and invented what is known as “fundamental analysis” for long-term investing. But it seems the world has largely forgotten about that now, as everyone thinks they can get rich from AI trading-bots and crypto.

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Thank you for your suggestions on Numba merch. I think it will (hast to) happen, eventually. It will be great to return to this post for inspiration when the time comes :pray: