This is very inspiring and congratulations! The overall site design is quite nice, and others have commented on the amount of text on the Overview page.
Could you discuss 1/ your business model (is it just paid premium features on the hosted version?) ; 2/ how you decided $25k would be good to start with on Kickstarter ; and (unrelated) 3/ what happened to thescholarapp.com (ad-parked now - whatever was there is gone)?
The primary focus is getting people using the software hosted or self installed.
The business model is on the hosted side via freemium + premium services.
$25k seemed like an okay threshold to prove market validation. Less than that and I wouldn't have felt comfortable enough people wanted something like this. It was not related to the actual cost of building OpenPhoto which has far exceeded that so far :).
The Scholar App we abandoned because the education space sucks and has too much friction for innovation. Hopefully others stick it out there because we are in dire need of innovation in education.
Could you discuss 1/ your business model (is it just paid premium features on the hosted version?) ; 2/ how you decided $25k would be good to start with on Kickstarter ; and (unrelated) 3/ what happened to thescholarapp.com (ad-parked now - whatever was there is gone)?
Excited to see where you go with OpenPhoto!