The Potential Future Costs of CK (or, The bigger picture starts here) (Patreon)

In my last post I explained why it’s so important to me for this campaign to reach at least $84 a month in support of Crushing Krisis, and ideally $120.

At $120/month, CK will be humming along in the most optimal shape it's been in for years - but that doesn't mean my plans end there! Here’s a look at some of the next things I’d focus when pledges are between $120-800/month (though not necessarily in this order).

Musical Expenses

While I don’t intend to use Patreon to buy expensive new gear, it would be nice to subsidize my guitar strings since I try to be a professional and change them before they start breaking. 

The bigger need is the ability to purchase mechanical licenses for 1-2 cover songs each month so I don’t get issued DMCA notices for recording and posting them! Song licensing  costs depend on the amount of streams or downloads, but they start around in the $20-30 zone after fees.

Projected Cost: An ongoing $16-65 per month

CK Redesign

I'm at a distinct disadvantage to almost every competitor and near neighbor to CK - I'm not mobile-optimized in the slightest. 

I know both from my experience in business analytics and from my own visitor data that I'm probably losing out on the a lot of mobile views and clicks I could be getting if CK was a friendlier mobile experience.

Plus, Google is going to start lowering the search rankings for pages that aren't optimized for mobile. Much of my new guide traffic is organic traffic, so if I don't redesign by that point it would be the death knell of CK.

Rather than pay a designer to create something custom for CK, I’d like to take the more sustainable route of purchasing a major WordPress framework and then customizing it to my needs. I’ve tried this in the past, but returned my license key because I simply didn’t have the time to focus on it. Now I do. 

(Also, it doesn't hurt to be married to a CSS expert.)

Projected Cost: This should be a one-time cost of $300-750 to license the framework, or $25-62.50 per month for a year of pledging, dropping down to $10 per month for subscription fees to maintain the license in subsequent years - freeing me to spend pledges on other big picture needs.

Creation of an LLC

Registering a limited liability company is the final frontier I must cross to be able to turn CK from a personal project into more sustainable business in the long term. 

Creating an LLC would simplify my personal accounting and turn a lot of my purchases into legitimate business expenses. It would also better protect my family from any legal and financial repercussions of my creative pursuits (this is a big one), and simplify the process of paying contractors like graphic designers or additional writers.

Let me again highlight "protect my family from any legal and financial reprecussions." Y'all know how Gawker.com is dead in the water now? That's because they had the protection of being a business. If I had a suit filed against me for some reason right now for doing something illegal on CK (not that I'm aware of anything!) my family could lose everything.

Plus, it would be pretty cool to make "Krisis Productions," which I've written in the liner notes of songs for over 20 years, a reality.

Projected Cost: The actual one-time costs of doing this in Pennsylvania are about $200 (not adjusted for Patreon fees/processing). However, I also need the advice of a lawyer and an accountant, and I’m hoping I can convince ones that I know to give me a (highly discounted) Friends & Family rate. 

To account for potential Lawyer/Accountant fees I must raise almost $200 a month for a year, but in subsequent years it would be more like $50-75/month for maintenance - freeing up that goal money for other advanced needs and improvements.

Adding Nice-to-Have Services

These services won’t make the massive impact on my daily productivity of my SEO plugin or Photoshop, but they could still make CK more powerful. 

The big expenses in this block are upgrading my Adobe subscription to cover all of their apps, upgrading to a paid MailChimp subscription, and subscribing to a social media monitoring platform (the expensive one that I want is 6x as much!)

Projected Cost: Depending on which services I decide on, this could be up to $120 to cover - as much as my entire cost for a high-performance CK! That means this wouldn’t be my first focus - I’d likely only focus on it if other goals and tools were going very well or after the initial spend on the redesign or LLC is completed.

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There is a third part to this costs series that is about less-practical, longer-term future plans for CK, but I think I owe it to you to cover a few less lofty topics before rambling about that.