December 16, 2010 from nathanbweller's blog
As you probably guessed from the title of this post, Abduzeedo is coming up on its 4th Birthday. Which begs the question, “What are you doing for your birthday Abduzeedo?!”
Good question. But before we talk about the future, lets remember the past.
The Founding
Back in 2006 Fabio Sasso, Co-Founder of Zee (a web design studio), went to lunch. While at lunch everything from the Zee offices was stolen. Yes, everything.
From that day on Fabio decided to post everything he was learning about design on a blog so that he would always have a copy “stored in the cloud” in-case something as tragic as the robbery ever happened again. Over time, those tutorials got pretty popular and early readers started asking questions like, “Hey Fabio, what inspires you?”
So Fabio started posting that stuff too. He even had to recruit a team of friends and family to help keep up with demand! Fast-forward 4 years, and now, the Abduzeedo Team posts inspiring stuff, strange stuff, fun stuff, educational stuff, all kinds of stuff! In fact, if you have asked for it, we have done our best to make it happen. With good reason too! We have found that throughout the years, if we respond to the needs of our readers, we are always met with good results.
Which is why for our birthday we would like to once again, collaborate with you our readers, to take Abduzeedo to a whole other level.
The Future
From the beginning Abduzeedo has always been about offering up knowledge, inspiration, and community - FOR FREE. And we have no intention of changing that. In fact, we want to make those offerings even better by re-thinking what we already do, and attempting to do it even better.
Which brings us to the first of several new beta experiments to come...
Introducing, Abducted Deals (beta)
This beta is designed to expand the reach and effectiveness of Abduzeedo Giveaways (and maybe once and for all, make all those annoying ads on our front page, a thing of the past). With all the hub-bub around group buying these days we got to wondering if we could provide awesome deals in the range of 50% to 100% off on stuff you want/need as a designer, in a win-win-win model that everyone from the reader, to us, to our partners enjoys.
That’s a tall order, but we think it is at least worth a try. I mean, how cool would it be if your new workspace was on us? Or you got a master creative suite from Adobe for 50% off? Or better yet, what if you gave us a wish-list and we tracked down partnerships that got you those things for free or at a heavily discounted price?
We think it sounds pretty sweet! But what do you think? This next week leading up to Christmas we will be running a series of Christmas Giveaways where we will test this model and invite you to give us feedback on how we can make it better, or if you even like it at all.
If you are interested in learning more and making sure you get a great new deal close to every day next week, head on up to the top right corner and spend a few seconds signing up for an Abduzeedo account. We will be following up with a more in-depth email tomorrow or the day after to give you a teaser of the Christmas Giveaways and explain how the new model will work. Any feedback you can give will be much appreciated and we will definitely take it into account for the next test we run :)
Looking forward to your thoughts!
- The Abduzeedo Team
P.S. Not to be too much of a tease, but signing up for an account now could be a big bonus for you in 2011 - wink, wink... ;) Also! Stay tuned this Saturday for our traditional Anniversary Poster Giveaway! This year's design was done by Rik Oostenbroek
