What is happening with Passionate Produce?
TLDR: Passionate Produce...LIVES! We are still here. folks, just a little beset by the slings and arrows of financial tomfoolery. That means it may be a while before we have a concrete launch date.
Our last big bang was opening the site up for beta testers in September 2013. At that time, we were hoping to launch in early 2014. It's been an ongoing process, and the launch date is a slippery little sucker.
Why? We are SO GLAD you asked!
Things were looking great at the start of October: we had a bank who was willing to work with us on payment processing, but they backed out in November. We can't use PayPal, Google Wallet, Amazon Payments, or any of the big-name payment processors because they have sex-negative terms of service: they're generally anti-pornography, and since we want to support sex-positive filmmakers that's a non-starter. A few folks have suggested that we use BitCoin, but we just don't think that's accessible enough to a wide range of folks. Since November, we've been trying to make connections and find leads, but it's a slow and uphill battle.
Work continues on the website itself as we stomp out bugs and add shiny, sparkly features so that we're ready as soon as we have a payment processor who ROCKS and loves us for who we are! We're working on a major infrastructure upgrade, and once that's in the can, we'll send out another round of beta tester invites. Thanks to everyone who's joined the beta tester program so far and started playing around with the site! We'll be nudging everyone to log in again and play around some more as we get closer to launch.
We also have a new badass Systems Administrator on board who's going to help us make sure the site is reliable and ready for traffic when we do finally launch.
We're excited to start giving you more regular updates: we'll try to keep the newsletter coming monthly, and hopefully you'll start to see more action on our blog, Facebook page, and Twitter feed over the coming months.
Thanks to everyone for your support! Your emails, tweets, and reshares are what give us strength. We don't know how much longer it will take to launch, but you remind us that this work is important and that it matters.
Peace.
~The Passionate Producers