Give It Away Now

I think I'm going to adopt "Give It Away" by the Red Hot Chili Peppers as the official theme song for Sgt Fitness.

"Give it away, give it away, give it away now..."

One of the things that inspired me to give away a significant fraction of the revenue from Sgt Fitness was a twitter campaign for, believe it or not, a museum of computing history in the UK. They were trying to raise £1.5 million to build the museum, and their tactic was to appeal to the "twitter-verse" to see if they could get 1.5 million people from all over the world to donate £1 each. Their logic went something like: if certain unnamed (in)famous Hollywood personalities can garner twitter followings of a million or more fans in days with their drivel, then a worthy cause should surely be able to raise some money. A little viral fundraising action.

"I realize I don't want to be a miser"

The thought then occurred to me as I was putting the finishing touches on the first release of Sgt Fitness. What if I donate a dollar, or a little more, for each copy of Sgt Fitness I sell on the app store? And then, what if I spread the news far and wide that it's my goal to sell a million copies of the app, thereby donating a million dollars or more to charity? I know, let's make it even more interesting: let's let the folks who actually buy a copy vote on what charities to donate the money to, and put a deadline of the end of the year on it. Could we do it? Is this idea good enough to take off? Will the Sgt go viral?

"Come on everybody, time to deliver
...
Give it away, give it away, give it away now..."