run a kickstarter

[chadwhitacre]

Reticketing from #95. The idea would be to give Chad three months to build and evangelize Gittip to the point where he (with others) is finding a living on it.

Draft here:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/whit537/1818838801?token=59ef74a4

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@therabidbanana: Maybe if you need to verify that there's promise in the idea, use a more established crowd-sourcing platform like Kickstarter that allows a set goal with deadline to try to get enough money to focus on building it full time for a few months? I'd certainly be willing to donate a bigger amount to try and kickstart the gittip economy. :D

@whit537: Hmmm, will have to chew on that one ... is it going to be easier to raise $12,000 ($4,000 x 3 months) on Kickstarter, or find 80 tippers at $12 a week on Gittip? Got to market it one way or another. If the (time) cost of marketing is the same in both cases, then having the sustainable income already in hand seems better than having to subsequently raise the 80 x $12 again anyway. The ultimate goal is the 80 x $12. Not clear to me yet that Kickstarter adds enough value as a proximate goal, but maybe?

@therabidbanana: The advantage to the kickstarter method is that everyone pays or nobody does - it makes you feel more confident about contributing. If only ten people pay $12/week, and that is not actually enough to sustain gittip, so the project dies out, then the people that went in have the feeling they have thrown away their money. I think a possible reason that more people haven't backed their tips is that they want to wait and see if gittip actually becomes reasonably viable before actually kicking in - which keeps it from being viable... a painful cycle to break out of, and exactly the kind of thing Kickstarter was made for.

Another open source project on kickstarter that was essentially "give me money to work on this full time for a few months" and was reasonably successful: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/joeyh/git-annex-assistant-like-dropbox-but-with-your-own/

@whit537: The thing is, if I do the Kickstarter, I still need to then go and raise the 80 x $12 in order to keep going, or I'm right back where I started, just with even more momentum behind the site (= pressure to make it work "somehow"). On the other hand, Kickstarters are known quantity by now and are kind of hot, even. They might lend some credence to Gittip by association. Also, one can look at it the other way: if I were to get 500 backers on Kickstarter it sure seems like I should be able to convert 200 of them into gittippers.

[chadwhitacre]

Seems like this fizzled. Re-open as desired.

[abnor]

Woah. Dug this up. Very historical. (Yay internet archaeology!) I'd love to hear the story sometime of how the kickstarter failed and gittip prevailed in spite of.