track Bountysource

[chadwhitacre]

Bountysource started directly competing with us last spring, with the release of "Salt." It's been growing steadily since. Before, Bountysource just did the bounty model. But, while we've had the wind totally knocked out of us by the Balanced shutdown, Bountysource has been gradually pivoting into the spot we once occupied alone: a "recurring crowdfunding platform to help developers earn their own salary from open-source."

Patreon swooped in and picked up content creators before we could blink.

Assembly showed up with an innovative revenue-sharing model, but eventually gave up.

This is the third time I've felt a fire in my belly, and I've come to recognize it as the 🔥 of competition. If we ignore Bountysource, they're going to eat our lunch. Simple as that. In fact, it may already be too late. I don't know how this is supposed to work, because I've never gotten mixed up in serious business competition before. But ... when in doubt, make a ticket! :-)

[mattbk]

We have some things going for us:

• We don't take a cut.
• Donations start at $0.01.

What else?

[chadwhitacre]

@mattbk What do we not have going for us? That's what's going to get us burned here.

[chadwhitacre]

Clarity.

[mattbk]

• A shiny website?
• Progress bars (see attached)?
• Share links (see attached)?
• Clarity is true. I always get overwhelmed looking at sites like IndieGoGo that have so much going on, and that's what Salt looks like to me. Let teams focus on the copy on their own sites, not have to keep updating another site in order to make yourselves look active to receive funding.

[chadwhitacre]

I was thinking that Bountysource Salt has more clarity than us. Compare:

https://salt.bountysource.com/ (homepage!)

with:

https://gratipay.com/explore/teams/ (not even our homepage!)

[chadwhitacre]

We are casting the net wider than just open-source projects, which hurts us in that it dissipates our focus and makes us muddy. On the other hand, it means we get to have awesome hackerspaces as users! :-)

https://gratipay.com/catapultpgh/
https://gratipay.com/cyberpipe/
https://gratipay.com/sudo-room/ (and also https://gratipay.com/sudomesh/)
https://gratipay.com/totalism-hackbase/

[chadwhitacre]

I'll also say something similar to what I said about Patreon a year ago: I'll cede to Bountysource when they:

• go fully open-source,
• implement https://gratipay.com/about/features/payroll,
• and fund themselves on themselves.

[techtonik]

Replacing all the text with datavis is definitely a good direction.

And I think that there is no competition. Gratipay - it is not about bounties and competition. It is about designing Open Source Economy of Gratitude, and that means that we need to make a step further than just collecting the stuff for living. Without doubts, but.. let me create a ticket.

[mattbk]

It's interesting to see @whit537 stepping toward competition and away from what you posted, @techtonik.

As Funkadelic say, "free your mind and your ass will follow."

[chadwhitacre]

Via the latest Changelog newsletter:

[mattbk]

I think we should focus on sustainable funding, not total collected.

[chadwhitacre]

/me changes the ticket title to be more honest.

[chadwhitacre]

Bringing this over from #312 (comment):

[chadwhitacre]

SIX STRATEGIES TO COMPETE IN BUSINESS

https://www.google.com/search?q=how+do+you+compete+in+business

[webmaven]

Simon Wardley is the most sophisticated thinker I know on the topic of competitive strategy.
http://blog.gardeviance.org/2015/03/wardley-map-set-of-useful-posts.html

Some recent posts not listed in that round-up:
http://blog.gardeviance.org/2015/05/on-evolution-maps-and-numpties.html
http://blog.gardeviance.org/2015/05/on-61-different-forms-of-gameplay.html (love the D&D alignment metaphor!)
http://blog.gardeviance.org/2015/05/five-key-indicators-for-success.html
http://blog.gardeviance.org/2015/07/the-100-day-corporate-get-fit-plan.html
http://blog.gardeviance.org/2015/08/on-future.html
http://blog.gardeviance.org/2015/08/on-platforms-and-ecosystems.html
http://blog.gardeviance.org/2015/08/on-common-fallacy-of-hypothesis-driven.html

[chadwhitacre]

I think they might be out of invite-only? Can anyone confirm?

[chadwhitacre]

[chadwhitacre]

They've rolled out search and tagging:

[chadwhitacre]

[chadwhitacre]

I received Bountysource's announcement immediately after pinging The Changelog. Seems like this could be about to heat up. :)

Product and brand.

Product

Our product is weaker.

Bountysource has more money and, consequently, a better product with features like updates and tagging.

Brand

Our brand is stronger. They're trying to serve the open-source community, but they're not open. They skim 10% off the top. They don't openly discuss their competitive strategy. ;) And their brand is "Salt," which, along with the term "bounty," is vaguely mercenary:

The word salary comes from the Latin word salarium, or "salt-money,” a Roman soldier's allowance for the purchase of salt.

In contrast, Gratipay receives payments on the same terms as any other Team. We are open. And our brand is the heart coin, which is all about punching an effing heart into the goddam global economy, which we are in fact slowly but surely doing.

So what?

Our brand only comes into play if we can meet the table stakes. If we can stay close to Bountysource on product then the fact that we're truly open and they're not should help us a good deal in the marketing, but if we can't compete on features then it doesn't matter how open we are: at the end of the day, users want to use a good product!

Whoever reaches critical mass first wins. Patreon won hands-down with creatives. If we let Bountysource take the open-source market ... then we can keep straggling along with our die-hard fans and working part-time on Gratipay, since we don't have investor pressure (Bountysource does). But I'd really like to get this ✈️ off the ground here at some point. I'm up for some more huffing and puffing on the campfire to get it started, but at some point I would like to sit back and crack open a beer. :-)

[chadwhitacre]

I'll also say something similar to what I said about Patreon a year ago: I'll cede to Bountysource when they:

• go fully open-source,
• implement https://gratipay.com/about/features/payroll,
• and fund themselves on themselves.

I wonder ... would Warren maybe actually go for this? :-)

[techtonik]

Let me iterate it a bit.. What if we concentrate more on people receiving money and sending it not for the service, not the product, just because of gratitude? We need a clear separation for this for FinCEH, and for people - clarity for one and confidence for the other. Sooner or later Bountysource will hit the same wall with FinCEH that we've had. And then it will be a question if it is a money-laundering and tax-evasion service or not. If somebody can solve a ticket for money and pay taxes, and somebody can do this for "bounty" and don't pay taxes, I can imagine some people seeing it as a tax evasion and raising questions.

So by concentrating on people I don't mean yet another social network - payment is all about money and keeping oneselves alive - I mean let's concentrate on how to make the flow legal, taxes paid and allow the transit passage of GPieces from one person to another through a series of exchanges. Gratipay can serve as an fund, where a distribution scheme is defined by rules that people are set personally. This guarantees that GP can get money into the system without question from authority. Then we need to make sure it is legal to get money for every country. Then we also need to be clear how the system could be abused, how authority sees that and what can we do about such external pressure.

[techtonik]

But the thing that bothers me much more is that I am not productive as a coder anymore. Well, never was, but that doesn't help to push it..

[chadwhitacre]

Went out in The Changelog Weekly today:

[chadwhitacre]

Salt started with one-off contributions. We got a huge demand for that in gratipay/gratipay.com#5. Hmmm ...

[chadwhitacre]

I was thinking that I'd like to go through Bountysource and do a feature comparison to see where we're lacking. Then it occurred to me to publish a one-page site comparing the two, because that would answer the question for us, and it could help us set the terms of public debate around openness: as we're able to close the feature gaps, the remaining "Open company?" feature will become more apparent.

I just bought gratipay-or-bountysource.guide. :-)

[chadwhitacre]

Call scheduled for tomorrow at 18:00 UTC. Gonna do a private call with a written summary after the fact.

[chadwhitacre]

We've got a call tomorrow with @bountysource to catch up on how our respective efforts to fund FLOSS are unfolding: #316 (comment).

https://twitter.com/Gratipay/status/717098156278824960

[gravyboat]

Another interesting factor that isn't included here is the multiple methods which are used to 'cash out' at Bountysource. Per their FAQ they currently support: Check, Paypal, Bitcoin, or Ripple. @whit537 (or whoever is running the Gratipay Twitter) and I have discussed the importance of multiple ways to pay people out so this isn't something new, just something to note.

[chadwhitacre]

Okay! Here's my summary of the call, which I vetted w/ @rappo so I'm including his responses:

Dave,

Thanks for the call. I appreciate the face-to-face interaction and the well-intentioned goading, as well as the invitation to join forces. Thank you. :-)

Here's what I plan to post:

---

We had a friendly call, which lasted almost 1.5 hours. @rappo rightly notes that Gratipay's numbers have been flat for a year, while Salt has shown steady growth. Gratipay needs to up its game if we want to stay competitive—and if/when we're ready to cede, we're all welcome to work for Bountysource. :-)

Some tidbits:

• They are going the Liberapay route re: curate users #118 (common carrier, trying to avoid politics)
• They are agnostic about how teams split funds (there are some on-site tools, more complex scenarios happen off-site).
• All members of all teams on Bountysource are contractors of Bountysource, Inc. (they're a "crowdsourced software company", not a payment processor).
• They are keeping the 10% hard fee (despite having their own Salt campaign).
• "Except for salaries, we are profitable."
• They are now open-source, and are planning to make a push soon to build the community around Bountysource itself.
• Their investors are on-board with this new direction.

Here's @rappo's response:

Chad,

Likewise, great chatting with you and catching up. I'm serious when I say I'm rooting for Gratipay. We both have the same goals and we make each other stronger by innovating and growing :).

Notes look good! Two things:

They are going the Liberapay route re: #118 (common carrier, trying to avoid politics)

I haven't read all of #118 so I'm not sure the full extent of what this implies, but it should go without saying that all projects need to be open source and that they must not be illegal in nature. Eg the software behind the Silk Road? totally fine. A campaign to run a darknet market on Tor? not cool.

They are keeping the 10% hard fee (despite having their own Salt campaign).

I would clarify this as "For now, they are...". I'm open to discussion on changing the fee structure (or removing it completely if it seems feasible), but we have much bigger fish to fry right now.

[nobodxbodon]

Though I didn't do any survey myself, I feel gratipay doesn't have its due reputation in OS world yet. Gratipay is still the most open one in the market as far as I see, but I think that part is far from being highlighted and taken full advantage of, especially when marketing and propagation. For example, some breakdown of the income & costs, more technical articles about the details of running the site, etc. More exposure and connections may go a long way.

[nobodxbodon]

BTW BountySource seems to support closed-source project. I wonder if Gratipay also does?

[chadwhitacre]

@nobodxbodon We don't right now, but I suppose we will very soon underneath #432.

[chadwhitacre]

I feel gratipay doesn't have its due reputation in OS world yet.

Want to help us with marketing? How can we put you to work? :-)

[rappo]

@nobodxbodon,

BTW BountySource seems to support closed-source project. I wonder if Gratipay also does?

We (Bountysource) do not allow closed-source projects on our platform. If you know of any that have snuck on please let me know and I'll boot them right off. Is Gratipay planning to support closed source projects?

[chadwhitacre]

Is Gratipay planning to support closed source projects?

We're in the process of relaxing our review process, which as it's headed would probably allow for closed-source projects, yes.

[nobodxbodon]

I feel gratipay doesn't have its due reputation in OS world yet.

Want to help us with marketing? How can we put you to work? :-)

@whit537 Depending on the current marketing plan, I might help with writing tech articles to some simple code if needed. Still I'm quite new to the project and I'm realizing most of my thoughts have already been brought up more or less before, so it may be better to start with small stuff first and see how it's going.

Besides, BountySource seem to take different strategy with Gratipay, as it allows more creating bounty freely (based on issue), without taking trouble of finding the right team to contribute to. Similarly, anyone can take the bounty without creating a team first, IIUC. IMO it lowers the entry fee and is more appealing in first sight.

[chadwhitacre]

it may be better to start with small stuff first and see how it's going.

👍

Wanna create an onboarding ticket for yourself to discuss further? :-)

[mattbk]

Is Gratipay planning to support closed source projects?

We're in the process of relaxing our review process, which as it's headed would probably allow for closed-source projects, yes.

Specifically, three levels of closed company will be possible when TWYW returns: #432 (comment)

[strypey]

Great to learn more about the nuts and bolts of both Gratipay and BountySource. Are both groups aware of this useful guide to getting paid for free code dev? Probably a good idea to keep this user informed of any changes to your platforms that may impact its accuracy (pull requests!)

BTW @mattbk loved your quote about sporting competition so much I quoted you on GNU Social :)

[techtonik]

@nayafia works with GitHub and other corporate world with the same issue, so we are aware of the work of each other. We could use more help from lawyers to build up an open system that could transparently calculate tax and make appropriate payments. This means open access to law (which is absent in my country, and this is why I am not coding anything - without reference and open tracking it is useless).

[chadwhitacre]

Bountysource is looking to bring new core contributors to the team. This is a great opportunity for someone to take the reigns on an amazing project and help make a difference within the open-source community.

Before you get worried, please be assured that Bountysource isn’t going anywhere. I (rappo) will continue to lead and administrate Bountysource. Warren will step aside as lead developer as soon a new core member can take his place. Warren will stay on to provide occasional technical expertise, as well as handle some of the behind-the-scenes business-y stuff with me.

https://salt.bountysource.com/teams/bountysource/updates/5-bountysource-is-searching-for-developers-to-join-our-core-team

[rappo]

@whit537, join us! :)