looking for a bounty-based kickstarter-like-thing

A month ago I spent about four hours searching and came up with nothing. So I wish to dedicate a thread to this.

In the patreon thread I expressed the following:

I wish that I could make a big list of projects that I would be interested in creating. Maybe 200 different things. Some would be youtube videos and some would be books or dvds or ... something.

As the months pass, I could expand each of them to have rewards - kinda like a kickstarter. I could even mark them as the ones that are more or less likely to happen. Maybe each project could have something like a forum where people could discuss the projects and enhance them. Maybe some people want the artifacts, and some people want to be involved in the project.

But the key is that the pledges sit there until the project is pretty much complete.

So, kinda like a kickstarter, but rather than the creator specifying an amount of money and a timeframe (usually 30 days), the whole thing just sits there until the creator feels like the amount is high enough, and there is now enough work already done that collecting that money will ensure the success of the project. I suppose some creators will want to collect the funds early. But I would want to collect the funds at about the time that the project is ready for print.

- - -

I like the idea that after doing this for several years, some projects have grown to, maybe, $10,000! And I think that I might be able to do that in a week or two. Maybe there will be a project that has $100,000 on it, but I still don't wanna. And then there are some that only have $500 - but I'm jazzed about doing that.

The key is that I am never under any obligation to do any of it.

I have now visited more than a dozen crowdfunding sites, only to learn that none of them do what I want them to do.

In the vein of saying what I want out loud sometimes turns into results, I hereby submit the things that I want from a crowfunding site:

222: creators can list ideas for future projects and supporters can pledge how much they would like to see that exist. Eventually, such a project might grow to the point that rewards are defined and the whole things becomes something of a kickstarter. But the kickstarter just keeps going and going and going until the creator pushes the button to say "I will do it!" - at which point the pledges are turned into money and sent to the creator. This might be at the beginning of the process or near the end of the process - creator's choice. The creator might even say something like "I am currently working on it, but I'm not going to take the money until I am ready to take it to the printer."

223: For some projects, creators might take $50 to make a youtube video, or a million dollars to create some massive project. Maybe $20,000 to write a book, or $100,000 to make a DVD. Some projects might be put out to be free to the world, or some projects might be only for people that supported the project.

224: Currently, it seems like most fundraising sites set the minimum to $1.00. I think it would be cool to set the minimum to a nickel. After all, a good blog post or a short youtube video might not be worth anything close to a dollar. But that could be the very thing that people people would be willing to put a nickel toward. I've done kickstsarters in the past that had 2000 supporters at a dollar or more. If I could lower that to a nickel and the reward would be a fifteen minute youtube video, maybe there would have been 20,000 people putting in a nickel plus the 2000 that put in a dollar or more. 20,000 people at a nickel is $1000.

225: A further aspect of the site could be projects without creators. People could create a project that they would like to see exist, but they don't have the ability to create it. They could then describe it, post images, set up rewards .... a crowd of dreamers could set up a crowdfunding page in the hopes that some day somebody will come along and create it and collect those funds.

226: Followers of a creator could create projects that they hope that that creator might like to try. That creator might put a big red X on it, or they might move the idea into their collection of the possible future projects.

227: Support for paypal, feeless-paypal, dwolla and bitcoin would be nice. So the possibility of transferring funds without taking the credit card hit would be good. For the micro payments, it would be good to have "an account" that could hold funds.

228: Currently, kickstarter and similar stuff takes about 5%. There are a few that apparently take nothing. But it would be cool to see something that undercuts kickstarter and takes only, say, 2%.

229: if a product is put out for free, there could be a link from the free thing back to the page that made it happen - and people could continue to contribute.

230: if the thing is not free, the page evolves into a buy-this-thing page.



So there you go. I wish for such a website to exist. The key is to respect that "obligation is poison" - so I like the idea that I can create at my own pace and when I am all done, I can take the bounty then.

The creator's life is then endless joy. Never any obligation.

Does this already exist and I just cannot find it? Does anybody agree with my point about "obligation is poison"?

I do agree that obligation is poison, but I can see problems with the crowdfunding idea.

From the other side, as someone who might donate....
There would definitely need to be a warning email of some type before funds are taken, if there is no end date. I won't be holding $10, $50 or whatever in my account until you decide what, if anything, you will do.
And if the money is taken immediately and just sits there forever in holding until you decide to use it or return it (which might have it's own problems depending on how much time has passed)... well I don't think I would donate to something like that. Possibly if I was over the moon crazy about the idea, but probably not.
How I understand this, it turns the obligation to the person donating, with hassles... poison. Maybe I'm missing something.

Let's suppose you support an idea for $20. And then four years pass. I think it is probable that no credit card would still function. And it is probable that your paypal account could have changed, or you, at the very least, changed your password.

So the idea is that you PLEDGE what you would put in. And at some point, it would enter into "kickstarter mode". So then you would get an email and it would say "Do you wanna re-affirm your pledge? You can change your pledge, drop your pledge ..."

And then there could be a pie chart that could say "$10,000 was originally pledged" and it could show stuff like % reaffirmed, % cancelled, % not yet confirmed, %shrunk, % grown ... etc.

I think that if a project has been riding for four years and people pledged $10,000 total, I think it is a safe bet that those folks will actually pony up about half of that.

Why not build it yourself? Would require some manual labor (building pledge tracking plugins for charts and tracking and so on) but it's do-able. It'd basically be a membership site - if everyone's just pledging, you wouldn't need to take credit card info etc until the end- you could set up the projects like virtual products on a Woocommerce site, and let people pledge the amount they like or an amount you set... Totally do-able.

Okay, that makes more sense to me.
From a creator side, I could see many people choosing that kind of site.
I don't think there is one out there currently.
Maybe it would be a nice addition to permies.

If you have the bookkeeping abilities and time the interest from this could help support the domination as well.......just a thought on pay when you agree rather than pay at time of campaign close strategy....

I can only assume that the income from the funding site comes from the funding itself, as a percentage. If I am correct, then this is the hurdle to overcome. The site getting some money later, or possibly none, is not a great business model.

There is a site but I can't find my bookmark right now. It was set up by a permaculture farm for just this kind of thing and when I checked it out I think there was only 2 projects on it.
I will keep looking it may be saved in my email somewhere.

I found it Farmraisers http://farmraisers.com/

Farm Raisers looks like a good idea, fees are pretty steep, but maybe thats what separates real enthusiasm from desk-top lookie-lews.

paul wheaton wrote:Let's suppose you support an idea for $20. And then four years pass. I think it is probable that no credit card would still function. And it is probable that your paypal account could have changed, or you, at the very least, changed your password.

So the idea is that you PLEDGE what you would put in. And at some point, it would enter into "kickstarter mode". So then you would get an email and it would say "Do you wanna re-affirm your pledge? You can change your pledge, drop your pledge ..."

And then there could be a pie chart that could say "$10,000 was originally pledged" and it could show stuff like % reaffirmed, % cancelled, % not yet confirmed, %shrunk, % grown ... etc.

I think that if a project has been riding for four years and people pledged $10,000 total, I think it is a safe bet that those folks will actually pony up about half of that.

If the farmraisers.com is not quite what you are looking for, and would like to start your own site, you could name it futurefunds.com. I just checked and that domain is for sale. *I have no affiliation with the domain owner, and have no idea what they want for it.* Your business motto could be, "Buy it before it even exists!"
Another option in the confirmation email should be, "Not now, ask again next month." That would give the pledgers time to budget the expense, otherwise, a lot would just drop the pledge, because it was requested at a bad time for them. Your project doers would get what pledges would be filled right away, and then would get the additional pledges, after they are filled the next month.

I'm guessing that a year later this still doesn't exist. I like the idea. I see how this kind of tool would be especially useful for someone like Paul. I could see myself wanting to use it, though my chances of generating serious dough would definitely be less.

I like the idea as a consumer that I could potentially influence what the creator's next project might be. I also like the idea that as a creator I could see how interested people would be in a project before deciding if I actually want to move forward with it. Kickstarter definitely has more of a "I am trying to move forward with this 1 idea" kind of thing going.

Does this seem like something that a lot of people would be interested in, both as creators and as consumers? I'm not sure. What do others think?

It would be too bad to have someone make a tool like this and then have Paul be the only reasonably successful creator on it and then a bunch of unsuccessful creators making the platform seem undesirable to any other potentially-successful creators. That would also leave the creator of the tool itself thinking "Oh boy I hope Paul does a whole lot of projects to help me pay off my development costs!" which is likely not ideal either.

What would be nice is having a tool like this to see if there was enough support for creation of a tool like this. :)

Sounds kind like a trust fund or foundation fund for invention and refining inventions. Reminds me also of what mother earth news started out doing. There is interest in that type of looser support of creativity in functional projects. There is quite a bit of interest in watching and somehow encouraging the types of projects you are coming up with and also in being the one who benefits in one way or another. I wanted to link up somehow with what you are doing at Wheaton labs when I heard about it partly because there is spoo. much available online that you have been the spark behind. Reaping the info made me want to pay back somehow then putting a bit of money in during a kickstarter and getting rewards which gave me more info to enrich my life as well as becoming a tiny part of a project which I would like to copy or otherwise make use of when it is refined adds up to a great kind of snowball. Making it an affordable option and a smallish commitment has appeal. I think you are onto a good train of thought.