Re: [tlug] kickstarter for open source...

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

Darren Cook writes:

 > As someone giving money to a project, I like ...
 > As someone running a project that needs financing, I like ...

Thanks, that helps.

 > But I think the model is hear to stay.

Sure, but the question I think about is how effective it will be once
"everybody" is using it.  There are projects on Kickstarter with
million-dollar goals that are multiply oversubscribed.  This is not
limited to small software firms and starving novelists.  Think about
what hell looks like: we academics get wind of this and start flooding
the crowdfunding sources with our grant proposals!  Or the innermost
circle: the spammers and ore-ore sagishi figure out how to sneak in.

 > For a new venture it is a new and distinct model, the 5th here:

 >   * Get your first set of small customers to finance you
 > 
 > It was hard to do the last one before the Internet gave us
 > crowd-funding,

AFAIK it's *still* hard to get *customers* to finance you.  That's
been possible for a decade or more by taking orders and delivering
only when you get enough orders to finance the work.  Believe me,
people have tried various schemes to make this work.  It doesn't.

The interesting thing that the Web (specifically Google and friends)
itself gives us is an order-of-magnitude cheaper way to reach an
order-of-magnitude more distant customers.  If that still doesn't
work, you can turn to crowd-funding as such.

Crowd-funding is just an extension of the traditional idea of VC to
"micro-investors", where the "micro" is so small that you don't even
necessarily need to return an economic good to the "investor".  They
are often satisfied to simply see the project start and make progress!