Kickstarter launches Drip, a Patreon competitor • Hacker News Board

Re: Kickstarter launches Drip, a Patreon competitor

#11

Post by annapurna » Wed, Nov 15, 2017, 4:10 PM UTC

As the article mentions, there are many players in this area and time will tell how Kickstarter leverages their brand to succeed, especially as it is an invitation list only (for now).

Some interesting thoughts from Perry Chen (Kickstarter Co-founder and Chairman): “If you look at a lot of companies, it’s COO, CMO, blah, blah, blah,” Chen said. “But look at a museum. You might have a CEO or director, but then you might have a curator. There is a very specific articulation of roles and lanes, and I think that’s really necessary for Kickstarter, trying to be a different kind of company over a long period of time. If you have operators coming with the classic business playbook, I don’t think we’ll be able to sustain our focus on our mission.”

As for comments regarding the name, you get an idea of why they might have leaned towards drip. On one of the artist's page [1], you see there are different tiers for supporting his project:

1. Dripper [$3/month]

2. Drizzler [$7/month]

3. Sprayer [$15/month]

[1]https://d.rip/peter

Re: Kickstarter launches Drip, a Patreon competitor

#12

Post by DamnInteresting » Wed, Nov 15, 2017, 4:12 PM UTC

I had an idea for a competitor in the Patreon space a couple of years ago, but with a twist that I feel would have made "patrons" much more comfortable with the whole thing. I even registered a domain, started on some coding, and consulted with some designers. But it quickly became apparent that financial gateways (credit cards, Paypal, etc) are hostile to the idea of allowing me to charge customer A, keep a cut, and pay customer B. Terms of service usually forbid this sort of action.

How does one circumvent this hostility? Obviously it's possible, since Patreon and Drip exist, but I didn't know where to start. I still think my idea is worth a try, but I'm stuck.

Re: Kickstarter launches Drip, a Patreon competitor

#13

Post by BlackjackCF » Wed, Nov 15, 2017, 4:15 PM UTC

DamnInteresting wrote: post #12

I had an idea for a competitor in the Patreon space a couple of years ago, but with a twist that I feel would have made "patrons" much more comfortable with the whole thing. I even registered a domain, started on some coding, and consulted with some designers. But it quickly became apparent that financial gateways (credit cards, Paypal, etc) are hostile to the idea of allowing me to charge customer A, keep a cut, and…

Is this the case if you use Stripe and Plaid for handling credit card/ACH?

Re: Kickstarter launches Drip, a Patreon competitor

#14

Post by aaronbrethorst » Wed, Nov 15, 2017, 4:15 PM UTC

DamnInteresting wrote: post #12

I had an idea for a competitor in the Patreon space a couple of years ago, but with a twist that I feel would have made "patrons" much more comfortable with the whole thing. I even registered a domain, started on some coding, and consulted with some designers. But it quickly became apparent that financial gateways (credit cards, Paypal, etc) are hostile to the idea of allowing me to charge customer A, keep a cut, and…

Stripe has a feature explicitly designed to support this scenario. https://stripe.com/connect

Re: Kickstarter launches Drip, a Patreon competitor

#15

Post by SeanOC » Wed, Nov 15, 2017, 4:18 PM UTC

DamnInteresting wrote: post #12

I had an idea for a competitor in the Patreon space a couple of years ago, but with a twist that I feel would have made "patrons" much more comfortable with the whole thing. I even registered a domain, started on some coding, and consulted with some designers. But it quickly became apparent that financial gateways (credit cards, Paypal, etc) are hostile to the idea of allowing me to charge customer A, keep a cut, and…

Stripe connect (https://stripe.com/connect) is probably the easiest option available today.

Otherwise, it's a pretty complicated negotiation and certification process as in addition to the processor twitchiness there are a bunch of state wire transmission/money laundering laws that you are getting rather adjacent to that can be a mess to navigate.

Re: Kickstarter launches Drip, a Patreon competitor

#16

Post by seibelj » Wed, Nov 15, 2017, 4:19 PM UTC

My idea for paying for open source code would be to auto-scan your codebase, find all open source projects, let you set a donation amount ($5, $10, $100, $1000) per month, and it would auto-donate to every project. Then give you a nice tax writeoff summary for the non-profits.

Obviously many details to work out, but I could see a company willing to pay $500 per month if it was easy to donate to all the tools and projects they use.

Re: Kickstarter launches Drip, a Patreon competitor

#17

Post by DamnInteresting » Wed, Nov 15, 2017, 4:20 PM UTC

aaronbrethorst wrote: post #14

DamnInteresting wrote: post #12

I had an idea for a competitor in the Patreon space a couple of years ago, but with a twist that I feel would have made "patrons" much more comfortable with the whole thing. I even registered a domain, started on some coding, and consulted with some designers. But it quickly became apparent that financial gateways (credit cards, Paypal, etc) are hostile to the idea of allowing me to charge customer A, keep a cut, and…

Stripe has a feature explicitly designed to support this scenario. https://stripe.com/connect

Nice! That looks like just what I need. Either it didn't exist when I last researched the issue, or I somehow missed it. Thanks!

Re: Kickstarter launches Drip, a Patreon competitor

#18

Post by ISL » Wed, Nov 15, 2017, 4:21 PM UTC

seibelj wrote: post #16

My idea for paying for open source code would be to auto-scan your codebase, find all open source projects, let you set a donation amount ($5, $10, $100, $1000) per month, and it would auto-donate to every project. Then give you a nice tax writeoff summary for the non-profits. Obviously many details to work out, but I could see a company willing to pay $500 per month if it was easy to donate to all the tools and proj…

Debian's popcon software can do at least part of this.

Re: Kickstarter launches Drip, a Patreon competitor

#19

Post by EGreg » Wed, Nov 15, 2017, 4:23 PM UTC

DamnInteresting wrote: post #12

I had an idea for a competitor in the Patreon space a couple of years ago, but with a twist that I feel would have made "patrons" much more comfortable with the whole thing. I even registered a domain, started on some coding, and consulted with some designers. But it quickly became apparent that financial gateways (credit cards, Paypal, etc) are hostile to the idea of allowing me to charge customer A, keep a cut, and…

Aren't you describing essentially a MARKETPLACE which takes a cut?

That may make you a "money transmitter". I did a lot of reserch on whether every marketplace (Uber, TaskRabbit etc.) needs to get a money transmitter license.

It seems this is a grey area, and the answer is probably: no, you don't have to register, because you aren't just sending money but paying people for services.

Where it gets tricky is when services are "broadcast" to many people. Then you get into Online Courses territory. People can purchase subscriptions to your courses etc.

The short answer is, you can circumvent gateways by using permissionless currency networks like bitcoin and litecoin.

But what I want to know from the HN crowd is, what kind of hostility can Stripe have when they power marketplaces all the time??

Re: Kickstarter launches Drip, a Patreon competitor

#20

Post by travisjungroth » Wed, Nov 15, 2017, 4:25 PM UTC

seibelj wrote: post #16

My idea for paying for open source code would be to auto-scan your codebase, find all open source projects, let you set a donation amount ($5, $10, $100, $1000) per month, and it would auto-donate to every project. Then give you a nice tax writeoff summary for the non-profits. Obviously many details to work out, but I could see a company willing to pay $500 per month if it was easy to donate to all the tools and proj…

I wrote an app that had a similar idea based on GitHub stars.

It was a crummy MVP. I gave out $1 to 100 different open source authors. Not one of them passed it along and made a donation to someone else. That was disappointing, really.