Ask HN: What happened to Proposition HN? ("$8000 for your side project")

Bounced a few emails around. I was turned down. A few months later I went and put it together myself anyway. The beta test has been well recieved and I am looking for clients.

Hey guys

Sorry for the radio silence. I was intending on keeping the blog updated with anecdotes from the experiment, but ended up not doing so. I've received a few emails from people mentioning that I'm throwing away the opportunity of turning the initial spike of interest into a long-standing readership/audience but the truth is that was never what I was after; I was genuinely keen on finding some cool new projects to work on.

The experiment is going so-so. If you remember I green-lighted 5 projects.

- 1 was aborted before start through mutual agreement after further market research

- 2 were aborted because the devs did not manage to complete the MVP. Lack of motivation mainly. If I've learnt anything so far it's that lack of follow-through is still a major issue, and the promise of a little money and a partner to work with does not squash the problem as much as I thought it would. I suspect not being physically in the same space has a lot to do with it.

That leaves 2, one of which is live and the other is about a month away still (slow progress)

So it's unclear whether this structure works. Going to depend on the last 2. Even then, the sample size has been quite small so the results will not be conclusive. Guess will need to try a second round at some point!

hmexx

It looks like there are 5+ different font families on that page. Choosing 2 would make it a lot easier to read.

You can find investors even out there (and others) - who at different points slip up and say they're just fishing for data (whether it is ideas or information relating to success of certain ideas).

And do you really think every idea that people have is published and talked about immediately upon them having it? Many don't so they can line things up and have a competitive advantage. Like you said, execution is the most important part - though the idea still is valuable - and if someone else executes first on an idea then they can beat out the originator of the idea. An easy example: Facebook, Mark Z. who was hired by the brothers, who had the idea to be exclusive to only people with a Harvard email address - which in evidence / documentation he even stated he wanted to beat them to the punch (because "people don't need two of these platforms" - rough quote, I don't remember the exact words).