These are the hardest. See, when a company or project is dead on arrival there is not much to do, you bury it, do a post-mortem and move on. If a company is successful then you ride the wave as far and as long as your stamina will let you and then you hopefully pocket a nice chunk of cash. But when you're in the middle, too big to die, too small to succeed it gets very hard. Killing it off feels completely wrong, pus…
Gittip, Year Two
71–80 of 218 posts
Re: Gittip, Year Two
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
As with any major public facing change, do it sooner rather than later, because the later it is, the more people will know you as "Gittip", so the cost of the change will be larger. Sit down with 2-3 people (including someone not in the Gittip loop!) this weekend and list all of the nouns and verbs that you associate with Gittip's mission, its market, what users do on Gittip, and what people achieve through Gittip. T…
But is it holding us back from reaching sustainability for Gittip itself?
I've been following Gittip's progress for a while, as a student funding someone through this isnt a priority for myself to be honest, I've started working now though so I'll have no excuses! Though I think the name means nothing to people outside of tech. I guess the decision to change the name depends on whether you're targeting nontechnical people who appreciate a developer's work.
Re: Gittip, Year Two
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
As with any major public facing change, do it sooner rather than later, because the later it is, the more people will know you as "Gittip", so the cost of the change will be larger. Sit down with 2-3 people (including someone not in the Gittip loop!) this weekend and list all of the nouns and verbs that you associate with Gittip's mission, its market, what users do on Gittip, and what people achieve through Gittip. T…
But is it holding us back from reaching sustainability for Gittip itself?
I can't answer that. Do you think changing the name might make more people use Gittip to contribute money to each other and eventually to Gittip itself? If yes, then do it. This is just my gut feeling from looking at the site, trying to use it, trying to explain it to friends, etc.
Re: Gittip, Year Two
#74While the discussion is mostly about Gittip vs Patreon, I never quite understood why they could grow despite flattr(.com) being around since 2010.
I like flattr's model of having 1 fixed monthly donation that gets split among all of a user's flattr clicks from this month. It somehow removes a true monetary value from a click and allows to spread them more freely. For whatever reason, it's pretty big in the German podcasting community.
Re: Gittip, Year Two
#75I wonder why Patreon took off and not Gittip. Personally I've heard more about Gittip than Patreon, which I only encountered recently, being used by some YouTube channel for sustenance. Maybe that's precisely the kind of market which Gittip should focus on.
Patreon took off because a) they've got domain expertise w/ YouTube in one co-founder, and b) they've got business expertise in the other co-founder.
Re: YouTube. When your friends are YouTube micro-celebs, who are good at marketing themselves by definition, you're going to have an easier time getting a network effect going around a platform that depends on marketing oneself, than when your friends are open-source programmers, who as a rule are not good at marketing themselves.
Re: Business. They identified a market need and are executing by the book. They built a prototype, with a standard skimming business model, raised some money, hired a team, danced with the tech press, and here we are.
Here's where we tried approaching content creators: https://github.com/gittip/www.gittip.com/issues/737. I actually did a call with Jack and others right when Patreon launched. Key point he made is that content creators get pitches from companies all the time, so already being in that scene is a huge advantage.
http://blog.gittip.com/post/51236581424/open-call-with-centu...
Re: Gittip, Year Two
#76I wonder why Patreon took off and not Gittip. Personally I've heard more about Gittip than Patreon, which I only encountered recently, being used by some YouTube channel for sustenance. Maybe that's precisely the kind of market which Gittip should focus on.
Patreon's team is just right: Technical co-founder who built the site himself, business co-founder who is a YouTube artist and has a lot of friends in those circles. I even think they met as college room mates, typical story VC's like (they are funded).
Re: Gittip, Year Two
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
Living in cheap places is fun when you're young, but eventually you take on more responsibilities and your body fails you. Are eastern europe and southeast asia known for their health care? Are dentists cheap there? Most importantly, are they good places to raise a family? I can totally get behind you when it comes to arbitraging cost of living, but not everyone can do that. At best, one could live in an inexpensive…
As just one example, you could live in Rochester MN. Nice 4 BR house There a dozens of places like this between the two insanely expensive coastal zones of the US. Places where things like housing cost nearly an order of magnitude less. [1]: http://www.zillow.com/homes/for_sale/Rochester-MN/26791_rid/...
Are there any black people or sidewalks there? I've been wanting a random change lately and trying to figure out a place to move to get away from Chicago.
Re: Gittip, Year Two
#78I guess the issue being raised here by many is this: You need to justify why the non-standard moves you've made are necessary for you to achieve your mission. If there is a story, it's not coming out. If they're not necessary, then your mission doesn't align with your actions. Perhaps your true mission is 'make all our dreams come true at the same time' but you have to be conscious of the fact that the conditional probability of everything working just right at the same time is orders of magnitude smaller than something like gittip being executed with better understood tools and structures.
Re: Gittip, Year Two
#79I ran a similar site a few years back (youtipit). The biggest challenge was actually getting people to give money for things they can have for free. Looking at Chads figures, I think there definitely has been a huge change in the way people respect "free" work, and are now a lot more willing to pay for it. I hope for him (and all others in this market) that this trend continues and that more people can start making a…
Thanks for the encouragement! :-)
I agree that the general cultural trends are pointing in the right direction in a way they weren't a few years ago.
Re: Gittip, Year Two
#80Ok, you guys need to make some changes, and I would recommend: - Allow monthly payments, instead of only weekly: most people receive money monthly so their economy math is based on monthly periods. - The company giving the biggest amount of money is giving $1095... you should try to involve Mozilla and other big non-profits to donate, basically because giving monthly money to open-source (non-employees) devs is one o…
Thanks for the recommendations!
I've added a +1 for you to these tickets:
"tip calculator" https://github.com/gittip/www.gittip.com/issues/11
"reach out to companies" https://github.com/gittip/www.gittip.com/issues/1149
For the spontaneous requests idea, we would need to implement one-time gifts first: