Just launched CrowdRaising.co. Would love some feedback | Hacker News Reader

Just launched CrowdRaising.co. Would love some feedback

5 pointsideaphore21 comments

Hi HN! We just unveiled a new concept. Crowdraising.co is like crowdfunding but with pledges of time, talent, and favors, instead of money, in exchange for rewards. Time can be used for customer development (surveys, interviews) bus. dev. favors (social media shares, introductions), or for talent acquisition (work samples).

We would love to hear what this community thinks of our idea, our meta-campaign, and any other feedback you can share. Please tear into it, nothing would make us happier.

https://CrowdRaising.co

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Economically, the issues I see are related to the fungibility of money and its time value. My $100 and your $100 are interchangeable. Our workproducts, probably not. If I authorize a payment to a company through Stripe it happens immediately (barring charge backs) and imposes minimal logistic overhead beyond counting the money and delivering the product on the company. If I commit to ten hours of work, due to the nature of time, it is a promise not 'cash' in hand. Moreover, there is the burden of coordinating that work. Maybe it's six months until the company needs an office design and that slips to a year and in the interim I'm busy and so it's fifteen months until it happens.

Busy people tend to trade money for time. Not so busy people are often not so busy for a reason. Moreover, professionally competent people tend to have no shortage of opportunities to work for free.

Anyway, it is an interesting idea. I think the key bits are building an economic community and creating trust.

Good luck.

Thank you very much. These are great points and exactly what we set out to solve when we undertook the project. We will definitely put a time limit on when pledged time can be claimed (likely 3 months after campaign closes). Aside from doing work for simple rewards, rewards for pledged time will include cash and equity. So building a profile of some free work could lead to pay work pretty quickly.

You're welcome.

My experience over the years with 'work for free/discount and I will tell all my friends about you' rather quickly led me to realize that having someone tell all their friends that I will work for free was not a good way to find paying work. Most gig people learn this pretty quick if they didn't know it intuitively already.

I don't think that profiles are a viable first order alternative to the time value and fungibility of money. My Twitter might be worth the investment required to curate and manage it over time because there is evidence to suggest possible positive effects.

On a site like CrowdRaising there's an long causal chain:

  make profile -> volunteer on project -> complete projects -> solicit positive feedback -> update profile -> volunteer on project -> complete project ->..... get substantial benefit

It is lengthy, unproven, imagined, inherently fragile, and largely out of my control. I'm probably better served by investing in Github or Linkedin etc.

User stories that depend on high levels of commitment to the platform are probably not sound premises for business decisions. Crowdfunding sites are built around two sound psychological models: casual users who will swipe a credit card for something that looks cool and a few people who don't encounter much ethical friction taking their money.

That's very interesting. I think this assumes that companies will be asking their crowd to do for them what they do for a living. But we are focusing on customer development (e.g. surveys, interview), and business development (introductions, and social media shares). These are useful, simple things that startups need and are fairly fungible in terms of time-value. For less fungible work, like what you do for a living, those will likely be limited to instances when the company is hiring. In this way, they can distribute one project to all the people who pledge time to that tier and interview the best result(s). Everyone else gets a reward. Also, the site will be gamified in that for every hour you pledge, you'll be given an hour. In other words, if you pledge 100 hours to take surveys and do social media shares, you'll be able to run your own campaign and raise 100 hours for your project for free.

100 hours of someone else's work means lots of my time coordinating and supervising it...and a non-trivial probability that I will not like what I get. I mean, my first thought regarding social media shares is that someone will just write a bot or outsource it to someone with a bot.

But again to the economics. There is an implication that the companies using the platform are doing so as an alternative (and perhaps not by choice) to capitalization. Betting (time or money) on an under-capitalized company is not the same as betting on a long shot (VC's bet on adequately capitalized long-shots).

Anyway, the proof will always be whether or not people adopt the platform.

You might consider making this text more prominent:

"CrowdRaising is crowdfunding's younger, cooler cousin. Pledge time, instead of money, in exchange for rewards. Customer development and talent acquisition all in one place."

Thanks! Made that change.

a while back I thought of an idea I was going to call "pledge" which allowed you to map out a crowd tipping plan. which allowed users to contribute one limited and re-occuring time, money and goods, other services, "follow project", pre-sales, etc. in exchange for royalties and commissions. and once enough resources were contributed to get the idea off the ground it would tip and start implementing. I hope your platform evolves into something like that.

That's really interesting. I will definitely discuss this with the team.

having a profile of things a person could pledge would be a neat way to start.

-$50/wk cash

-10 hours/wk Development time.

-1 yr domain hosting.

-1millioncoins.com domain name

Oh definitely the first two, we're doing this on re-launch after the meta campaign. But I don't follow re: the domain names. Do you mean we should partner with a domain registrar to give out freebies to our users?

if I own a cool domain name instead of selling it why not contribute it to a project in exchange for equity or rev share or time etc.

If you're willing to share more of your idea, let me know.

my email is in my profile. btw, how much equity are my ideas worth? lol.

Very cool idea. I like your site design.

Have you considered partnering with a non-profit (i.e., Taproot Foundation* )? This is like a super-streamlined version of some of what they do.

Also, if you decide to go the non-profit route, you might be able to land corporate sponsors.

Anyway, nice work! Wish you all the best.

*I am not affiliated with this organization, just saw that they posted volunteer coding jobs online.

That's a very good idea. We will reach out to them.

Money is easy to qualify, quantify, and enforce. Whatever your platform allows users to pledge isn't.

This is not going to work.

That's a fair point and something we're working on. We are using 1-hour blocks for pledges. People have been quantifying and qualifying work in 1-hour blocks for a while and are used it we think. But we will continue to refine that. Thank you.

one idea might be to offer a virtual currency as an exchange mechanism. I couple domains 1millioncoins.com, 1billioncoins.com along those lines. just domains not workign websites. I tried launching one awhile back but didn't get a lot of response so i killed it.

That is absolutely part of the plan. Thanks!

also, adding a time trading website might allow people to baseline a value for their time.

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