Will you peerfund my crazily ambitious work? | Hacker News Reader

Will you peerfund my crazily ambitious work?

tav.espians.com

23 pointstav16 comments

Sorry but No.

I don’t mean to be rude but as soon as someone comes to HN with a request like this and actually gets funded the floodgates will almost surely open. Every person rejected by Y Combinator will start showing up to try and get their funding via the community and since it really doesn’t take that much to get to the front page I suspect the place will be flooded in no time.

Sorry to be so blunt and had you not posted this yourself it might be a different story but I just don’t like this sort of thing. I like this community…it brings joy to my life and I don’t want to see it devolve into a “Pitch your startup” forum. That’s what VCs are for.

I have mixed feelings about this. I agree that HN shouldn't become just a place to pitch startups, but.... 1. people already "pitch" their startups here for feedback on a regular basis, just not for funding. Is it that different? And 2. there does seem to be a need for this sort of crowdsourced funding scenario.

Maybe a new site (could|should) be created, dedicated to this model of soliciting funding? Something similar to Kickstarter, but for startups seeking funding? But, I think there are a lot of regulations about investing in startups, aren't there? If so, not sure there's a way to reconcile that with this sort of crowd-sourced, highly distributed model. :-(

I thought this was a joke at first. The title of the post screams "NO" right off the bat.

As best I can figure out, what I'd be paying for is your time, as you work on a project which you want to work on anyway. In return, I would get warm fuzzy feelings. Do I correctly understand the nature of the transaction?

If I didn't give you money, would you work on it in your spare time? If yes, why am I giving you money? If no, then maybe you're not all that committed to this project after all.

How does this not apply to every project looking for kickstart funding?

Well, usually more is offered in return than a warm fuzzy feeling.

Because those are willing to sell me a slice of the company? This guy seems to just want money as a charity case. Unless there's something I've missed.

> Because those are willing to sell me a slice of the company?

Not usually, kickstart does not give you equity.

Pretty neat idea, but if you've been at it for a decade why would the next three months suddenly make a difference ?

That was my first thought too. I also question his confidence that he only needs 3 more months to launch it, given that it's been in the works for ten years (or more likely it seems, on and off for ten years).

It also seems like he's trying to build a cathedral when the blueprint specifies a bazaar. He's already got the source code on GitHub, why not instead focus on using social media and whatnot to enlist another hacker or two, get it to Beta, launch it, see if it gets traction, and then seek funding.

Maybe this isn't generally true, but I tend to find coding itself to be quite straightforward — it's the design and architecture that takes up the time.

It takes an inordinate amount of time to get to the simplicity beyond the complexity — and sadly it's taken me about 10 years to go through that process.

http://ampify.it/ is an awesome project. It's great to see the Mediawiki Confluence extension coming out of the recent work. Everyone who has a mediawiki should try it out at http://socialstartuplabs.com/wiki/

http://alexrollin.com

Hey alex,

You're being downmodded because you've started posting without reading the HN guidelines (http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html):

Please don't sign comments, especially with your url. They're already signed with your username. If other users want to learn more about you, they can click on it to see your profile.

Please take a look at those before posting, and welcome to HN!

OK guys, but let's not all pile on and downmod him to hell just for signing with a URL, alright?

-1 might be appropriate, but right now he's somewhere below -4 and probably going to drop further since nothing below -4 is displayed.

Totally, I lost 50+ points once on a bad comment. Weak. Show mercy hacker news police!

Huh! I always thought the downmods were capped at -4, and further downvotes just made the comment lighter, and therefore less readable. Sorry to hear that, that's tough!

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