Ask HN: Cold-calling companies to sponsor development of open source project?
Since end of last year I've been developing an open source payment gateway for Ethereum tokens, called Hub20. It is akin to BTCPayServer, with the advantages that it allows usage of tokens like DAI (important for merchants that don't want to deal with volatility of crypto) or BAT which are growing in user base and are starting to develop an actual economy around it. It also integrates Raiden (a Layer-2 payment network, equivalent to BTC Lightning) to make transactions instant and near-zero cost.
The project was considered novel enough to actually receive a grant from the Raiden Trust, which enabled me to justify ~3 months of work. All in all, a good amount of work is done and I am currently even running one instance of Hub20 in production on another project of mine.
Now, the "Ask HN" part:
I really would like to keep working on this project to make it more useful to more people, but between day job/side project/family obligations, I do not have enough capacity in the foreseeable future to work on it unless I make it my main source of income.
I have compiled a list of companies that would be interested in a project like this - from ecommerce sites to SaaS that would like to reduce their costs with card processing fees, even "vice/adult" companies that could benefit from charging users without asking for their credit card - and I would like to keep working in this project if I find enough sponsors or businesses willing to pay a support/consulting contract.
I believe that what I am building is valuable and I think I can put together a pitch deck that shows why this would be interesting to companies. I just don't have the slightest idea on how to approach them without any previous introduction. If anyone has faced something similar or if has any tips (e.g, list of materials that I could put online to show/demo) I would be forever grateful.
[0]: https://hub20.io
[1]: https://raiden.network
[2]: https://btcpayserver.org