Facing Imminent Homelessness, Gagoot Developer Seeks Project Funding
gagoot.com
gagoot.com
Your website has very little information about what it is, but that's not anywhere near the biggest problem.
Once you either have a product that people want to use, or at least a decent prototype to show to people for not guaranteed at all funding you might be able to get some money but until then you should be doing what everyone else does - work a regular job for someone else to keep you afloat while you work on your own stuff.
Crowdfunding doesn't really make sense for nascent projects with high risk. If the value to a consumer is $10, and there is a 10% chance of success, the EV is only $1. Honestly VC is better for that, but you have to actually sell ownership and upside instead of charging for probably-nothing. I don't really think a VC will touch this though.
The best bet is probably to reduce scope and get a day job.
To that end, I am offering to produce a detailed white paper, to be delivered in four weeks, to any investor (or group of investors) who is/are willing to make an upfront token payment of $5,000. After delivery, the paper will remain private, for a short while, maybe a week or two, to give the investor(s) a time advantage to decide whether they are interested in making a real investment. If not, then I will publish it, so I can use it as a basis for some other funding approach for GAGOOT.
I realize that this proposition is unusual, but I find myself in an unusual situation, and so I am brainstorming unusual solutions. Also, if you are in or near my city, I am willing to meet in person. Thank you for your consideration.
By the way, speaking of "brainstorming", I am reminded of 1983's "Brainstorm". Here is a fascinating article about the film.
https://popularmechanics.com/culture/movies/a25654064/sci-fi...
I’ve built a business on open source — it was very difficult, and the outcome far from immediate. There’s absolutely no way I could have done it while homeless and living in a shelter.
Hoping for the best for you.
Code and diagrams will be in the newsletter and/or the white paper, as soon as I can get those going.
I see others have tried to help in the past with little luck, but I'll take a stab at it too, just in case: I'd focus on getting some income of any sort coming in, even of the informal employment variety. Also, go to your local social services office and apply for things like EBT. Once you have a few 100 dollars (which you might even be able to get by panhandling for a few days), go find a room for rent. If you're not picky, you can get one for $100/wk or probably even lower if you look around. Then look for more sustainable income sources. Once that's all sorted out, only then start thinking about your side project.
Abandon this project immediately. Use whatever personal resource (time, energy, motivation) you’ve got left to find any sort of technical/intellectual work that leverages your most valuable skills before it’s too late.
> “I merely exist here, as it is difficult to get any useful computer work done.”
Eventually you will find it impossible to do anything with those most valuable skills.
The people who made it listened, observed real problems, and crafted something obviously useful and better to fill a specific category of need, most often while working another job to pay the bills.
Survive, thrive, and then work on side-projects. Side projects are too risky to become an immediate living when you need water, food, and shelter.
Honestly, I avoided shelters because of the lack of safety and risk of diseases like TB, c. auris, meningitis, bed bugs, and such. Yuck. I'd rather find somewhere quiet hidden away.
In the mean time get whatever job you can even if that means the municipal day labour if available.
Fiverr and other bit work can also help but the key is don't hold your breath for Gagoot.
Just my 2 cents
This will also give you the opportunity to teach kids English, as native English speakers are demanded all over the world. An easy and lucrative job, you will be spending time talking with the kids of the upper-middle class. There are also apps like Cambly which let you do that online, so you can start making money from your native English right away.
A 1000 for the plane ticket and a 1000 a month(which you should be able to get by teaching English part time) should be enough for a comfortable life.
Also, don’t forget that your most valuable asset is your health and you should not let your health deteriorate in this temporary situation.
also, moving is expensive. living as an expat in a foreign country is not that cheap (you'll spend more than the locals). i believe there are areas in the US where you can live cheaply too. finding one that is cheap but yet has decent internet may be a challenge though. (my gut suggests to look for places with community ran internet service)
Some time ago China was the go-to destination for that kind of work but I hear it's no longer the case. Here in Turkey there are quite few expats doing that kind of jobs and living very well but there there are almost 200 countries out there and all should be evaluated individually. The general rule works though: However poor the county is, there's always a class of rich people who want their kids learn English and they are prepared to pay for it handsomely.
Being a native English speaker is a marketable skill all over outside the Anglosphere, the demand is there.
If one has under-treated conditions like OCD or manic depression, I've seen people with unhealthy fixations on ideas be their own worst enemies and sabotage their life situations. People who lived in vans but failed to get medication and floated in the in-between and on the margins. I've been there. There's no reward for misery and it's difficult to climb out of it. Wash windows, sell t-shirt, mow lawns.. all things that can be done with minimum of resources for immediate cash. Go on craigslist and offer technical services for an hourly rate.
It's not enough to want. One has to sustain themselves, be relentlessly resourceful, do and build something people need, and collect money in one stable way before changing to another. Stability first. It's like an investment portfolio: you wouldn't throw your parent's life savings into a random NFT. Maybe $5 as a test, but that's it.
Ideas are worth money. For example, corporations buy patents for things that don't yet exist (or may never exist) simply to shore up their IP portfolios. What I'm attempting here is a different business model, one which does not have to become accepted practice for every startup.
Sell those domain names if you can... be aware that they're probably not worth much because their value is also tied to your idea... which doesn't have value until it's made real.
I'm being brutally honest here in an attempt to help. Bite the bullet and get a day job, pursue your project weekends and evenings even if that seems a painful way forward. All you have to do is produce working results and then you can sell the idea, quit your job, and go full time. If you're good enough to create your idea, you're good enough to sleep walk your way through a boring job that pays your bills and quickly put together working proof of your idea that you can use to obtain financing.
Ideas are worth money. For example, corporations buy patents for things that don't yet exist (or may never exist) simply to shore up their IP portfolios. What I'm attempting here is a different business model, one which does not have to become accepted practice for every startup.
figure out some way to get out of the homeless shelter, ASAP
then, get ANY job that pays you money
you are in survival mode, you can hack later
OP: I've been homeless before, I don't really care if post is truth or a lie, a scam or a sincere cry for help. Desperation takes many forms and I'd like to help either way.
A $5,000 pledge would unfortunately be a terrible financial decision at a time where I'm saving for a house, but I won't hurt purchasing the yearly newsletter subscription for $50. It's not a lot of money in the grand scheme of things, especially if it helps you get on your feet. Send a payment link to shane at my username dot com.
Not sure if that's better or worse now that I write it out.
The main difference seems to be that Davis built something interesting and functional (if not profitable or practical), whereas gagoot.com seem more like Time Cube rambling.
I, too, was reminded of Terry Davis, his struggles, and his death, but I didn't want to mention it, as it was a bit too close to home.
>GAGOOT is a domain-less, server-to-server meshnet which offers a reimagined, members-only, ad-free, tracker-free, fingerprint-free, captcha-free, cookie-free, bloat-free, DDoS-proof, no-censorship approach to implementing a number of disparate functions, including search, social media, archiving, messaging, cloud computing, and distributed computing, each designed to provide anonymity, privacy, and freedom as first-class concerns rather than as mere afterthoughts.
To me, this sounds suspiciously like someone with enough knowledge about how things work on the Internet to be confident that they can do better, but hasn't learned enough to understand how little he knows... it's the Dunning-Kruger effect in the wild.
The problem (or feature) of knowledge is that there's always more knowledge and nuance behind what you think you know, and the details are what makes things work. All the services and functions he describes as parts of his system above were developed over decades by thousands of the brightest people in the world. Replacing all that with one good idea only one person has worked on is possible, but incredibly unlikely.
Most importantly, all those things were developed by people who not only had good ideas but who did all the hard work to make them real. Ideas aren't worth money, results are.
OP needs to stop counting on their project idea as a gateway to self sufficiency and realize that (sadly) they have to go back to work in the boring real world, even though working for an hour on their project would eventually produce more value than working a week at a day job.
That sucks hard, but the truth is that without a track record or a working prototype to show off no one is going to pay OP for their project, period. That's just how the world works.
I'm saying all this as another 50+ year old IT person who understands that it's getting harder to find new jobs and who is burned out on working as a cog in the machine.
I've been building similar building blocks to this, and it's VERY hard and long and tedious work to make it actually happen. And yes, doing this kind of thing while employed full time is frustrating to no end, because everything takes 5x longer.
After 5 years, I have Dogma [1] (a metalanguage for building text and binary grammars) finished, and Concise Encoding [2] (an ad-hoc hierarchical data format) almost finished (it's been slowed by the fact that I needed to develop Dogma to describe it [3], and also from switching to Antlr for the text parsing). I expect that the bidirectional, multi-stream encrypted communications protocol that uses these technologies will be even more pain once I dig into it beyond the 6 months I've given it so far. And only THEN will I be able to make interesting things with it (such as a re-imagined file API alternative to POSIX).
Building this kind of stuff is a marathon with no end, and you absolutely can't do it unless you either are already independently wealthy, or you're leveraging your daytime job to that end.
[2] https://concise-encoding.org/
[3] https://github.com/kstenerud/concise-encoding/blob/master/cb... and https://github.com/kstenerud/concise-encoding/blob/master/ct...