Hacker News Reader

Comment by nhangen | Hacker News Reader

If you really want to keep building Fred, you could use something like IgnitionDeck (http://ignitiondeck.com) to raise money over a longer duration.

We've had a lot of people come to us after successful and non-successful Kickstarters in order to keep the dream alive.

Edit: I get it, blatant self-promotion. Look through my history and you'll see I rarely mention my company, and when I do, it's appropriate. In this case, I'm trying to help.

View on HN

Well, I'm happy you self-promoted. Ignition Deck looks really awesome, and I wouldn't have heard about it otherwise.

For example, http://ignitiondeck.com/id/crowdfunding-a-video-game/ is the most valuable crowdfunding breakdown I've ever seen.

Thanks a lot. My partner Shawn worked very hard on that one, and we put a lot of time/effort into it. Glad you found it useful.

I just realized something: I want a platform for gauging interest in a project. I don't really want money, I want people to commit to paying $10 for a year's subscription to my idea X (normally costing $200 a year), so I can say "if 100 people find this interesting enough to enter their credit card details, I'm going to go ahead and build it".

Is there currently something like that? A crowdfunding platform will work, I guess, but I want something with more visibility, because I'm bad at discovering and communicating with my target market.

I guess this is a rather hard problem, I might try one of Kickstarter, Indiegogo or a similar platform and see if I'm successful.

I downvoted you - it is not the self-promotion, but rather the fact that except for mentioning "Fred", this whole comment reads like an auto-generated message. For example, an ancedote about a similar open source project that failed on kickstarter and found success on IgnitionDeck would probably be better received.

That's fair enough, I appreciate the feedback.

Ironically, I avoided a lengthier comment because I worried it would seem fake.

I certainly can't speak for the whole crowd but I would approach it like this:

"Rachel - if you'd still like to pursue crowdfunding for open sourcing Fred, email me at nathan@ignitiondeck.com - we'd love to feature you in a new series we are doing called Kickstarter Redemptions"

I don't see any decrease in the smarminess of your approach.

Nathan's comment sounded like a genuine suggestion: the focus is on her to be able to utilize an alternative. With yours, the focus is on we'd "love to feature you." Sounds so much more self-serving, and also like impersonal marketing copy. Though, as with you, I cannot speak for the whole crowd.

Hey Nathan,

Just add a "shameless self-plug" or "* this is my product". I guess it's important to mention that you are advertising "your" product.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com