So You Wanna Build a Crowdfunding Site

hacks.mozilla.org

133 points·ncasenmare··10 comments

This coincidentally is also the Final Assignment of the Coursera course by Stanford "Startup Engineering". Every one there would be making a Node based, AWS powered, Bootstrap themed Crowdfunding site.

It's worth noting that Startup Engineering is basing its payment platform on Bitcoin whereas this Mozilla article covers Balanced Payments.

I also get the impression from the lectures so far that Startup Engineering isn't covering databases to any real extent, whereas the article covers MongoDB.

They forgot about Crowdhoster. Or using BalancedPayments' APIs.

As a non-js based programmer, This is some excellent insight in what a webapp looks like when built with node.js. I'm definitely gonna be reading through this to get my feet wet with node, as it's something I've been meaning to do but have been so occupied with other languages. Thanks for sharing!

If you are new to Javascript you should note that this tutorial makes heavy use of Promises which is one way to handle callbacks piling up, but it's not the only way, or even the most common.

Or you could fork selfstarter[1], which is what we used to allow users to reserve their username on http://microco.sm

[1] https://github.com/lockitron/selfstarter

Crowdhoster is a fork of selfstarter bit it's behind a request form.

The source and a readme to set up your own instance of Crowdhoster is at http://github.com/Crowdtilt/Crowdhoster.

Feel free to email lebel@crowdtilt.com if you need any help setting it up!

Crowdfunding tools should belong to the crowd? I'd like to hear more rationale on that statement.

I think he was being somewhat flippant. He's really saying: we think it should be easy to crowdfund something, so we're open-sourcing our own crowdfunding software.

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