Hacker News Reader

Comment by webwright | Hacker News Reader

Inspiring service (once I figured out what the heck the post was talking about and managed to make sense of the home page). This post and the site's homepage scream for the attention of a person who has a head for marketing.

I think Patreon is winning because the people leading the charge care most about solving the problem (connecting patrons to creators). Gittip, while they are also clearly passionate about solving the problem, seems to have a big chunk of their passion/attention aimed at HOW they solve the problem (the whole site/process seems to be open-sourced: http://building.gittip.com/).

What they're creating is really a consumer-facing product/service. Are there any/many examples of consumer-facing OSS stuff that's better than the standard path of "find/hire amazing devs/designers/marketeers who love what you're building and pay them to kick ass?"

View on HN

Yes! Wanna help with marketing? :-)

You're right that it's not just "what we do" but "how we do it" that matters for Gittip. For me they're actually related, though I guess I haven't convinced everyone of that. Basically I just don't feel grateful and generous when I'm spending most of my time working for a paycheck. I want to give my labor away for free! I want open work!

I wrote a post about "open products" for The Changelog a while ago that talks about the question of consumer-facing products that also happen to be OSS: http://thechangelog.com/open-products/.

You should read: http://blog.eladgil.com/2012/10/startups-miracles.html

I think you're shooting for two miracles here - the core idea PLUS the idea that open work is the best way to create a consumer/facing service when all of the evidence seems to point that it's not.

Thanks, I read it.

> Many people delude themselves on whether they are a one-miracle, or multi-miracle startup. They way to tell is to ask yourself what your product or business end goal is. Is your approach directly focused on achieving that end goal? If not, you may have a multi-miracle plan without realizing it.

Gittip's end goal is to enable an economy of gratitude, generosity, and love.

So you tell me: is our approach directly focused on achieving that end goal?

Nope.

If that's your goal (which is a good, but again could use a marketing brain), it's pretty easy to make a list of what needs to exist/happen for that goal to succeed. To me, it's hard to argue that "try a radically different way of developing the product/company" should be ANYWHERE on that list, any more than "run a kickstarter campaign for every new feature" should be on Kickstarter's list or "we should outsource all of our product development" should be on oDesk's list. To me, it looks like adding a ton of unnecessary risk, though it certainly does tell a nice "we're eating our own dogfood" story. But, heck-- I've been wrong plenty before.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com