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Comment by whit537 | Hacker News Reader

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/.

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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.

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