Codefund – Crowdfunding for Aspiring Coders
codefund.io
codefund.io
Crowd-funding works psychologically pretty cleanly for funding new product development, or artistic work. If it's a thing you want to exist and you think the would-be creator can do it, you fund it, the creator's idea is validated, the thing is (hopefully) made, and you get to enjoy it.
If you don't fund it, it sort of says "I don't feel a strong need for you (creator) to built that (thing) -- but doesn't pass a strong judgement on the creator, even if you know them.
With "crowd-fund your medical expenses", for example, I'm much less comfortable. Reading a plea, then choosing not to fund someone's treatment for a serious illness feels like saying "I don't care if you die", when that's not at all what I'm feeling.
I'm also uncomfortably, acutely aware of what people who post a crowd-funding effort to save my life or save my home etc. must feel like when the effort fails -- like the world at large, but even worse, the people who know and seemingly care for them, don't care enough to save them.
These projects have noble goals -- people need help with medical expenses; help them reach out to others for help! -- but it forces people to put a price on things we'd rather not, but with weird twists ("I really want to help you, but I'm pretty sure this alternative treatment you're trying to pay for is snake oil...").
Codefund isn't as bad, on this spectrum, but it still feels a bit dark to me. Negative feelings a campaign can invoke:
- you start a campaign, convinced your super-supportive friends and family will carry the day. It fails. Does this mean they don't care as much as you thought? Or that they don't think you can succeed?
- You are 6 months out of university, and stressing over how fast your salary disappears, halfway through each month. A not-yet-close friend who you have been trying to impress sends you a link: they're crowdfunding hacker school! How much do you have to contribute (with a credit card, gritting your teeth), to avoid alienating them?
If you think of crowdfund efforts as direct conversations (rather than "interactions enabled by the internet"), it becomes more obvious which ones are really uncomfortable. The level of discomfort is partly cultural -- maybe there are subsets of Americans who feel it's basically "okay" to ask for something you maybe shouldn't, and be told "no" (and be okay with that), but for many, many people this is not okay, people will feel obliged to say "yes" but resent you horribly, and so on.
A crowdfunding platform that basically enables painfully-uncomfortable conversations at internet scale isn't an unalloyed good -- I think there must be better solutions to these problems out there.
Sorry for the ramble; I'm not totally clear on where I stand, but curious to hear what other people think about it.
[Edit: minor tweaks to what I was saying about Americans vs. the world... didn't seem accurate.]
So yes, I agree that there are potentially negative effects that could result from a failed campaign. People put a lot of effort into raising the funds necessary to pursue their dreams. A failed campaign can be devastating to someone who is emotionally invested in their future plans.
However, I don't believe that should stop entrepreneurs from trying to solve the problem, especially in this case. Codefund exists because no one else has presented a better solution, and I believe that the existence of an imperfect solution is a greater good than the lack there of, despite potentially negative psychological effects.
As a company, we can do a better job coaching fundraisers about the reality of their situation, in an effort to regulate their expectations. We can and we should do that much at least. That being said, I don't think closing the doors on educational crowdfunding is the answer. I don't know what the ideal solution is, but Adrian and I are committed to iterating toward that vision based on your feedback.
I think asking aspiring coders to run a "kickstarter" style crowd funding campaign for themselves is a mistake for the reasons the jtheory mentions.
I think it would make more sense to allow funders to organize themselves into scholarship groups with shared goals.
Then match aspiring coders to these scholarship groups using a process similar to the "National Resident Matching Program".
Then there is no binary choice of "you are deserving, you are not" about aspiring coders being made by funders. It's more of a "this coder exemplifies our ideals better than this coder"
/edited for clarity
A kickstarter approach effectively blocks people who don't have friends & family with spare cash (and whose mothers don't have houses with spare rooms either).
big fan of moving away from anything that buckets individuals into "you are deserving, you are not." creating a group around a specific coding goal provides a nice layer of abstraction away from the individual.
Another potential advantage of a model like this is that aspiring coders who "fail" to find the funding level they were looking for can be put in contact with groups than can help them refine their appplication, skill set, and goals so that they may be able to succeed in finding funding in the future.
This sort of funding paradigm could also be used to support quality educators who want to volunteer to go into schools, non-profits and other areas that are lacking skilled CS educators.
I think this sort of model could also be used "on top of" the more traditional "kickstarter" crowdfunding model. You could still allow traditional, one person to one person funding model, but at the completion of the campaign, match funding groups with individuals who have not raised sufficient funds.
If your friends and family really dig deep to pay your tuition to hacker bootcamp, even if you take to code like a duck to water and get into some really interesting projects, you still owe them, until you manage to dig deep in a roughly equivalent way for each of them. If you do really get a good start, that's some payoff for them (they bought you a big present, and it noticeably improved your life!), but you still owe them.
And if you find yourself really not taking to coding -- you just don't have the eye for detail, your brain keeps fumbling the logic; there's too much meaningless trivia to navigate... well, now you're discouraged, you've wasted a big chunk of time, the nice present they bought you (at your request) turned out to be a bad one, AND you still owe them.
Agreed on the general point to not let the perfect be the enemy of the good, though, on principal!
There are certainly some cases where this'll work nicely with few risks (e.g., a non-hacker with a large audience already who decides they want to give hacking a try -- or someone who's poor but has a lot of wealthy family & friends); and there are probably other interesting ideas with tweaks to the model -- funding in a pool with awards? I'm not sure, but best of luck in any case.
Based on our current model, a fundraiser wouldn't have to pay back anyone that contributed funds toward their campaign. So we'd avoid that murky mess that comes with having a thousand micro loans to cover your tuition.
Adrian and I need to really think about some of the harmful effects brought on by the campaign. It's honestly something we haven't thought about too much, so I'm really grateful that you brought it up. Definitely deserves a lot of attention.
I want to introduce Codefund, a crowdfunding platform for aspiring coders. We have built a platform that enables users to crowdfund their tuition after being accepted into a programming bootcamp.
Our first campaign is now live, and we're fundraising for Rose Afriyie, who has been accepted into the Starter League (http://www.starterleague.com/) in Chicago. She's hoping to learn web development in order to continue building mRelief, a social services app she is developing in partnership with the City of Chicago.
Check out her campaign here: https://www.codefund.io/campaign/rose
twitter: @codefunding
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Codefund is the bootstrapped project of Adrian Moses and Dana Alibrandi. Adrian is a software engineer with a keen mind for good products, and I'm a product manager filling in the gaps. We're aware that there are holes in our product, but we feel like this platform is something that should exist in the world. Maybe its current iteration isn't the ideal, but if you agree that we should find a way to help diversify and bolster the tech industry, then we'd love to hear your feedback on how to improve.
And most importantly, donate if you believe in the campaign and want to see Codefund grow :)
Open the chrome console to reproduce.
Cool idea though! How do your terms compare to something like gofundme?
As compared to gofundme, our terms are similar in that there are no penalties for missed deadlines and the fundraiser gets to keep any amount they raise. It didn't seem right to reject donations just because the goal wasn't met. If a fundraiser can raise any amount, then it makes their future debt much more manageable.
We've been tossing around the idea of removing the deadline, but because of the gap of time between acceptance and your first tuition payment, we inserted a deadline to focus donations in our limited timeframe. In the future, we can encourage applicants to create campaigns as quickly as possible, in order to maximize the amount of time before the first tuition payment. In theory, fundraisers can continue their campaigns until their full tuition is covered, where a portion of the total is sent directly to the school in order to cover that particular payment period. At the very least, it will buy fundraisers more time to cover the total cost of their needs.
Still, it is nice to see people taking an interest in young coders. There's a lot of support for teaching kids programming, but I sometimes I feel like those supporters don't know what to do once we actually learn.
I also have some misgivings about this particular form of aid distribution. It's very possible that some extremely deserving candidates miss out on aid because they aren't the best at marketing. In that regard, we offer some basic marketing suggestions and efforts around their campaign, and it's something we hope to improve upon in the future.
I don't necessarily think Codefund is THE solution, but I think that it's A solution, and it's one that we can keep iterating on together.
Definitely agree with you though, there is a gamey element to it that I would like to do away with. However, I will gladly entertain that solution for now considering that the potential social benefit far outweighs the cons of it being a contest.