10 ms·

Kickstarter launches Drip, a Patreon competitor

138 points by artsandsci 9y ago

Sujan 9y ago
I was automatically logged in on their domain https://d.rip/ https://d.rip/ with my Kickstarter account, no redirect happening (as far as I could see). How?
- pierrebeaucamp 9y ago
  Third party cookies
edgarvaldes 9y ago
The first image as a bleeding and broken logo is sad. But the idea seems interesting, and I think that to have a Patreon competitor is healty for the content creators.
aaronarduino 9y ago
Kinda surprised they picked that name considering Drip [1] has been around for a while. [1] https://www.drip.com/ https://www.drip.com/
- hundchenkatze 9y ago
  Yeah, the name is all kinds of weird. If I give someone money through Drip am I Dripper? Sounds gross.
  - kegan_myers_asy 9y ago
    You are a defective faucet. Every time you contribute you are sending a droplet. Content creators are a drain. This analogy isn't getting any better.
    - stevehawk 9y ago
      Either that or he has chlamydia or syphillis.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- Disruptive_Dave 9y ago
  Mentioned this under another comment: Drip was a startup that was acquired from Kickstarter a year or two ago. So they didn't choose the name (and didn't choose to rebrand).
- thomnottom 9y ago
  drip.com became drip.fm became drip.kickstarter.com. This service pre-dates the sites that now occupy drip.com and drip.fm.
wmeredith 9y ago
I haven't read the article, but the branding absolutely sucks. When trying to generate income, Drip, is hardly the connotation I'd want. They should have gone with Flood or Tide. Something big and powerful MADE of Drips. I get what they were going for, but it seems like a tone deaf misfire. EDIT: And, as u/aronarduino pointed out elsewhere in this thread, the name is already taken (and the TLD drip.com) by a well established tech product.
- Disruptive_Dave 9y ago
  Drip was a startup that acquired from Kickstarter a year or two ago. So they didn't choose the name (and didn't choose to rebrand).
  - hundchenkatze 9y ago
    Hmm, so they did. https://www.kickstarter.com/blog/drip-joins-kickstarter https://www.kickstarter.com/blog/drip-joins-kickstarter
- lolsal 9y ago
  I think the point is not to attract people willing to take money in drips, but people willing to give money in drips. The taking side is the easy side. Getting people to give is the difficult side.
  - chx 9y ago
    Really? The music that some people make (in my case, Peter Hollens, Taylor Davis, Clamavi De Profundis) makes me so happy I am very glad to give so they can make me more. In this world, it seems a very easy thing to understand that they can only make music if they are paid for it. This is the ideal model, there is no greedy studio stealing most of the money, I am directly connected to the artist, it just makes so much sense to give a few dollars. And also, I am not paying a lot here compared to the amount of quality entertainment time I get.
    - 9y ago
nopenopenope321 9y ago
"Think of the classic corporation as a legalized sociopath" says the sociopath
annapurna 9y ago
As the article mentions, there are many players in this area and time will tell how Kickstarter leverages their brand to succeed, especially as it is an invitation list only (for now). Some interesting thoughts from Perry Chen (Kickstarter Co-founder and Chairman): “If you look at a lot of companies, it’s COO, CMO, blah, blah, blah,” Chen said. “But look at a museum. You might have a CEO or director, but then you might have a curator. There is a very specific articulation of roles and lanes, and I think that’s really necessary for Kickstarter, trying to be a different kind of company over a long period of time. If you have operators coming with the classic business playbook, I don’t think we’ll be able to sustain our focus on our mission.” As for comments regarding the name, you get an idea of why they might have leaned towards drip. On one of the artist's page [1], you see there are different tiers for supporting his project: 1. Dripper [$3/month] 2. Drizzler [$7/month] 3. Sprayer [$15/month] [1]https://d.rip/peter https://d.rip/peter
- neaden 9y ago
  Those are absolutely awful names for tiers.
  - abiox 9y ago
    surely an intentional thing. i'd be tempted to do the same, honestly.
    - dkersten 9y ago
      Sure, but they're still terrible (and IMHO somewhat off-putting) tier names. Nothing about the drip branding is making me consider using it, given that I already back a number of people on Patreon. (Of course, there's more to a product than branding, so we will see -- EDIT: as somebody else mentioned, Kickstarter being a PBC does make me more inclined to support this, despite its bad branding)
- Cyberdog 9y ago
  4. Moistener [$31/month] 5. Squirter [$63/month] 6. Gusher [$127/month]
DamnInteresting 9y ago
I had an idea for a competitor in the Patreon space a couple of years ago, but with a twist that I feel would have made "patrons" much more comfortable with the whole thing. I even registered a domain, started on some coding, and consulted with some designers. But it quickly became apparent that financial gateways (credit cards, Paypal, etc) are hostile to the idea of allowing me to charge customer A, keep a cut, and pay customer B. Terms of service usually forbid this sort of action. How does one circumvent this hostility? Obviously it's possible, since Patreon and Drip exist, but I didn't know where to start. I still think my idea is worth a try, but I'm stuck.
- BlackjackCF 9y ago
  Is this the case if you use Stripe and Plaid for handling credit card/ACH?
- aaronbrethorst 9y ago
  Stripe has a feature explicitly designed to support this scenario. https://stripe.com/connect https://stripe.com/connect
  - DamnInteresting 9y ago
    Nice! That looks like just what I need. Either it didn't exist when I last researched the issue, or I somehow missed it. Thanks!
    - travisjungroth 9y ago
      It’s not that old; probably didn’t exist.
    - SkyPuncher 9y ago
      I believe it just came out this year. We're in the process of integrating connect and when we started, it is was not a full-blown product yet.
- SeanOC 9y ago
seibelj 9y ago
My idea for paying for open source code would be to auto-scan your codebase, find all open source projects, let you set a donation amount ($5, $10, $100, $1000) per month, and it would auto-donate to every project. Then give you a nice tax writeoff summary for the non-profits. Obviously many details to work out, but I could see a company willing to pay $500 per month if it was easy to donate to all the tools and projects they use.
- ISL 9y ago
  Debian's popcon software can do at least part of this.
- travisjungroth 9y ago
  I wrote an app that had a similar idea based on GitHub stars. It was a crummy MVP. I gave out $1 to 100 different open source authors. Not one of them passed it along and made a donation to someone else. That was disappointing, really.
  - fapjacks 9y ago
    Why was that disappointing? A dollar is really nothing to even think about. If some random person trying to start a service sends me a dollar based on my busy open source contributions, and then (hints? asks? requests?) that I sign up for their service and then forward it to some other person, I would ignore it. I'm guessing this was the big idea? Now, a hundred dollars...
  - skinnymuch 9y ago
    But a dollar isn't enough. Can't expect people to take time out to try something out for a dollar. Maybe should've done 100 dollars for 10 different open source authors. See how that goes.
- olalonde 9y ago
  The problem with this approach is that trivial libraries (e.g. https://github.com/visionmedia/debug https://github.com/visionmedia/debug) that are widely used would get a disproportionate amount of donations.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
zanny 9y ago
Personally I am a fan of this only because Kickstarter is a PBC. The most fundamental problem with Patreon is that it is a proprietary web service operated by a for profit company that now controls the incomes of thousands, ranging from hobbyist artists to major productions like Crash Course. It is like everything that is wrong with Facebook (the lock in from networking effects to a closed ecosystem) but made even worse by making peoples livelihoods depend on it. If there has ever been anything more deserving of if not full decentralization some protection from the controlling interest destroying people on a whim it is Patreon. The PBC nature of Kickstarter doesn't wholly solve this, not even close, but it implies they at least cannot do unethical things to try to increase revenue on the platform by exploiting its dependent creators. Thats a small step in the right direction.
- jacobkg 9y ago
  PBC = "Public Benefit Corporation" https://www.kickstarter.com/blog/kickstarter-is-now-a-benefit-corporation https://www.kickstarter.com/blog/kickstarter-is-now-a-benefi...
- jonathanjaeger 9y ago
  A definite benefit is that you can port subscribers (as you mentioned, not closed): "The other big difference is that Drip also aims to be more creator friendly, allowing creators to easily port subscribers to other crowdfunding platforms with this model."
- Hoasi 9y ago
  Good point, thanks for mentioning it. I always thought Patreon was actually a Public Benefit Corporation.
- quadrangle 9y ago
  To be clear: A PBC just means they have some value that they will not sacrifice for profit. It doesn't mean they aren't for profit, and it doesn't mean they are democratic or anything. It's still a good thing. Not being a PBC is basically unethical always (there's NO ethical excuse for ANY for-profit to NOT be a PBC). But it's a low standard, not comparable to being a co-op or non-profit. Also, even with Patreon being not a PBC, it's horrendous to compare them to Facebook. Facebook is an evil corporation that spends tons of resources promoting surveillance, advertising, and manipulation (and gaining power to dramatically influence politics etc). Facebook is exploitive and actively malicious. For all the real complaints about Patreon, they are doing stuff that is largely positive at least and is in direct opposition to the surveillance-capitalism of Facebook. There is NO COMPARISON. Facebook is plainly awful. Patreon is a good concept run by good people with some real problems that make it worth looking at the competition.
Sujan 9y ago
Awesome domain: https://d.rip/ https://d.rip/
captainmuon 9y ago
I would like to hijacked this post to also mention Liberapay (https://liberapay.com https://liberapay.com) which is a fork of GitTip and ran by one of the original devs. I like it because it is a small, independent competitor to Patreon. It seems more suited to things that are not "art" or "internet celebrity", e.g. open source projects or political initiatives. It is like GitTip before the name change to Gratipay in that you don't need concrete rewards and it also funds individuals. (IIRC Gratipay introduced those changes to get around "money transferrer" laws that didn't allow them to send money no-strings-attached to individuals. Liberapay gets around this by being in EU jurisdiction). It's still pretty small, but looks cool, and I'd love to see it succeed.
- smichel17 9y ago
  If I might hijack this comment, I'd like to mention Snowdrift.coop as well, which is targeted at free/libre/open works. ("Disclaimer": I am a member of our fully volunteer team.) Snowdrift.coop functions in a similar no-strings-attached style to Liberapay, but uses a unique donation model, called Crowdmatching, where the amount of the monthly donation is based on the number of patrons. The platform itself will be funded as a project on its own site (rather than taking a cut of donations), and will be run as a non-profit cooperative (getting governance set up is one of our top priorities right now, alongside a public launch; if anyone has experience/expertise and would like to help with this, please reach out). The best introduction, although visually outdated, is probably the intro page on our wiki: https://wiki.snowdrift.coop/about/intro/ https://wiki.snowdrift.coop/about/intro/ I wish I had time to stick around and chat, but it's a busy time in my semester right now; there's a wealth of adfitional information on the wiki and there's usually people around in irc/matrix (#snowdrift on freenode / matrix.org; the rooms are bridged).
  - hsod 9y ago
    Your wiki link is giving me this error, FYI: Happstack 7.4.6.1 Something went wrong here Internal server error Everything has stopped The error was "NotFound"
    - 9y ago
hitekker 9y ago
Where should I go to short Kickstarter? I know they didn't go public so I'd like the next best way to invest in their likely outcome.
throw7 9y ago
d.rip is javascript-only site.
KaoruAoiShiho 9y ago
The founder guy sounds kinda naive and strange. The only way to provide the most value to users is scale.
- subpixel 9y ago
  Think of it this way: he has his ‘f* you’ money and Kickstarter was his idea to begin with and they still rake in millions and he’s happy to experiment at the artsy-end of the market. That may or may not make impeccable business sense but he’s structured the business so he can follow that ‘mission’.
  - KaoruAoiShiho 9y ago
    I was just taking him at his word, I think at some point in the article he was quoted about providing value to users or something. But yes I agree with you in general, he wants to mess around and experiment and let his ego rule his little kingdom.
dlwdlw 9y ago
Is this something that be automated by a sufficiently advanced smart contract? It seems strange that energy is directed towards creating yet another market with yet another moat to capture money when such a service should be forced as close as possible to commodity pricing.

138 points by artsandsci 9y ago

I was automatically logged in on their domain https://d.rip/ https://d.rip/ with my Kickstarter account, no redirect happening (as far as I could see). How?

pierrebeaucamp 9y ago
Third party cookies

edgarvaldes 9y ago

The first image as a bleeding and broken logo is sad. But the idea seems interesting, and I think that to have a Patreon competitor is healty for the content creators.

aaronarduino 9y ago

Kinda surprised they picked that name considering Drip [1] has been around for a while. [1] https://www.drip.com/ https://www.drip.com/

hundchenkatze 9y ago
Yeah, the name is all kinds of weird. If I give someone money through Drip am I Dripper? Sounds gross.
- kegan_myers_asy 9y ago
  You are a defective faucet. Every time you contribute you are sending a droplet. Content creators are a drain. This analogy isn't getting any better.
  - stevehawk 9y ago
    Either that or he has chlamydia or syphillis.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
Disruptive_Dave 9y ago
Mentioned this under another comment: Drip was a startup that was acquired from Kickstarter a year or two ago. So they didn't choose the name (and didn't choose to rebrand).
thomnottom 9y ago
drip.com became drip.fm became drip.kickstarter.com. This service pre-dates the sites that now occupy drip.com and drip.fm.

wmeredith 9y ago

I haven't read the article, but the branding absolutely sucks. When trying to generate income, Drip, is hardly the connotation I'd want. They should have gone with Flood or Tide. Something big and powerful MADE of Drips. I get what they were going for, but it seems like a tone deaf misfire. EDIT: And, as u/aronarduino pointed out elsewhere in this thread, the name is already taken (and the TLD drip.com) by a well established tech product.

Disruptive_Dave 9y ago
Drip was a startup that acquired from Kickstarter a year or two ago. So they didn't choose the name (and didn't choose to rebrand).
- hundchenkatze 9y ago
  Hmm, so they did. https://www.kickstarter.com/blog/drip-joins-kickstarter https://www.kickstarter.com/blog/drip-joins-kickstarter
lolsal 9y ago
I think the point is not to attract people willing to take money in drips, but people willing to give money in drips. The taking side is the easy side. Getting people to give is the difficult side.
- chx 9y ago
  Really? The music that some people make (in my case, Peter Hollens, Taylor Davis, Clamavi De Profundis) makes me so happy I am very glad to give so they can make me more. In this world, it seems a very easy thing to understand that they can only make music if they are paid for it. This is the ideal model, there is no greedy studio stealing most of the money, I am directly connected to the artist, it just makes so much sense to give a few dollars. And also, I am not paying a lot here compared to the amount of quality entertainment time I get.
  - 9y ago

nopenopenope321 9y ago

"Think of the classic corporation as a legalized sociopath" says the sociopath

annapurna 9y ago

As the article mentions, there are many players in this area and time will tell how Kickstarter leverages their brand to succeed, especially as it is an invitation list only (for now). Some interesting thoughts from Perry Chen (Kickstarter Co-founder and Chairman): “If you look at a lot of companies, it’s COO, CMO, blah, blah, blah,” Chen said. “But look at a museum. You might have a CEO or director, but then you might have a curator. There is a very specific articulation of roles and lanes, and I think that’s really necessary for Kickstarter, trying to be a different kind of company over a long period of time. If you have operators coming with the classic business playbook, I don’t think we’ll be able to sustain our focus on our mission.” As for comments regarding the name, you get an idea of why they might have leaned towards drip. On one of the artist's page [1], you see there are different tiers for supporting his project: 1. Dripper [$3/month] 2. Drizzler [$7/month] 3. Sprayer [$15/month] [1]https://d.rip/peter https://d.rip/peter

neaden 9y ago
Those are absolutely awful names for tiers.
- abiox 9y ago
  surely an intentional thing. i'd be tempted to do the same, honestly.
  - dkersten 9y ago
    Sure, but they're still terrible (and IMHO somewhat off-putting) tier names. Nothing about the drip branding is making me consider using it, given that I already back a number of people on Patreon. (Of course, there's more to a product than branding, so we will see -- EDIT: as somebody else mentioned, Kickstarter being a PBC does make me more inclined to support this, despite its bad branding)
Cyberdog 9y ago
4. Moistener [$31/month] 5. Squirter [$63/month] 6. Gusher [$127/month]

DamnInteresting 9y ago

I had an idea for a competitor in the Patreon space a couple of years ago, but with a twist that I feel would have made "patrons" much more comfortable with the whole thing. I even registered a domain, started on some coding, and consulted with some designers. But it quickly became apparent that financial gateways (credit cards, Paypal, etc) are hostile to the idea of allowing me to charge customer A, keep a cut, and pay customer B. Terms of service usually forbid this sort of action. How does one circumvent this hostility? Obviously it's possible, since Patreon and Drip exist, but I didn't know where to start. I still think my idea is worth a try, but I'm stuck.

BlackjackCF 9y ago
Is this the case if you use Stripe and Plaid for handling credit card/ACH?
aaronbrethorst 9y ago
Stripe has a feature explicitly designed to support this scenario. https://stripe.com/connect https://stripe.com/connect
- DamnInteresting 9y ago
  Nice! That looks like just what I need. Either it didn't exist when I last researched the issue, or I somehow missed it. Thanks!
  - travisjungroth 9y ago
    It’s not that old; probably didn’t exist.
  - SkyPuncher 9y ago
    I believe it just came out this year. We're in the process of integrating connect and when we started, it is was not a full-blown product yet.
SeanOC 9y ago

seibelj 9y ago

My idea for paying for open source code would be to auto-scan your codebase, find all open source projects, let you set a donation amount ($5, $10, $100, $1000) per month, and it would auto-donate to every project. Then give you a nice tax writeoff summary for the non-profits. Obviously many details to work out, but I could see a company willing to pay $500 per month if it was easy to donate to all the tools and projects they use.

ISL 9y ago
Debian's popcon software can do at least part of this.
travisjungroth 9y ago
I wrote an app that had a similar idea based on GitHub stars. It was a crummy MVP. I gave out $1 to 100 different open source authors. Not one of them passed it along and made a donation to someone else. That was disappointing, really.
- fapjacks 9y ago
  Why was that disappointing? A dollar is really nothing to even think about. If some random person trying to start a service sends me a dollar based on my busy open source contributions, and then (hints? asks? requests?) that I sign up for their service and then forward it to some other person, I would ignore it. I'm guessing this was the big idea? Now, a hundred dollars...
- skinnymuch 9y ago
  But a dollar isn't enough. Can't expect people to take time out to try something out for a dollar. Maybe should've done 100 dollars for 10 different open source authors. See how that goes.
olalonde 9y ago
The problem with this approach is that trivial libraries (e.g. https://github.com/visionmedia/debug https://github.com/visionmedia/debug) that are widely used would get a disproportionate amount of donations.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

zanny 9y ago

Personally I am a fan of this only because Kickstarter is a PBC. The most fundamental problem with Patreon is that it is a proprietary web service operated by a for profit company that now controls the incomes of thousands, ranging from hobbyist artists to major productions like Crash Course. It is like everything that is wrong with Facebook (the lock in from networking effects to a closed ecosystem) but made even worse by making peoples livelihoods depend on it. If there has ever been anything more deserving of if not full decentralization some protection from the controlling interest destroying people on a whim it is Patreon. The PBC nature of Kickstarter doesn't wholly solve this, not even close, but it implies they at least cannot do unethical things to try to increase revenue on the platform by exploiting its dependent creators. Thats a small step in the right direction.

jacobkg 9y ago
PBC = "Public Benefit Corporation" https://www.kickstarter.com/blog/kickstarter-is-now-a-benefit-corporation https://www.kickstarter.com/blog/kickstarter-is-now-a-benefi...
jonathanjaeger 9y ago
A definite benefit is that you can port subscribers (as you mentioned, not closed): "The other big difference is that Drip also aims to be more creator friendly, allowing creators to easily port subscribers to other crowdfunding platforms with this model."
Hoasi 9y ago
Good point, thanks for mentioning it. I always thought Patreon was actually a Public Benefit Corporation.
quadrangle 9y ago
To be clear: A PBC just means they have some value that they will not sacrifice for profit. It doesn't mean they aren't for profit, and it doesn't mean they are democratic or anything. It's still a good thing. Not being a PBC is basically unethical always (there's NO ethical excuse for ANY for-profit to NOT be a PBC). But it's a low standard, not comparable to being a co-op or non-profit. Also, even with Patreon being not a PBC, it's horrendous to compare them to Facebook. Facebook is an evil corporation that spends tons of resources promoting surveillance, advertising, and manipulation (and gaining power to dramatically influence politics etc). Facebook is exploitive and actively malicious. For all the real complaints about Patreon, they are doing stuff that is largely positive at least and is in direct opposition to the surveillance-capitalism of Facebook. There is NO COMPARISON. Facebook is plainly awful. Patreon is a good concept run by good people with some real problems that make it worth looking at the competition.

Sujan 9y ago

Awesome domain: https://d.rip/ https://d.rip/

captainmuon 9y ago

I would like to hijacked this post to also mention Liberapay (https://liberapay.com https://liberapay.com) which is a fork of GitTip and ran by one of the original devs. I like it because it is a small, independent competitor to Patreon. It seems more suited to things that are not "art" or "internet celebrity", e.g. open source projects or political initiatives. It is like GitTip before the name change to Gratipay in that you don't need concrete rewards and it also funds individuals. (IIRC Gratipay introduced those changes to get around "money transferrer" laws that didn't allow them to send money no-strings-attached to individuals. Liberapay gets around this by being in EU jurisdiction). It's still pretty small, but looks cool, and I'd love to see it succeed.

smichel17 9y ago
If I might hijack this comment, I'd like to mention Snowdrift.coop as well, which is targeted at free/libre/open works. ("Disclaimer": I am a member of our fully volunteer team.) Snowdrift.coop functions in a similar no-strings-attached style to Liberapay, but uses a unique donation model, called Crowdmatching, where the amount of the monthly donation is based on the number of patrons. The platform itself will be funded as a project on its own site (rather than taking a cut of donations), and will be run as a non-profit cooperative (getting governance set up is one of our top priorities right now, alongside a public launch; if anyone has experience/expertise and would like to help with this, please reach out). The best introduction, although visually outdated, is probably the intro page on our wiki: https://wiki.snowdrift.coop/about/intro/ https://wiki.snowdrift.coop/about/intro/ I wish I had time to stick around and chat, but it's a busy time in my semester right now; there's a wealth of adfitional information on the wiki and there's usually people around in irc/matrix (#snowdrift on freenode / matrix.org; the rooms are bridged).
- hsod 9y ago
  Your wiki link is giving me this error, FYI: Happstack 7.4.6.1 Something went wrong here Internal server error Everything has stopped The error was "NotFound"
  - 9y ago

hitekker 9y ago

Where should I go to short Kickstarter? I know they didn't go public so I'd like the next best way to invest in their likely outcome.

throw7 9y ago

d.rip is javascript-only site.

KaoruAoiShiho 9y ago

The founder guy sounds kinda naive and strange. The only way to provide the most value to users is scale.

subpixel 9y ago
Think of it this way: he has his ‘f* you’ money and Kickstarter was his idea to begin with and they still rake in millions and he’s happy to experiment at the artsy-end of the market. That may or may not make impeccable business sense but he’s structured the business so he can follow that ‘mission’.
- KaoruAoiShiho 9y ago
  I was just taking him at his word, I think at some point in the article he was quoted about providing value to users or something. But yes I agree with you in general, he wants to mess around and experiment and let his ego rule his little kingdom.

dlwdlw 9y ago

Is this something that be automated by a sufficiently advanced smart contract? It seems strange that energy is directed towards creating yet another market with yet another moat to capture money when such a service should be forced as close as possible to commodity pricing.