My takeaway from this is that there was a community of people willing to collectively pay 100k EUR and I'd say that was the biggest contributor to it's success

My takeaway from this is that there was a community of people willing to collectively pay 100k EUR and I'd say that was the biggest contributor to it's success - a large group of people seeing the value of the shared good. I don't have examples at hand to point at, but I feel like there is/was several open source projects that did have the initial VC money, but fizzled out after the money was spent specifically because they got to a fairly polished point without really having a community