Ask HN: Using CrowdTilt and open sourcing our site

This post is regarding https://www.shicray.org/ _Site Overview_ It's a site that is a marketplace for service providers (programmers, hair stylists, cleaning people, gardeners, lawyers, etc... focusing of tech people for now). We offer a set menu of services by city and all the prices are consistent across providers. E.g., so you want your lawn mowed? Large lawns: $50. Small lawns: $20... no matter the provider you choose. Then based on feedback ratings we can increase the payout to good providers and pay poor providers less, incentivizing good service. Further, once we have sufficient traffic, we use supply/demand data to dictate market pricing. We make money by charging a 15% fee to providers, about 3% of which goes to payment processing currently. We could reduce this, but I wanted to at least start high to give us room to do so. _Bootstrapping_ I have two ideas to get us going. 1. We list our company on CrowdTilt ( https://www.crowdtilt.com/learn/faq ). Every donor who's a service provider, at least those above a certain donation amount, gets all future marketplace fees--minus payment processing--waived for life. Thus our donors should be more than happy to direct people to our site since we're providing payment processing, escrow, and ratings to boost their cred. We'd set out to raise a sizeable sum of money, at least $500K. Since CrowdTilt only charges donors when the goal is reached, donors would be sure their donation is only going to a widely supported mission, decreasing the risk of a bad investment. 2. We open source the site's codebase for three reasons, (1) the community donated so they should have at least an AGPL license to it and (2) we're not relying on proprietary code since from seeing the site most developers could clone it, and (3) we might get outside dev support to help succeed. _HN Feedback_ Can you offer me thoughts on this plan? Thanks in advance!