20 ms·

Gittip, Year Two

263 points by tshepang 12y ago

primigenus 12y ago
I love Gittip. I don't love the homepage. When I visit the homepage, I see "Sustainable crowdfunding: inspiring generosity", followed by a call to action input asking me to enter someone's username, and finally three groups of lists of people. None of these things mean anything to me if I'm new to Gittip. The headline at the top describes your company mission statement, not what the product does. Instead of telling me the abstract of what Gittip is about, it should tell me the benefit of using your product. For instance, "Support your favourite people by automatically donating to them weekly." Skip the generosity, sustainability, and crowdfunding mentions for now. Put them behind the About link, which I might click if I'm interested in learning more about how and why you're doing this (I'm probably not). The call to action input doesn't help me much. It's asking me to enter someone's name off the top of my head, and it's using a very vague label ("who inspires you?") to do so. I would scrap this approach and instead provide a way to sign up to Gittip with a call to action that ties back in to the headline. So you want to donate to people you like? Step 1: sign up for an account. Step 2: add people from your Twitter, Github, Facebook, etc. Step 3: Look through the list of people (Gittip should use some magic to prioritise the people by likelihood of my wanting to support them, such as looking at how close they are to me on Facebook, or how many followers/stars they have on Github and how many of their projects I've starred) and select up to 3 that I like. Done! Step 4: Decide to give someone something minimal (say, $0.25) per week by entering my credit card details. If I choose not to do that, at leat I made a profile on the site, got familiar with how it works, taught you a bit about who I am and where I came from, and you can maybe email me later and remind me if someone I have in my friends list did something interesting (like published a new project, blog post, insightful tweet, etc) The list of people at the bottom of the homepage is boring. It's not contextual to the goals of the homepage, which are converting users to understanding Gittip and wanting to join in. Right now you show me static lists of new users, top givers, and top receivers. I don't really care about new users other than as proof that this site isn't dead, so you can reduce their importance right off the bat. Top givers and receivers aren't relevant to me unless you tell me what they're giving or receiving. So I would reformat these lists: andyet gives x per week to a, b, c, and more. ashedryden receives x per week from a, b, c and more. I need to understand that Gittip is about creating a direct personal relationship between people giving money and receiving money. Right now, these lists don't imply any kind of relationship. I also think you need to revise the name. I know you've decided that "Gittip" is just a new word and shouldn't be understood as a portmanteau of git and tip, but it's a terrible, hard to remember, hard to spell word. "Giddip? So with a D?" "No, with two T's" "The heck does that mean?" "I dunno, it's just some weird word" -- you're missing the opportunity to give the product a memorable, clear, unique name that either represents your product as it stands apart from competition, or is memorable and quirky enough that it just sticks. Patreon got it right: it evokes "patron" but it's slightly different, so you can intuitively guess what it's about and still remember the brand itself. I recommend reading the book Seductive Interaction Design by Stephen Anderson: http://www.amazon.com/Seductive-Interaction-Design-Effective-Experiences/dp/0321725522 http://www.amazon.com/Seductive-Interaction-Design-Effective... - it will help you combine your existing ability to reason about the product with some basic psychology and mental modeling that will allow you to word things in such a way that the benefit is more clearly communicated and you're speaking to the user instead of rambling about the company vision to nobody in particular. Good luck with Gittip in year 3. I'll be watching - and giving :)
- whit537 12y ago
  Thanks! Awesome feedback, especially on the homepage! I've added your comments with a +1 to https://github.com/gittip/www.gittip.com/issues/1074 https://github.com/gittip/www.gittip.com/issues/1074. Re: the name, that's mentioned a couple other places on this thread. Do you think it's important enough to focus on in the next year? Do you think it's the crucial missing link to making Gittip itself sustainable? Or is that something we tackle once we've demonstrated that we can actually keep the lights on indefinitely? Thanks for the book recommendation. I've ordered it. > Good luck with Gittip in year 3. I'll be watching - and giving :) Thank you! :D
  - primigenus 12y ago
    As with any major public facing change, do it sooner rather than later, because the later it is, the more people will know you as "Gittip", so the cost of the change will be larger. Sit down with 2-3 people (including someone not in the Gittip loop!) this weekend and list all of the nouns and verbs that you associate with Gittip's mission, its market, what users do on Gittip, and what people achieve through Gittip. Then pick one of those. Register the domain. If it's taken, use 37signals' approach of appending "app", "hq" or some other unique identifier to it. It will only take up as much of your time as you allow it to.
    - whit537 12y ago
      But is it holding us back from reaching sustainability for Gittip itself?
      - nuetrino 12y ago
        I've been following Gittip's progress for a while, as a student funding someone through this isnt a priority for myself to be honest, I've started working now though so I'll have no excuses! Though I think the name means nothing to people outside of tech. I guess the decision to change the name depends on whether you're targeting nontechnical people who appreciate a developer's work.
      - 12y ago
norswap 12y ago
I wonder why Patreon took off and not Gittip. Personally I've heard more about Gittip than Patreon, which I only encountered recently, being used by some YouTube channel for sustenance. Maybe that's precisely the kind of market which Gittip should focus on.
- whit537 12y ago
  Patreon took off because a) they've got domain expertise w/ YouTube in one co-founder, and b) they've got business expertise in the other co-founder. Re: YouTube. When your friends are YouTube micro-celebs, who are good at marketing themselves by definition, you're going to have an easier time getting a network effect going around a platform that depends on marketing oneself, than when your friends are open-source programmers, who as a rule are not good at marketing themselves. Re: Business. They identified a market need and are executing by the book. They built a prototype, with a standard skimming business model, raised some money, hired a team, danced with the tech press, and here we are. Here's where we tried approaching content creators: https://github.com/gittip/www.gittip.com/issues/737 https://github.com/gittip/www.gittip.com/issues/737. I actually did a call with Jack and others right when Patreon launched. Key point he made is that content creators get pitches from companies all the time, so already being in that scene is a huge advantage. http://blog.gittip.com/post/51236581424/open-call-with-centup-flattr-and-patreon http://blog.gittip.com/post/51236581424/open-call-with-centu...
- peterjancelis 12y ago
  Patreon's team is just right: Technical co-founder who built the site himself, business co-founder who is a YouTube artist and has a lot of friends in those circles. I even think they met as college room mates, typical story VC's like (they are funded).
rb2k_ 12y ago
While the discussion is mostly about Gittip vs Patreon, I never quite understood why they could grow despite flattr(.com) being around since 2010. I like flattr's model of having 1 fixed monthly donation that gets split among all of a user's flattr clicks from this month. It somehow removes a true monetary value from a click and allows to spread them more freely. For whatever reason, it's pretty big in the German podcasting community.
- nbouscal 12y ago
  Gittip and Flattr have fundamentally different models and focuses. Perhaps ironically, Flattr is more focused on tipping. It's about signaling one-time appreciation for a specific piece of work (an article, a video, etc). Gittip, on the other hand, is about providing a sustainable income for a person, hence the subscription giving model. Also worth mentioning that all of these companies (Gittip, Flattr, Patreon, others) seem to be on exceptionally good terms with each other, which is really nice to see.
alexandros 12y ago
I guess the issue being raised here by many is this: You need to justify why the non-standard moves you've made are necessary for you to achieve your mission. If there is a story, it's not coming out. If they're not necessary, then your mission doesn't align with your actions. Perhaps your true mission is 'make all our dreams come true at the same time' but you have to be conscious of the fact that the conditional probability of everything working just right at the same time is orders of magnitude smaller than something like gittip being executed with better understood tools and structures.
- whit537 12y ago
  > you have to be conscious of the fact that the conditional probability of everything working just right at the same time is orders of magnitude smaller than something like gittip being executed with better understood tools and structures. Sure, that's why I'm encouraged that Gittip has grown as well as it has! We paid out $41,000 our first year. We paid out $300,000 our second year. The best justification I can offer will be a strong year three. ;-)
pessimizer 12y ago
I have a few criticisms of Gittip, with the caveat that I'm largely criticizing you for not being something else that I want, rather than for not doing a good job at the thing that you're currently doing. 1) Is there some sort of legal reason that Gittip doesn't want to manage all of my non-profit giving? 2) What's with the focus on programming? The programming community is tiny, and will be better off piggybacking on the larger culture rather than trying to create one of our own. Why not focus on supporting free culture writ large, like musicians, writers, artists, and charities? 3) The reason my own donation is shitty is because I have to figure out who to donate to and how to donate to them, and then I end up having to maintain as many channels for cash as I have things to donate to. Can't you just offer me curated funds where percentages of my monthly tithe go to a range of things that are often supported together, and you guys just keep it updated? 4) The greatest sin that gittip commits in my opinion is not being donator focused. It seems to be a platform for people to get money donated to them, rather than a platform to manage my donations, as a person who has money. OK: I hope this isn't too incoherent, because I'm a bit busy; my bottom line is that I want to donate $10K - $20K a year, like many people I'm sure, and if you can help me with that problem, that's where success lies. Right now, it seems like you primarily help marginal people receive money instead of helping me give it. I want to give to 100 software projects that I know about, and 200 that I don't. I want to give to 10 charities that I know about, and 20 that I don't. I want to give to them whether or not they're aware of gittip. I don't want to be Joan Kroc giving all of her money to NPR because she didn't know of the myriad of other companies that make up public radio. I don't want to spend more than an hour a year on it. Can you help me?
- zheshishei 12y ago
  Something like a donation dashboard might solve your problem? They could let the donor set an optional maximum monthly contribution. Of that maximum contribution, the donor could set how much of it goes to each tip. The giving page seems like a good place to put such a thing. As for tipping a charitable organisation that might not be on gittip, perhaps setting up proxy accounts where the monthly tip is donated by gittip would work. Of course, this would be susceptible to a social engineering attack where a scammer could fraudulently claim to represent the organisation and ask for control of the account.
mholt 12y ago
I ended up using my own badges from shields.io because the widgets generated for me say "I receive $null from GitTip." And the buttons don't say anything useful: People don't know what "Gittip" is by itself, and "3.00" (actually, for me, they say "NaN") doesn't mean anything either. I made a badge on shields that says "tips|accepted" because I 1) wouldn't want people to know how much I'm making on Gittip and 2) don't care how they donate, really. But I like the idea of Gittip and hope it continues and grows. I'd love to see actual stories of donors/receivers there, too.
- whit537 12y ago
  Did you know that Gittip and Shields are in cahoots? :-) http://blog.gittip.com/post/59396458675/gittip-has-acquired-shields http://blog.gittip.com/post/59396458675/gittip-has-acquired-... Re: stories, I've added a +1 for you to https://github.com/gittip/www.gittip.com/issues/1074 https://github.com/gittip/www.gittip.com/issues/1074.
iodfgj 12y ago
I think gittip had the potential to become something great and yea, sure, you've had a substantial increase in traffic since last year but an increase in traffic does not mean an increase in quality. I've been looking over at gittip for a while now and saw it was doing good things for good open source developers but your homepage shows the problem. The top 2 money recipients are 2 feminists which have never seen a line of code in their lives (one of them doesn't even have a github account!). This got me really confused as to what the objective of the website really is since apparently anyone can signup and receive cash without working for it. So that's why I don't use the website to receive or to give. I think its kind of insulting for the developers that actually do something for the community.
- whit537 12y ago
  Gittip is a site for multiple communities, not one single community, so I take it as a sign of strength that we do in fact have multiple communities using Gittip now. Think along the lines of PayPal or Twitter: they are a big tent. I've added a +1 for you to https://github.com/gittip/www.gittip.com/issues/1074 https://github.com/gittip/www.gittip.com/issues/1074, because you're right that the homepage currently conflates the different communities that are using Gittip.
  - lucisferre 12y ago
    Don't feed the trolls.
- maco 12y ago
  > The top 2 money recipients are 2 feminists which have never seen a line of code in their lives (one of them doesn't even have a github account!). Ashe and Shanley? Ashe is a programmer, and Shanley was working as a programmer until she founded a media startup. I do find the hangup people have on GitHub in particular weird, though. I have very little code on public GitHub repositories. Why? KDE, GNOME, and Ubuntu all have their own code hosting. I spent years working almost exclusively on projects that were large enough to have their own server farm. And then, of course, there's Sourceforge.
- 12y ago
jimmytidey 12y ago
It's an incredibly admirable thing to be doing.
- ronilan 12y ago
  It is. But it is also the wrong thing to be doing. "Gittip’s mission is to enable an economy of gratitude, generosity, and love". In order to affect such a thing one needs leverage. That is, one needs a lever and a place to stand on. If two years in and after several times at the top of HN, Chad still can't make a living - then he has neither. The mission will fail. It is better to let go. Just my own meandering experience.
  - whit537 12y ago
    Taking three to five years to reach profitability is normal. In the mean time, we paid out $300,000 in no-strings-attached gifts this past year. That does not feel to me like the wrong thing to be doing. :-)
    - ronilan 12y ago
      Chad, the passion and effort you've put into your project are clear. I hope it will eventually become beneficial to you, if not directly, then down the road through the doors it must have opened to you. That being said, I think I'm not the only one who would have advised you to let go of something that is half dead (edit: meaning "vegetative" by comparable standards). Also, wouldn't the mission be better served as a project at github rather than a profit seeking enterprise? Wouldn't Reddit gifts arrangement be the right model? After all once you put a link at the place where people go magic is possible. Just something to think about. Sunk cost is tricky but it is never too late to make the right decision. Ok. Almost never....
      - whit537 12y ago
        We paid out $41,000 in our first year, and $300,000 in our second. How is something that just grew 632% half-dead?
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
SingAlong 12y ago
I feel an emotional attachment towards Gittip. Here's my story: This is my GitHub profile https://github.com/HashNuke https://github.com/HashNuke and this is my Gittip profile https://www.gittip.com/HashNuke/ https://www.gittip.com/HashNuke/ I've been writing opensource software full-time for the past few months. A few weeks ago, I checked my Gittip profile out of curiosity. I found out someone was anonymously giving me $0.5/wk, for the last 4 weeks. I had $2 as my balance. I was in tears when I saw that. I felt that mattered. Someone cared about my work. I'm excited that in a few weeks it can pay for the domain name for my next opensource project. Thanks to Chad, the Gittip team and the community. I hope Gittip works out well for them financially to sustain themselves and do more.
- whit537 12y ago
  That is super awesome and encouraging to read. Thanks SingAlong/HashNuke! Keep up the good work! :D
  - gedrap 12y ago
    And maybe a story for homepage? ;) It's surely more engaging than a list of new users (which, honestly, I don't care and don't think anyone cares outside 'getting on HN front page got him X sign ups'). Although... I am quite curious how this post will affect your metrics e.g. a month down the line ;) And, yes, please, change your name. I found it misleading (I thought it's something like dogecoin tips on reddit, just for github) and hard to remember for people who don't know git. Other that that, you're awesome! Keep it going :)
    - whit537 12y ago
      Thanks for the feedback! The reason we have leaderboards on the homepage in the first place is to quickly answer the question, "Is anyone actually making a living here?" I looked at Flattr and could not for the life of me answer that question. Now that the matter is established, I agree that it's time to change the homepage. I've added a +1 for you to https://github.com/gittip/www.gittip.com/issues/1074 https://github.com/gittip/www.gittip.com/issues/1074. Re: Stories, see http://tomslee.net/2014/01/airbnb-stories.html http://tomslee.net/2014/01/airbnb-stories.html for a counterargument.
gw 12y ago
I've been using Gittip for my free software projects, and while I am nowhere near being sustainable, it's more than I expected to get. There is certainly room for two players (see Kickstarter/Indiegogo), and I much prefer Gittip's minimalism and lack of flare.
KJasper 12y ago
I've never heard of Gittip nor Patreon before reading this article. Looking at both websites the website for Patreon is much more engaging and less cluttered. Gittip looks intimidating with all those small pictures and numbers going around. A good redesign for the index would propel the business more than all those commits. Love both ideas though :)
- yitchelle 12y ago
  I kinda agree with you here. I have not heard of Gittip either before this post came on HN. So I visited it, and upon seeing the front page, I immediately thought that this is like a competition where the rankings of the highest givers and highers receivers were showcased. I think that the site should show something that tipping the projects is a good idea. (Shooting from my hip here) maybe they should pick out a couple of projects and show how the tipping has benefitted the project?
  - KJasper 12y ago
    I agree with you about the competition bit. I immediately thought: "Oh how surprising the cute girl is in second position" (I dont have a clue who shanley is). So focusing more on how they make a difference instead of a silly selfie would be a good first step indeed.
    - whit537 12y ago
      Thanks for the feedback! :-) I've added +1s for the ~~three~~ two of you to https://github.com/gittip/www.gittip.com/issues/1074 https://github.com/gittip/www.gittip.com/issues/1074.
    - rescripting 12y ago
      A bit OT, but "Oh how surprising the cute girl is in second position" is casual sexism and really dismissive. Read her statement on gettip for some extra irony.
jve 12y ago
Took me some looking around to find a link on bottom of the (gittip.com) page to actually find out what gittip does. First thought was - is it a way to get paid by submitting patches through GitHub? No, actually thats a site where you give/receive donations to people on Twitter/GitHub/Bitbucket
- User9812 12y ago
  Same thing here, I had no idea about this site, so I click their mission from the article. http://building.gittip.com/big-picture/mission http://building.gittip.com/big-picture/mission Well, that made it more confusing, so I click process at the bottom of the above page. Now it sounds like it's a giant pool of money, anyone can volunteer for anything, and take some of that money. So, I can say I want to keep the elderly company and go play scrabble with them in the evenings, and take $10/hr from Gittip for my time? So, I visit the site directly to see if this is accurate... https://www.gittip.com https://www.gittip.com Apparently not. Ok, now I'm suppose to enter a Twitter username? This is to donate money to Twitter users? Still confused, so I click a random profile of someone receiving money. It starts to make more sense, so these are just people marketing themselves, and asking for weekly donations. The about page confirms this... https://www.gittip.com/about/ https://www.gittip.com/about/ Far too much work to figure out what's happening here. I still have no idea what I can donate money towards. I mean, how do I browse causes? If I want to support musicians, or people cleaning up garbage on their beaches, where do I go? I can't find any type of listings, or categories here. Is this just for programmers? I need to know their Twitter/Github username, or randomly click profiles on the site? I give up, I've spent 20 minutes reading, and browsing this site, and my only conclusion is that it's a place to sponsor your favorite programmers, by giving them a weekly donation. I've been programming and freelancing for over a decade, and I can't think of anyone by name that I'd donate towards. This site gives me zero help in finding people to donate towards, aside from aimlessly browsing hundreds of profiles, hoping for someone to catch my attention. I don't have that kind of time. This entire thing is too frustrating. I don't have a Twitter, GitHub, Bitbucket, or OSM account, so they won't even let me sign-up anyway. However, they say, 'Gittip's audience is everyone; it's intended to be a mass-market consumer product.' http://building.gittip.com http://building.gittip.com Browsing the above, it looks like they spent way too much effort on over-analyzing everything. They have widgets, an API, browser extensions, but they're missing the most important thing, I working business model. It seems like the result of too many engineers and programmers in a room, while no one is spending a minute thinking about marketing, sales, or the user experience.
huehue 12y ago
Funny thing is most top earners don't even seem to code.
- buttscicles 12y ago
  Not that funny. Gittip shifted its focus solely from programmers pretty early on.
  - iodfgj 12y ago
    so its just a website for technologically capable street beggars?
chroma 12y ago
Let me preface this by saying: I want Gittip to succeed. I really want them to succeed. I would love to be able to spend my time getting paid by a community to develop open source software. However... those growth curves look linear, if not sigmoid. More importantly: >The Gittip team receives $20,339 per year (averaging the past ten weeks). There are 39 people splitting that money. $500 per person per year? That's not within two orders of magnitude of sustainability.[1] In addition, even the greatest collector of revenue on Gittip can't make a decent living from it. $40k per year is quite close to minimum wage in California. I truly wish it were otherwise, but this post makes me seriously worry about the future of Gittip. Apparently, they did not make something people want. 1. I realize that only a few people are full-time on Gittip, but that's still a huge red flag. Unless the author is being extremely generous with his profit sharing, those numbers are inexcusable.
- whit537 12y ago
  Our curve was exponential throughout 2013 and into 2014. We doubled three times, about every four or five months. We started to flatten out the past few months as we try to gather a full-time team. Because here's the thing: any other company that doubled three times in a year would go withdraw $2M from the angel network ATM and just flat-out hire a team. We've got a company structure and culture that most angels aren't ready for. E.g.: https://twitter.com/Jason/status/468570235390271489 https://twitter.com/Jason/status/468570235390271489 I call this "double-bootstrapping" in the post.
- ronaldx 12y ago
  > $40k per year is quite close to minimum wage in California. This didn't sound right, so I checked it for you: Full-time minimum wage in California is officially about to increase to $14k. Based on a 30-hour work week (ref: wikipedia definition of full-time) at $9ph (as of July 1, 2014).
  - whit537 12y ago
    Yeah, the U.S. median for singles is $30,880 (as I mention in the post). I don't know what percentile $41,500 is, but it's well above minimum wage.
pekk 12y ago
Gittip is a nice idea. But sadly, it has become a place for certain people to receive hefty monthly paychecks from anonymous patrons in exchange for incredibly aggressive and toxic trolling. Despite original intentions, this is not making an ecosystem of love and gratitude. So if its creator isn't even making money from it, it's probably better if it goes to sleep.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- tshepang 12y ago
  Do you have examples of the trolling you talk of?
  - ta140604 12y ago
    I believe he was referring to the top two receivers, Shanley [1] and Ashe[2]. These two are a part of the group of very aggressive feminists; there's no official 'group' to speak of (AFAIK), just a network of people supporting each other. Just to give a few names - Alex Gaynor (member of PSF board), Jacob Kaplan-Moss (yep, Django ex-BDFL), Coda Hale (HN/codahale, see his last messages here on HN [3], they're just about Shanley and Gittip), HN/steveklabnik, etc etc A few highlights by Shanley: "Men are rapists" [4] HN's Sam Altman reaches out to women asking what he could do; Shanley reacts: "i'm not insulting you, i'm fucking EDUCATING you. so shut the fuck up and/or pay me, preferably both." [5], while refusing to do anything for HN, not even meeting anyone in person [6] They've been either involved or voiced (shouted, actually) their support to whoever was involved in recent scandals with feminism - Adria Richards @ PyCon (I believe Alex Gaynor helped to make this event as public as possible), pronoun scandal (Alex Gaynor, again, was the author of RP that started the whole thing), Paul Graham misquote (Jacob KM speaks out [7])... I could go on. But, basically, a bunch of very aggressive people, who claim to work on solving the problems women face, but actually (IMO) are just making the whole thing worse. And, back to the subject, seeing them on top of gittip definitely doesn't help the project. Which is said, that's a great idea and I loved it when I saw it. [1] https://twitter.com/shanley https://twitter.com/shanley [2] https://twitter.com/ashedryden https://twitter.com/ashedryden [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=codahale https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=codahale [4] https://twitter.com/shanley/status/451779905475186690 https://twitter.com/shanley/status/451779905475186690 [5] https://twitter.com/shanley/status/446375139488186368 https://twitter.com/shanley/status/446375139488186368 [6] https://twitter.com/shanley/status/446376327218622464 https://twitter.com/shanley/status/446376327218622464 [7] https://twitter.com/jacobian/status/416719991963009024 https://twitter.com/jacobian/status/416719991963009024 PS Oh, this just in. Shanley on how companies can increase diversity: "Hire me to be your diversity consultant I will help you quickly close down your business to make room for better ones" https://twitter.com/shanley/status/474013765252292609 https://twitter.com/shanley/status/474013765252292609
AyKarsi 12y ago
I ran a similar site a few years back (youtipit). The biggest challenge was actually getting people to give money for things they can have for free. Looking at Chads figures, I think there definitely has been a huge change in the way people respect "free" work, and are now a lot more willing to pay for it. I hope for him (and all others in this market) that this trend continues and that more people can start making a living from free work.
- whit537 12y ago
  Thanks for the encouragement! :-) I agree that the general cultural trends are pointing in the right direction in a way they weren't a few years ago.
untilHellbanned 12y ago
Kinda shocked by all the negativity here. Gittip seems pretty successful to me. Have those telling Chad to quit really challenged themselves in their own lives like this? I highly doubt it.
ivanca 12y ago
Ok, you guys need to make some changes, and I would recommend: - Allow monthly payments, instead of only weekly: most people receive money monthly so their economy math is based on monthly periods. - The company giving the biggest amount of money is giving $1095... you should try to involve Mozilla and other big non-profits to donate, basically because giving monthly money to open-source (non-employees) devs is one of the boldest statements they can make in favor of open-source. - Create spontaneous requests, for example if someone is giving 10 dollars to some folk the app could pop up and ask if they want to give her/him a one-time gift of $20, and ask again once the next month (just remember to also show a checkbox to disable those notifications). The people is full of greed based on impulsive behavior, why not let generosity also be impulsive?
- whit537 12y ago
  Thanks for the recommendations! I've added a +1 for you to these tickets: "tip calculator" https://github.com/gittip/www.gittip.com/issues/11 https://github.com/gittip/www.gittip.com/issues/11 "reach out to companies" https://github.com/gittip/www.gittip.com/issues/1149 https://github.com/gittip/www.gittip.com/issues/1149 For the spontaneous requests idea, we would need to implement one-time gifts first: https://github.com/gittip/www.gittip.com/issues/5 https://github.com/gittip/www.gittip.com/issues/5
- PaulHoule 12y ago
  $1095 a week is over $50K a week, that's a substantial amount of money over a year.
  - tshepang 12y ago
    "$50K a week" --> "$50K a year"
sgdesign 12y ago
I've always associated Gittip with GitHub, and contributing small amounts to cool open-source projects. But from the article, it seems like its mission is much more ambitious than that. In that case, if the service wants to shed its tech-only image, maybe a rebranding is in order?
Cthulhu_ 12y ago
The thing is, there's little money in open source; the users don't have that much money to spend, the developers usually do it in their spare time or are sponsored / paid for by their developers. Paying open source developers would only become sustainable if said big companies funneled a lot of money towards gittip; tens of dollars instead of cent amounts, times dozens of companies.
jballanc 12y ago
It seems to me that Gittip is making the same mistake that Gnu/FSF have made: the most effective change comes one step at a time. Ostensibly, the primary goal of Gittip is to create an economy of Open Source work. But instead of focusing on this goal, they are also (from the article): * running a non-traditional "open" company * shunning investors not willing to work with an "open" company * only doing "open" interviews Stallman deserves much credit for starting the FSF movement, but there's a reason that Linux has succeeded where Hurd has barely even shown its face. Linus has always been a pragmatist. In the end, we have a world where software development is much more "Open" today than it was 30 years ago, but who deserves more of the credit? Stallman the zealot? or Linus the pragmatist? I love Gittip's primary mission, but I hate that they'd rather see this primary mission fail than compromise on any of a list of additional secondary goals. Regardless, I think that 5-10 years from making a decent living doing open source work will be far more feasible than it is today, but who will make that happen? Gittip? or Kickstarter/IndieGoGo/Crowdtilt/Patreon/Bountysource?
- easytiger 12y ago
  > Ostensibly, the primary goal of Gittip is to create an economy of Open Source work Which is why it will never work
- jacquesm 12y ago
  > but who deserves more of the credit? Stallman the zealot? or Linus the pragmatist? I would argue that it needed both. If Linus would have had to start by writing a C compiler or the basic set of unix utilities that Linux could be built with/on top of the project would likely not have succeeded in the way it did. Remember that we also had Bill and Lynne Jolitz' 386BSD at that time and if Linux would not have taken much of the energy out of the *BSD ecosystem we'd likely be using that on most of our servers now. The timing was right, Linus is a nice guy, penguins are cute, history is the way it is, so I won't make any attempts to revise it. But let's not overdo it either.
  - lmm 12y ago
    There's an argument that the reason Linux beat 386BSD is the pragmatic decision to make it easy to run a dual-boot system on a single-disk PC.
infruset 12y ago
I was really surprised to see they don't accept Bitcoin. I feel like it is the perfect use case and would probably help them gather some more enthusiasm from the community. However, one could also contend that Bitcoin might very well kill them..
- eswat 12y ago
  We can do payouts in Bitcoin currently, but it’s a manual process. We have an Issue on GitHub to remedy this to make it automated while making sure we do it right. Any help would be appreciated: https://github.com/gittip/www.gittip.com/issues/1960 https://github.com/gittip/www.gittip.com/issues/1960
  - infruset 12y ago
    I was thinking more along the lines of having two different kinds of gifts, dollars and bitcoins, and when someone gives bitcoins to someone else, the receiver has to accept is as bitcoins by providing an address if they want to cash it out.
- untilHellbanned 12y ago
  Completely agree. Dogecoin too. I'm surprised more crowdfunding sites don't accept crypto. Here's one that does https://onarbor.com https://onarbor.com.
po 12y ago
I would suggest one thing that may be controversial, and I hope you take it as constructive criticism: Change the name of Gittip. Maybe you've discussed this before somewhere but… The name suggests two things that I think hinder the service: - This is a service for software developers only (git) - A tip is a small amount of money in exchange for quality service There is no reason to tie yourself only to software developers. There are a lot of other places where people may want to show appreciation for each other in an open way. There is also no reason to associate yourself with tipping culture. Tipping causes many people anxiety and has power dynamics and cultural norms attached to it. Tips are supposed to be small and in exchange for service. I really think a more abstract name would allow people to connect with it better. Good luck with year three!
- luxpir 12y ago
  As a non-target-market neutral observer I have a comment on this point. What it lacks in directly relevant meaning, the name makes up for in memorability. The sound/rhyme/rhythm, simple length, inference (devs/money) are all well thought out enough to encourage further investigation. It's true that tipping culture varies widely around the world, but if visitors are aware of how tipping culture works in the States then the name's function is fulfilled. Many tips can indeed add up to a living in many places, even in the States, and making a reference to tipping culture can also reflect the humble requirements of OSS developers who have by definition not opted to work on OSS projects for the money. Seems sensible enough from that point of view.
- whit537 12y ago
  Thanks for the feedback! We actually had a loooong bikeshed on this a month into Gittip. Here's the thread: https://github.com/gittip/www.gittip.com/issues/138 https://github.com/gittip/www.gittip.com/issues/138 Maybe someday we'll rebrand, but that would be a fair bit of work at this point and would distract us from more pressing concerns such as better discoverability and usability.
  - luxpir 12y ago
    While I suspect the name isn't the most important thing to be spending time on at this point, it is good fun. 'Opengrant' was a good suggestion from that thread not only because of its 'monetary grant giving' meaning but also its original permission-giving roots: "With these resources I hereby grant you the ability to work on this for the betterment and embiggening of my interests". On an even lighter note, 'adoptadev' seems pretty open for the taking...
jacquesm 12y ago
These are the hardest. See, when a company or project is dead on arrival there is not much to do, you bury it, do a post-mortem and move on. If a company is successful then you ride the wave as far and as long as your stamina will let you and then you hopefully pocket a nice chunk of cash. But when you're in the middle, too big to die, too small to succeed it gets very hard. Killing it off feels completely wrong, pushing it feels like you are adding to the opportunity cost with a relatively small chance chance of eventual success. It's a very practical illustration of the sunk-cost fallacy in all its gruesome glory. Personally I hope that gittip will continue to grow and that the team will stick with it. They serve a very important role, pioneers in uncharted territory. And even if a lot of those pioneers ended up dead in creeks with arrows in their backs they pointed the way, showed what works and what does not. And they still have a sufficiently large shot at success if they stick with it. But if they'd pull the plug I would not fault them. Let's hope there will be a 3rd instalment of this article, where gittip grew steadily for the 3rd year in a row and it became profitable. That would be the best way to see this go.
- whit537 12y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGFXGwHsD_A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGFXGwHsD_A :D
xur17 12y ago
I think someone else mentioned this idea, but I can't find it anymore. I wish there was some way to donate to a group of people that was automatically managed by you guys (or crowd-sourced if you can make that work). I wouldn't mind giving a little bit each month, but I don't really feel like searching for specific users that do work I want to support, and then checking back every few months to make sure they still are. Also, it would be a lot more meaningful to see a list of groups on the homepage rather than people that I have mostly never heard of.
- whit537 12y ago
  Thanks for the feedback! Did you open https://github.com/gittip/www.gittip.com/issues/2455 https://github.com/gittip/www.gittip.com/issues/2455? It sounds similar. :-) I've added your homepage comment with a +1 to https://github.com/gittip/www.gittip.com/issues/1074 https://github.com/gittip/www.gittip.com/issues/1074, and your other comments to https://github.com/gittip/www.gittip.com/issues/1493 https://github.com/gittip/www.gittip.com/issues/1493.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
freyfogle 12y ago
There's been a push in the perl community to start using gittip, and I think it's a great thing. So please do keep up the great work. My company (Nestoria) just started a "module of the month". Each month the dev team picks someone whose code we use and via gittip we'll donate $1/week for a year to that person. That's not a fortune obviously, but our hope is that others - individuals and companies - follow our lead, and in many cases it will be obscure modules that don't otherwise get a lot of attention. http://devblog.nestoria.com/post/86216883403/module-of-the-month-may-2014-test-more http://devblog.nestoria.com/post/86216883403/module-of-the-m...
- whit537 12y ago
  Awesome! Thanks for using Gittip! :D
  - freyfogle 12y ago
    Agree it is awesome (I had no part in coming up with the idea). Feel free to use us as a case study.
teawithcarl 12y ago
I love Gittip, and believe deeply in their philosophy goal. I visited their hackathon Jan 2nd-4th, in Ambridge, PA. Great team ... hard working, talented. Chad is a superb full-stack engineer, and completely sincere in his honorable goals. I believe he and the team will succeed. And when they do, since it's bootstrapped, it will not be owned by investors. Gittip is truly a new and deep way of thinking.
- whit537 12y ago
  Thanks for the support, Carl! Loved having you here! :D
rdegges 12y ago
I've been using Gittip since practically day 1. I really love the system, and always feel happy knowing Chad is the one leading it! If you haven't met Chad before -- you should. He's one of the nicest, most genuine people I've had the pleasure of meeting! Best of luck with Gittip moving forward! <3
- whit537 12y ago
  Thanks rdegges! The feeling is mutual! :D
ianbicking 12y ago
One thing that I think Gittip is going to require is that people actually ask to receive donations. I'm guessing that the people who are doing best through Gittip do just that. It's a voluntary gift-oriented community, but that shouldn't get in the way of asking. Chad: one thing I will note is that, though you are very open in the article about what you are making, and clearly you want more gifts to sustain yourself and gittip, you don't actually ask. For gittip to succede you don't just need a volume of people, you need a volume of people who are actively asking other people to participate. And you should start with yourself! For gittip that plea can take different forms. Well-funded groups can ask for tips that they redistribute. People doing small projects on the side can still calculate out their expenses (my expenses are just a few domain names, but they aren't free) and can ask for exactly that modest goal. In a sense you want to teach people how to ask, and you want to normalize these pleas, which is best done through demonstration.
- whit537 12y ago
  You may be right. Certainly, "asking" has been a success factor for people using Gittip, which is fine. For myself, I like not overtly asking for money too much, because then the gifts I do receive feel that much more genuine. :-) What if instead of normalizing asking (pull), we normalized generosity (push)?
  - ianbicking 12y ago
    I know asking is hard, and uncomfortable, but I feel like you are coming up with excuses to avoid the hard and uncomfortable thing. But I also suspect you know you have to do uncomfortable things to make this succeed. Asking/pulling extends the network, pushing does not. Certainly you aren't the only one reluctant to ask, but I think there's room to experiment with creative ways to ask, ones that will feel more authentic to you. Also I'm going to pull out the Lesson In Humility card.
cvburgess 12y ago
For anyone wanting to donate to Gittip itself: https://www.gittip.com/Gittip/ https://www.gittip.com/Gittip/
- whit537 12y ago
  Thank you. :-)
webwright 12y ago
Inspiring service (once I figured out what the heck the post was talking about and managed to make sense of the home page). This post and the site's homepage scream for the attention of a person who has a head for marketing. I think Patreon is winning because the people leading the charge care most about solving the problem (connecting patrons to creators). Gittip, while they are also clearly passionate about solving the problem, seems to have a big chunk of their passion/attention aimed at HOW they solve the problem (the whole site/process seems to be open-sourced: http://building.gittip.com/ http://building.gittip.com/). What they're creating is really a consumer-facing product/service. Are there any/many examples of consumer-facing OSS stuff that's better than the standard path of "find/hire amazing devs/designers/marketeers who love what you're building and pay them to kick ass?"
- whit537 12y ago
  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/ http://thechangelog.com/open-products/.
  - webwright 12y ago
    You should read: http://blog.eladgil.com/2012/10/startups-miracles.html 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.
    - whit537 12y ago
      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?
rgbrgb 12y ago
I just signed up. What's the easiest way for me to put a gittip badge in a Readme.md on Github? I'd recommend putting that front and center unless I missed it.
- whit537 12y ago
  Awesome, thanks! :D See http://shields.io/ http://shields.io/ for README badge. I've added a +1 for you to https://github.com/gittip/www.gittip.com/issues/1145 https://github.com/gittip/www.gittip.com/issues/1145.
verelo 12y ago
Lets say i have a serious problem i need solved and i see gittip as a great way to encourage someone to do. How do i go from this homepage to giving my money to the person who will solve it? Or is this just for the case where someone has already done great work, and i want them to continue it (literally a tip)?
- tshepang 12y ago
  More the latter than the former. There are more suitable tools for the former, e.g. Paypal.
joeyh 12y ago
This reminds me that I have a small amount of tips on gittip. However, I can only withdraw it by adding a bank account. Security concerns make this not appealing, at least not at the current level of funds. The cost/benefit is not there for me. And so I've not yet really made money on gittip, which doesn't give me much incentive to promote it. (Beyond thinking the open company idea is pretty cool. But that also means I value their time, so I'm not seeing the cost/benefit on emailing them for a manual bitcoin withdrawal, either..) On the other hand, flattr at least lets me withdraw money using paypal.. Or they have so far. They seem to be possibly moving to european bank account only, which will kill it for me.
- greatbigtable 12y ago
  Add Paypal withdraw support. People don't like having to spread their account information all over the place. Leverage what they already have access to in their lives; note the proliferation of Twitter and Facebook logins all over the web.
  - canvia 12y ago
    Cryptocoin would be a nice option as well.
morgante 12y ago
Maybe I'm confused about the mission of Gittip, but I always thought it was (based on the name) supposed to support valuable open source work. Given this, it seems sad that the leaderboard prominently features people whose contributions are definitely not made in the form of git commits.

263 points by tshepang 12y ago

I love Gittip. I don't love the homepage. When I visit the homepage, I see "Sustainable crowdfunding: inspiring generosity", followed by a call to action input asking me to enter someone's username, and finally three groups of lists of people. None of these things mean anything to me if I'm new to Gittip. The headline at the top describes your company mission statement, not what the product does. Instead of telling me the abstract of what Gittip is about, it should tell me the benefit of using your product. For instance, "Support your favourite people by automatically donating to them weekly." Skip the generosity, sustainability, and crowdfunding mentions for now. Put them behind the About link, which I might click if I'm interested in learning more about how and why you're doing this (I'm probably not). The call to action input doesn't help me much. It's asking me to enter someone's name off the top of my head, and it's using a very vague label ("who inspires you?") to do so. I would scrap this approach and instead provide a way to sign up to Gittip with a call to action that ties back in to the headline. So you want to donate to people you like? Step 1: sign up for an account. Step 2: add people from your Twitter, Github, Facebook, etc. Step 3: Look through the list of people (Gittip should use some magic to prioritise the people by likelihood of my wanting to support them, such as looking at how close they are to me on Facebook, or how many followers/stars they have on Github and how many of their projects I've starred) and select up to 3 that I like. Done! Step 4: Decide to give someone something minimal (say, $0.25) per week by entering my credit card details. If I choose not to do that, at leat I made a profile on the site, got familiar with how it works, taught you a bit about who I am and where I came from, and you can maybe email me later and remind me if someone I have in my friends list did something interesting (like published a new project, blog post, insightful tweet, etc) The list of people at the bottom of the homepage is boring. It's not contextual to the goals of the homepage, which are converting users to understanding Gittip and wanting to join in. Right now you show me static lists of new users, top givers, and top receivers. I don't really care about new users other than as proof that this site isn't dead, so you can reduce their importance right off the bat. Top givers and receivers aren't relevant to me unless you tell me what they're giving or receiving. So I would reformat these lists: andyet gives x per week to a, b, c, and more. ashedryden receives x per week from a, b, c and more. I need to understand that Gittip is about creating a direct personal relationship between people giving money and receiving money. Right now, these lists don't imply any kind of relationship. I also think you need to revise the name. I know you've decided that "Gittip" is just a new word and shouldn't be understood as a portmanteau of git and tip, but it's a terrible, hard to remember, hard to spell word. "Giddip? So with a D?" "No, with two T's" "The heck does that mean?" "I dunno, it's just some weird word" -- you're missing the opportunity to give the product a memorable, clear, unique name that either represents your product as it stands apart from competition, or is memorable and quirky enough that it just sticks. Patreon got it right: it evokes "patron" but it's slightly different, so you can intuitively guess what it's about and still remember the brand itself. I recommend reading the book Seductive Interaction Design by Stephen Anderson: http://www.amazon.com/Seductive-Interaction-Design-Effective-Experiences/dp/0321725522 http://www.amazon.com/Seductive-Interaction-Design-Effective... - it will help you combine your existing ability to reason about the product with some basic psychology and mental modeling that will allow you to word things in such a way that the benefit is more clearly communicated and you're speaking to the user instead of rambling about the company vision to nobody in particular. Good luck with Gittip in year 3. I'll be watching - and giving :)

whit537 12y ago
Thanks! Awesome feedback, especially on the homepage! I've added your comments with a +1 to https://github.com/gittip/www.gittip.com/issues/1074 https://github.com/gittip/www.gittip.com/issues/1074. Re: the name, that's mentioned a couple other places on this thread. Do you think it's important enough to focus on in the next year? Do you think it's the crucial missing link to making Gittip itself sustainable? Or is that something we tackle once we've demonstrated that we can actually keep the lights on indefinitely? Thanks for the book recommendation. I've ordered it. > Good luck with Gittip in year 3. I'll be watching - and giving :) Thank you! :D
- primigenus 12y ago
  As with any major public facing change, do it sooner rather than later, because the later it is, the more people will know you as "Gittip", so the cost of the change will be larger. Sit down with 2-3 people (including someone not in the Gittip loop!) this weekend and list all of the nouns and verbs that you associate with Gittip's mission, its market, what users do on Gittip, and what people achieve through Gittip. Then pick one of those. Register the domain. If it's taken, use 37signals' approach of appending "app", "hq" or some other unique identifier to it. It will only take up as much of your time as you allow it to.
  - whit537 12y ago
    But is it holding us back from reaching sustainability for Gittip itself?
    - nuetrino 12y ago
      I've been following Gittip's progress for a while, as a student funding someone through this isnt a priority for myself to be honest, I've started working now though so I'll have no excuses! Though I think the name means nothing to people outside of tech. I guess the decision to change the name depends on whether you're targeting nontechnical people who appreciate a developer's work.
    - 12y ago

norswap 12y ago

I wonder why Patreon took off and not Gittip. Personally I've heard more about Gittip than Patreon, which I only encountered recently, being used by some YouTube channel for sustenance. Maybe that's precisely the kind of market which Gittip should focus on.

whit537 12y ago
Patreon took off because a) they've got domain expertise w/ YouTube in one co-founder, and b) they've got business expertise in the other co-founder. Re: YouTube. When your friends are YouTube micro-celebs, who are good at marketing themselves by definition, you're going to have an easier time getting a network effect going around a platform that depends on marketing oneself, than when your friends are open-source programmers, who as a rule are not good at marketing themselves. Re: Business. They identified a market need and are executing by the book. They built a prototype, with a standard skimming business model, raised some money, hired a team, danced with the tech press, and here we are. Here's where we tried approaching content creators: https://github.com/gittip/www.gittip.com/issues/737 https://github.com/gittip/www.gittip.com/issues/737. I actually did a call with Jack and others right when Patreon launched. Key point he made is that content creators get pitches from companies all the time, so already being in that scene is a huge advantage. http://blog.gittip.com/post/51236581424/open-call-with-centup-flattr-and-patreon http://blog.gittip.com/post/51236581424/open-call-with-centu...
peterjancelis 12y ago
Patreon's team is just right: Technical co-founder who built the site himself, business co-founder who is a YouTube artist and has a lot of friends in those circles. I even think they met as college room mates, typical story VC's like (they are funded).

rb2k_ 12y ago

While the discussion is mostly about Gittip vs Patreon, I never quite understood why they could grow despite flattr(.com) being around since 2010. I like flattr's model of having 1 fixed monthly donation that gets split among all of a user's flattr clicks from this month. It somehow removes a true monetary value from a click and allows to spread them more freely. For whatever reason, it's pretty big in the German podcasting community.

nbouscal 12y ago
Gittip and Flattr have fundamentally different models and focuses. Perhaps ironically, Flattr is more focused on tipping. It's about signaling one-time appreciation for a specific piece of work (an article, a video, etc). Gittip, on the other hand, is about providing a sustainable income for a person, hence the subscription giving model. Also worth mentioning that all of these companies (Gittip, Flattr, Patreon, others) seem to be on exceptionally good terms with each other, which is really nice to see.

alexandros 12y ago

I guess the issue being raised here by many is this: You need to justify why the non-standard moves you've made are necessary for you to achieve your mission. If there is a story, it's not coming out. If they're not necessary, then your mission doesn't align with your actions. Perhaps your true mission is 'make all our dreams come true at the same time' but you have to be conscious of the fact that the conditional probability of everything working just right at the same time is orders of magnitude smaller than something like gittip being executed with better understood tools and structures.

whit537 12y ago
> you have to be conscious of the fact that the conditional probability of everything working just right at the same time is orders of magnitude smaller than something like gittip being executed with better understood tools and structures. Sure, that's why I'm encouraged that Gittip has grown as well as it has! We paid out $41,000 our first year. We paid out $300,000 our second year. The best justification I can offer will be a strong year three. ;-)

pessimizer 12y ago

I have a few criticisms of Gittip, with the caveat that I'm largely criticizing you for not being something else that I want, rather than for not doing a good job at the thing that you're currently doing. 1) Is there some sort of legal reason that Gittip doesn't want to manage all of my non-profit giving? 2) What's with the focus on programming? The programming community is tiny, and will be better off piggybacking on the larger culture rather than trying to create one of our own. Why not focus on supporting free culture writ large, like musicians, writers, artists, and charities? 3) The reason my own donation is shitty is because I have to figure out who to donate to and how to donate to them, and then I end up having to maintain as many channels for cash as I have things to donate to. Can't you just offer me curated funds where percentages of my monthly tithe go to a range of things that are often supported together, and you guys just keep it updated? 4) The greatest sin that gittip commits in my opinion is not being donator focused. It seems to be a platform for people to get money donated to them, rather than a platform to manage my donations, as a person who has money. OK: I hope this isn't too incoherent, because I'm a bit busy; my bottom line is that I want to donate $10K - $20K a year, like many people I'm sure, and if you can help me with that problem, that's where success lies. Right now, it seems like you primarily help marginal people receive money instead of helping me give it. I want to give to 100 software projects that I know about, and 200 that I don't. I want to give to 10 charities that I know about, and 20 that I don't. I want to give to them whether or not they're aware of gittip. I don't want to be Joan Kroc giving all of her money to NPR because she didn't know of the myriad of other companies that make up public radio. I don't want to spend more than an hour a year on it. Can you help me?

zheshishei 12y ago
Something like a donation dashboard might solve your problem? They could let the donor set an optional maximum monthly contribution. Of that maximum contribution, the donor could set how much of it goes to each tip. The giving page seems like a good place to put such a thing. As for tipping a charitable organisation that might not be on gittip, perhaps setting up proxy accounts where the monthly tip is donated by gittip would work. Of course, this would be susceptible to a social engineering attack where a scammer could fraudulently claim to represent the organisation and ask for control of the account.

mholt 12y ago

I ended up using my own badges from shields.io because the widgets generated for me say "I receive $null from GitTip." And the buttons don't say anything useful: People don't know what "Gittip" is by itself, and "3.00" (actually, for me, they say "NaN") doesn't mean anything either. I made a badge on shields that says "tips|accepted" because I 1) wouldn't want people to know how much I'm making on Gittip and 2) don't care how they donate, really. But I like the idea of Gittip and hope it continues and grows. I'd love to see actual stories of donors/receivers there, too.

whit537 12y ago
Did you know that Gittip and Shields are in cahoots? :-) http://blog.gittip.com/post/59396458675/gittip-has-acquired-shields http://blog.gittip.com/post/59396458675/gittip-has-acquired-... Re: stories, I've added a +1 for you to https://github.com/gittip/www.gittip.com/issues/1074 https://github.com/gittip/www.gittip.com/issues/1074.

iodfgj 12y ago

I think gittip had the potential to become something great and yea, sure, you've had a substantial increase in traffic since last year but an increase in traffic does not mean an increase in quality. I've been looking over at gittip for a while now and saw it was doing good things for good open source developers but your homepage shows the problem. The top 2 money recipients are 2 feminists which have never seen a line of code in their lives (one of them doesn't even have a github account!). This got me really confused as to what the objective of the website really is since apparently anyone can signup and receive cash without working for it. So that's why I don't use the website to receive or to give. I think its kind of insulting for the developers that actually do something for the community.

whit537 12y ago
Gittip is a site for multiple communities, not one single community, so I take it as a sign of strength that we do in fact have multiple communities using Gittip now. Think along the lines of PayPal or Twitter: they are a big tent. I've added a +1 for you to https://github.com/gittip/www.gittip.com/issues/1074 https://github.com/gittip/www.gittip.com/issues/1074, because you're right that the homepage currently conflates the different communities that are using Gittip.
- lucisferre 12y ago
  Don't feed the trolls.
maco 12y ago
> The top 2 money recipients are 2 feminists which have never seen a line of code in their lives (one of them doesn't even have a github account!). Ashe and Shanley? Ashe is a programmer, and Shanley was working as a programmer until she founded a media startup. I do find the hangup people have on GitHub in particular weird, though. I have very little code on public GitHub repositories. Why? KDE, GNOME, and Ubuntu all have their own code hosting. I spent years working almost exclusively on projects that were large enough to have their own server farm. And then, of course, there's Sourceforge.
12y ago

jimmytidey 12y ago

It's an incredibly admirable thing to be doing.

ronilan 12y ago
It is. But it is also the wrong thing to be doing. "Gittip’s mission is to enable an economy of gratitude, generosity, and love". In order to affect such a thing one needs leverage. That is, one needs a lever and a place to stand on. If two years in and after several times at the top of HN, Chad still can't make a living - then he has neither. The mission will fail. It is better to let go. Just my own meandering experience.
- whit537 12y ago
  Taking three to five years to reach profitability is normal. In the mean time, we paid out $300,000 in no-strings-attached gifts this past year. That does not feel to me like the wrong thing to be doing. :-)
  - ronilan 12y ago
    Chad, the passion and effort you've put into your project are clear. I hope it will eventually become beneficial to you, if not directly, then down the road through the doors it must have opened to you. That being said, I think I'm not the only one who would have advised you to let go of something that is half dead (edit: meaning "vegetative" by comparable standards). Also, wouldn't the mission be better served as a project at github rather than a profit seeking enterprise? Wouldn't Reddit gifts arrangement be the right model? After all once you put a link at the place where people go magic is possible. Just something to think about. Sunk cost is tricky but it is never too late to make the right decision. Ok. Almost never....
    - whit537 12y ago
      We paid out $41,000 in our first year, and $300,000 in our second. How is something that just grew 632% half-dead?

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

SingAlong 12y ago

I feel an emotional attachment towards Gittip. Here's my story: This is my GitHub profile https://github.com/HashNuke https://github.com/HashNuke and this is my Gittip profile https://www.gittip.com/HashNuke/ https://www.gittip.com/HashNuke/ I've been writing opensource software full-time for the past few months. A few weeks ago, I checked my Gittip profile out of curiosity. I found out someone was anonymously giving me $0.5/wk, for the last 4 weeks. I had $2 as my balance. I was in tears when I saw that. I felt that mattered. Someone cared about my work. I'm excited that in a few weeks it can pay for the domain name for my next opensource project. Thanks to Chad, the Gittip team and the community. I hope Gittip works out well for them financially to sustain themselves and do more.

whit537 12y ago
That is super awesome and encouraging to read. Thanks SingAlong/HashNuke! Keep up the good work! :D
- gedrap 12y ago
  And maybe a story for homepage? ;) It's surely more engaging than a list of new users (which, honestly, I don't care and don't think anyone cares outside 'getting on HN front page got him X sign ups'). Although... I am quite curious how this post will affect your metrics e.g. a month down the line ;) And, yes, please, change your name. I found it misleading (I thought it's something like dogecoin tips on reddit, just for github) and hard to remember for people who don't know git. Other that that, you're awesome! Keep it going :)
  - whit537 12y ago
    Thanks for the feedback! The reason we have leaderboards on the homepage in the first place is to quickly answer the question, "Is anyone actually making a living here?" I looked at Flattr and could not for the life of me answer that question. Now that the matter is established, I agree that it's time to change the homepage. I've added a +1 for you to https://github.com/gittip/www.gittip.com/issues/1074 https://github.com/gittip/www.gittip.com/issues/1074. Re: Stories, see http://tomslee.net/2014/01/airbnb-stories.html http://tomslee.net/2014/01/airbnb-stories.html for a counterargument.

gw 12y ago

I've been using Gittip for my free software projects, and while I am nowhere near being sustainable, it's more than I expected to get. There is certainly room for two players (see Kickstarter/Indiegogo), and I much prefer Gittip's minimalism and lack of flare.

KJasper 12y ago

I've never heard of Gittip nor Patreon before reading this article. Looking at both websites the website for Patreon is much more engaging and less cluttered. Gittip looks intimidating with all those small pictures and numbers going around. A good redesign for the index would propel the business more than all those commits. Love both ideas though :)

yitchelle 12y ago
I kinda agree with you here. I have not heard of Gittip either before this post came on HN. So I visited it, and upon seeing the front page, I immediately thought that this is like a competition where the rankings of the highest givers and highers receivers were showcased. I think that the site should show something that tipping the projects is a good idea. (Shooting from my hip here) maybe they should pick out a couple of projects and show how the tipping has benefitted the project?
- KJasper 12y ago
  I agree with you about the competition bit. I immediately thought: "Oh how surprising the cute girl is in second position" (I dont have a clue who shanley is). So focusing more on how they make a difference instead of a silly selfie would be a good first step indeed.
  - whit537 12y ago
    Thanks for the feedback! :-) I've added +1s for the ~~three~~ two of you to https://github.com/gittip/www.gittip.com/issues/1074 https://github.com/gittip/www.gittip.com/issues/1074.
  - rescripting 12y ago
    A bit OT, but "Oh how surprising the cute girl is in second position" is casual sexism and really dismissive. Read her statement on gettip for some extra irony.

jve 12y ago

Took me some looking around to find a link on bottom of the (gittip.com) page to actually find out what gittip does. First thought was - is it a way to get paid by submitting patches through GitHub? No, actually thats a site where you give/receive donations to people on Twitter/GitHub/Bitbucket

User9812 12y ago
Same thing here, I had no idea about this site, so I click their mission from the article. http://building.gittip.com/big-picture/mission http://building.gittip.com/big-picture/mission Well, that made it more confusing, so I click process at the bottom of the above page. Now it sounds like it's a giant pool of money, anyone can volunteer for anything, and take some of that money. So, I can say I want to keep the elderly company and go play scrabble with them in the evenings, and take $10/hr from Gittip for my time? So, I visit the site directly to see if this is accurate... https://www.gittip.com https://www.gittip.com Apparently not. Ok, now I'm suppose to enter a Twitter username? This is to donate money to Twitter users? Still confused, so I click a random profile of someone receiving money. It starts to make more sense, so these are just people marketing themselves, and asking for weekly donations. The about page confirms this... https://www.gittip.com/about/ https://www.gittip.com/about/ Far too much work to figure out what's happening here. I still have no idea what I can donate money towards. I mean, how do I browse causes? If I want to support musicians, or people cleaning up garbage on their beaches, where do I go? I can't find any type of listings, or categories here. Is this just for programmers? I need to know their Twitter/Github username, or randomly click profiles on the site? I give up, I've spent 20 minutes reading, and browsing this site, and my only conclusion is that it's a place to sponsor your favorite programmers, by giving them a weekly donation. I've been programming and freelancing for over a decade, and I can't think of anyone by name that I'd donate towards. This site gives me zero help in finding people to donate towards, aside from aimlessly browsing hundreds of profiles, hoping for someone to catch my attention. I don't have that kind of time. This entire thing is too frustrating. I don't have a Twitter, GitHub, Bitbucket, or OSM account, so they won't even let me sign-up anyway. However, they say, 'Gittip's audience is everyone; it's intended to be a mass-market consumer product.' http://building.gittip.com http://building.gittip.com Browsing the above, it looks like they spent way too much effort on over-analyzing everything. They have widgets, an API, browser extensions, but they're missing the most important thing, I working business model. It seems like the result of too many engineers and programmers in a room, while no one is spending a minute thinking about marketing, sales, or the user experience.

huehue 12y ago

Funny thing is most top earners don't even seem to code.

buttscicles 12y ago
Not that funny. Gittip shifted its focus solely from programmers pretty early on.
- iodfgj 12y ago
  so its just a website for technologically capable street beggars?

chroma 12y ago

Let me preface this by saying: I want Gittip to succeed. I really want them to succeed. I would love to be able to spend my time getting paid by a community to develop open source software. However... those growth curves look linear, if not sigmoid. More importantly: >The Gittip team receives $20,339 per year (averaging the past ten weeks). There are 39 people splitting that money. $500 per person per year? That's not within two orders of magnitude of sustainability.[1] In addition, even the greatest collector of revenue on Gittip can't make a decent living from it. $40k per year is quite close to minimum wage in California. I truly wish it were otherwise, but this post makes me seriously worry about the future of Gittip. Apparently, they did not make something people want. 1. I realize that only a few people are full-time on Gittip, but that's still a huge red flag. Unless the author is being extremely generous with his profit sharing, those numbers are inexcusable.

whit537 12y ago
Our curve was exponential throughout 2013 and into 2014. We doubled three times, about every four or five months. We started to flatten out the past few months as we try to gather a full-time team. Because here's the thing: any other company that doubled three times in a year would go withdraw $2M from the angel network ATM and just flat-out hire a team. We've got a company structure and culture that most angels aren't ready for. E.g.: https://twitter.com/Jason/status/468570235390271489 https://twitter.com/Jason/status/468570235390271489 I call this "double-bootstrapping" in the post.
ronaldx 12y ago
> $40k per year is quite close to minimum wage in California. This didn't sound right, so I checked it for you: Full-time minimum wage in California is officially about to increase to $14k. Based on a 30-hour work week (ref: wikipedia definition of full-time) at $9ph (as of July 1, 2014).
- whit537 12y ago
  Yeah, the U.S. median for singles is $30,880 (as I mention in the post). I don't know what percentile $41,500 is, but it's well above minimum wage.

pekk 12y ago

Gittip is a nice idea. But sadly, it has become a place for certain people to receive hefty monthly paychecks from anonymous patrons in exchange for incredibly aggressive and toxic trolling. Despite original intentions, this is not making an ecosystem of love and gratitude. So if its creator isn't even making money from it, it's probably better if it goes to sleep.

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
tshepang 12y ago
Do you have examples of the trolling you talk of?
- ta140604 12y ago
  I believe he was referring to the top two receivers, Shanley [1] and Ashe[2]. These two are a part of the group of very aggressive feminists; there's no official 'group' to speak of (AFAIK), just a network of people supporting each other. Just to give a few names - Alex Gaynor (member of PSF board), Jacob Kaplan-Moss (yep, Django ex-BDFL), Coda Hale (HN/codahale, see his last messages here on HN [3], they're just about Shanley and Gittip), HN/steveklabnik, etc etc A few highlights by Shanley: "Men are rapists" [4] HN's Sam Altman reaches out to women asking what he could do; Shanley reacts: "i'm not insulting you, i'm fucking EDUCATING you. so shut the fuck up and/or pay me, preferably both." [5], while refusing to do anything for HN, not even meeting anyone in person [6] They've been either involved or voiced (shouted, actually) their support to whoever was involved in recent scandals with feminism - Adria Richards @ PyCon (I believe Alex Gaynor helped to make this event as public as possible), pronoun scandal (Alex Gaynor, again, was the author of RP that started the whole thing), Paul Graham misquote (Jacob KM speaks out [7])... I could go on. But, basically, a bunch of very aggressive people, who claim to work on solving the problems women face, but actually (IMO) are just making the whole thing worse. And, back to the subject, seeing them on top of gittip definitely doesn't help the project. Which is said, that's a great idea and I loved it when I saw it. [1] https://twitter.com/shanley https://twitter.com/shanley [2] https://twitter.com/ashedryden https://twitter.com/ashedryden [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=codahale https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=codahale [4] https://twitter.com/shanley/status/451779905475186690 https://twitter.com/shanley/status/451779905475186690 [5] https://twitter.com/shanley/status/446375139488186368 https://twitter.com/shanley/status/446375139488186368 [6] https://twitter.com/shanley/status/446376327218622464 https://twitter.com/shanley/status/446376327218622464 [7] https://twitter.com/jacobian/status/416719991963009024 https://twitter.com/jacobian/status/416719991963009024 PS Oh, this just in. Shanley on how companies can increase diversity: "Hire me to be your diversity consultant I will help you quickly close down your business to make room for better ones" https://twitter.com/shanley/status/474013765252292609 https://twitter.com/shanley/status/474013765252292609

AyKarsi 12y ago

I ran a similar site a few years back (youtipit). The biggest challenge was actually getting people to give money for things they can have for free. Looking at Chads figures, I think there definitely has been a huge change in the way people respect "free" work, and are now a lot more willing to pay for it. I hope for him (and all others in this market) that this trend continues and that more people can start making a living from free work.

whit537 12y ago
Thanks for the encouragement! :-) I agree that the general cultural trends are pointing in the right direction in a way they weren't a few years ago.

untilHellbanned 12y ago

Kinda shocked by all the negativity here. Gittip seems pretty successful to me. Have those telling Chad to quit really challenged themselves in their own lives like this? I highly doubt it.

ivanca 12y ago

Ok, you guys need to make some changes, and I would recommend: - Allow monthly payments, instead of only weekly: most people receive money monthly so their economy math is based on monthly periods. - The company giving the biggest amount of money is giving $1095... you should try to involve Mozilla and other big non-profits to donate, basically because giving monthly money to open-source (non-employees) devs is one of the boldest statements they can make in favor of open-source. - Create spontaneous requests, for example if someone is giving 10 dollars to some folk the app could pop up and ask if they want to give her/him a one-time gift of $20, and ask again once the next month (just remember to also show a checkbox to disable those notifications). The people is full of greed based on impulsive behavior, why not let generosity also be impulsive?

whit537 12y ago
Thanks for the recommendations! I've added a +1 for you to these tickets: "tip calculator" https://github.com/gittip/www.gittip.com/issues/11 https://github.com/gittip/www.gittip.com/issues/11 "reach out to companies" https://github.com/gittip/www.gittip.com/issues/1149 https://github.com/gittip/www.gittip.com/issues/1149 For the spontaneous requests idea, we would need to implement one-time gifts first: https://github.com/gittip/www.gittip.com/issues/5 https://github.com/gittip/www.gittip.com/issues/5
PaulHoule 12y ago
$1095 a week is over $50K a week, that's a substantial amount of money over a year.
- tshepang 12y ago
  "$50K a week" --> "$50K a year"

sgdesign 12y ago

I've always associated Gittip with GitHub, and contributing small amounts to cool open-source projects. But from the article, it seems like its mission is much more ambitious than that. In that case, if the service wants to shed its tech-only image, maybe a rebranding is in order?

Cthulhu_ 12y ago

The thing is, there's little money in open source; the users don't have that much money to spend, the developers usually do it in their spare time or are sponsored / paid for by their developers. Paying open source developers would only become sustainable if said big companies funneled a lot of money towards gittip; tens of dollars instead of cent amounts, times dozens of companies.

jballanc 12y ago

It seems to me that Gittip is making the same mistake that Gnu/FSF have made: the most effective change comes one step at a time. Ostensibly, the primary goal of Gittip is to create an economy of Open Source work. But instead of focusing on this goal, they are also (from the article): * running a non-traditional "open" company * shunning investors not willing to work with an "open" company * only doing "open" interviews Stallman deserves much credit for starting the FSF movement, but there's a reason that Linux has succeeded where Hurd has barely even shown its face. Linus has always been a pragmatist. In the end, we have a world where software development is much more "Open" today than it was 30 years ago, but who deserves more of the credit? Stallman the zealot? or Linus the pragmatist? I love Gittip's primary mission, but I hate that they'd rather see this primary mission fail than compromise on any of a list of additional secondary goals. Regardless, I think that 5-10 years from making a decent living doing open source work will be far more feasible than it is today, but who will make that happen? Gittip? or Kickstarter/IndieGoGo/Crowdtilt/Patreon/Bountysource?

easytiger 12y ago
> Ostensibly, the primary goal of Gittip is to create an economy of Open Source work Which is why it will never work
jacquesm 12y ago
> but who deserves more of the credit? Stallman the zealot? or Linus the pragmatist? I would argue that it needed both. If Linus would have had to start by writing a C compiler or the basic set of unix utilities that Linux could be built with/on top of the project would likely not have succeeded in the way it did. Remember that we also had Bill and Lynne Jolitz' 386BSD at that time and if Linux would not have taken much of the energy out of the *BSD ecosystem we'd likely be using that on most of our servers now. The timing was right, Linus is a nice guy, penguins are cute, history is the way it is, so I won't make any attempts to revise it. But let's not overdo it either.
- lmm 12y ago
  There's an argument that the reason Linux beat 386BSD is the pragmatic decision to make it easy to run a dual-boot system on a single-disk PC.

infruset 12y ago

I was really surprised to see they don't accept Bitcoin. I feel like it is the perfect use case and would probably help them gather some more enthusiasm from the community. However, one could also contend that Bitcoin might very well kill them..

eswat 12y ago
We can do payouts in Bitcoin currently, but it’s a manual process. We have an Issue on GitHub to remedy this to make it automated while making sure we do it right. Any help would be appreciated: https://github.com/gittip/www.gittip.com/issues/1960 https://github.com/gittip/www.gittip.com/issues/1960
- infruset 12y ago
  I was thinking more along the lines of having two different kinds of gifts, dollars and bitcoins, and when someone gives bitcoins to someone else, the receiver has to accept is as bitcoins by providing an address if they want to cash it out.
untilHellbanned 12y ago
Completely agree. Dogecoin too. I'm surprised more crowdfunding sites don't accept crypto. Here's one that does https://onarbor.com https://onarbor.com.

po 12y ago

I would suggest one thing that may be controversial, and I hope you take it as constructive criticism: Change the name of Gittip. Maybe you've discussed this before somewhere but… The name suggests two things that I think hinder the service: - This is a service for software developers only (git) - A tip is a small amount of money in exchange for quality service There is no reason to tie yourself only to software developers. There are a lot of other places where people may want to show appreciation for each other in an open way. There is also no reason to associate yourself with tipping culture. Tipping causes many people anxiety and has power dynamics and cultural norms attached to it. Tips are supposed to be small and in exchange for service. I really think a more abstract name would allow people to connect with it better. Good luck with year three!

luxpir 12y ago
As a non-target-market neutral observer I have a comment on this point. What it lacks in directly relevant meaning, the name makes up for in memorability. The sound/rhyme/rhythm, simple length, inference (devs/money) are all well thought out enough to encourage further investigation. It's true that tipping culture varies widely around the world, but if visitors are aware of how tipping culture works in the States then the name's function is fulfilled. Many tips can indeed add up to a living in many places, even in the States, and making a reference to tipping culture can also reflect the humble requirements of OSS developers who have by definition not opted to work on OSS projects for the money. Seems sensible enough from that point of view.
whit537 12y ago
Thanks for the feedback! We actually had a loooong bikeshed on this a month into Gittip. Here's the thread: https://github.com/gittip/www.gittip.com/issues/138 https://github.com/gittip/www.gittip.com/issues/138 Maybe someday we'll rebrand, but that would be a fair bit of work at this point and would distract us from more pressing concerns such as better discoverability and usability.
- luxpir 12y ago
  While I suspect the name isn't the most important thing to be spending time on at this point, it is good fun. 'Opengrant' was a good suggestion from that thread not only because of its 'monetary grant giving' meaning but also its original permission-giving roots: "With these resources I hereby grant you the ability to work on this for the betterment and embiggening of my interests". On an even lighter note, 'adoptadev' seems pretty open for the taking...

jacquesm 12y ago

These are the hardest. See, when a company or project is dead on arrival there is not much to do, you bury it, do a post-mortem and move on. If a company is successful then you ride the wave as far and as long as your stamina will let you and then you hopefully pocket a nice chunk of cash. But when you're in the middle, too big to die, too small to succeed it gets very hard. Killing it off feels completely wrong, pushing it feels like you are adding to the opportunity cost with a relatively small chance chance of eventual success. It's a very practical illustration of the sunk-cost fallacy in all its gruesome glory. Personally I hope that gittip will continue to grow and that the team will stick with it. They serve a very important role, pioneers in uncharted territory. And even if a lot of those pioneers ended up dead in creeks with arrows in their backs they pointed the way, showed what works and what does not. And they still have a sufficiently large shot at success if they stick with it. But if they'd pull the plug I would not fault them. Let's hope there will be a 3rd instalment of this article, where gittip grew steadily for the 3rd year in a row and it became profitable. That would be the best way to see this go.

whit537 12y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGFXGwHsD_A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGFXGwHsD_A :D

xur17 12y ago

I think someone else mentioned this idea, but I can't find it anymore. I wish there was some way to donate to a group of people that was automatically managed by you guys (or crowd-sourced if you can make that work). I wouldn't mind giving a little bit each month, but I don't really feel like searching for specific users that do work I want to support, and then checking back every few months to make sure they still are. Also, it would be a lot more meaningful to see a list of groups on the homepage rather than people that I have mostly never heard of.

whit537 12y ago
Thanks for the feedback! Did you open https://github.com/gittip/www.gittip.com/issues/2455 https://github.com/gittip/www.gittip.com/issues/2455? It sounds similar. :-) I've added your homepage comment with a +1 to https://github.com/gittip/www.gittip.com/issues/1074 https://github.com/gittip/www.gittip.com/issues/1074, and your other comments to https://github.com/gittip/www.gittip.com/issues/1493 https://github.com/gittip/www.gittip.com/issues/1493.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

freyfogle 12y ago

There's been a push in the perl community to start using gittip, and I think it's a great thing. So please do keep up the great work. My company (Nestoria) just started a "module of the month". Each month the dev team picks someone whose code we use and via gittip we'll donate $1/week for a year to that person. That's not a fortune obviously, but our hope is that others - individuals and companies - follow our lead, and in many cases it will be obscure modules that don't otherwise get a lot of attention. http://devblog.nestoria.com/post/86216883403/module-of-the-month-may-2014-test-more http://devblog.nestoria.com/post/86216883403/module-of-the-m...

whit537 12y ago
Awesome! Thanks for using Gittip! :D
- freyfogle 12y ago
  Agree it is awesome (I had no part in coming up with the idea). Feel free to use us as a case study.

teawithcarl 12y ago

I love Gittip, and believe deeply in their philosophy goal. I visited their hackathon Jan 2nd-4th, in Ambridge, PA. Great team ... hard working, talented. Chad is a superb full-stack engineer, and completely sincere in his honorable goals. I believe he and the team will succeed. And when they do, since it's bootstrapped, it will not be owned by investors. Gittip is truly a new and deep way of thinking.

whit537 12y ago
Thanks for the support, Carl! Loved having you here! :D

rdegges 12y ago

I've been using Gittip since practically day 1. I really love the system, and always feel happy knowing Chad is the one leading it! If you haven't met Chad before -- you should. He's one of the nicest, most genuine people I've had the pleasure of meeting! Best of luck with Gittip moving forward! <3

whit537 12y ago
Thanks rdegges! The feeling is mutual! :D

ianbicking 12y ago

One thing that I think Gittip is going to require is that people actually ask to receive donations. I'm guessing that the people who are doing best through Gittip do just that. It's a voluntary gift-oriented community, but that shouldn't get in the way of asking. Chad: one thing I will note is that, though you are very open in the article about what you are making, and clearly you want more gifts to sustain yourself and gittip, you don't actually ask. For gittip to succede you don't just need a volume of people, you need a volume of people who are actively asking other people to participate. And you should start with yourself! For gittip that plea can take different forms. Well-funded groups can ask for tips that they redistribute. People doing small projects on the side can still calculate out their expenses (my expenses are just a few domain names, but they aren't free) and can ask for exactly that modest goal. In a sense you want to teach people how to ask, and you want to normalize these pleas, which is best done through demonstration.

whit537 12y ago
You may be right. Certainly, "asking" has been a success factor for people using Gittip, which is fine. For myself, I like not overtly asking for money too much, because then the gifts I do receive feel that much more genuine. :-) What if instead of normalizing asking (pull), we normalized generosity (push)?
- ianbicking 12y ago
  I know asking is hard, and uncomfortable, but I feel like you are coming up with excuses to avoid the hard and uncomfortable thing. But I also suspect you know you have to do uncomfortable things to make this succeed. Asking/pulling extends the network, pushing does not. Certainly you aren't the only one reluctant to ask, but I think there's room to experiment with creative ways to ask, ones that will feel more authentic to you. Also I'm going to pull out the Lesson In Humility card.

cvburgess 12y ago

For anyone wanting to donate to Gittip itself: https://www.gittip.com/Gittip/ https://www.gittip.com/Gittip/

whit537 12y ago
Thank you. :-)

webwright 12y ago

Inspiring service (once I figured out what the heck the post was talking about and managed to make sense of the home page). This post and the site's homepage scream for the attention of a person who has a head for marketing. I think Patreon is winning because the people leading the charge care most about solving the problem (connecting patrons to creators). Gittip, while they are also clearly passionate about solving the problem, seems to have a big chunk of their passion/attention aimed at HOW they solve the problem (the whole site/process seems to be open-sourced: http://building.gittip.com/ http://building.gittip.com/). What they're creating is really a consumer-facing product/service. Are there any/many examples of consumer-facing OSS stuff that's better than the standard path of "find/hire amazing devs/designers/marketeers who love what you're building and pay them to kick ass?"

whit537 12y ago
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/ http://thechangelog.com/open-products/.
- webwright 12y ago
  You should read: http://blog.eladgil.com/2012/10/startups-miracles.html 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.
  - whit537 12y ago
    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?

rgbrgb 12y ago

I just signed up. What's the easiest way for me to put a gittip badge in a Readme.md on Github? I'd recommend putting that front and center unless I missed it.

whit537 12y ago
Awesome, thanks! :D See http://shields.io/ http://shields.io/ for README badge. I've added a +1 for you to https://github.com/gittip/www.gittip.com/issues/1145 https://github.com/gittip/www.gittip.com/issues/1145.

verelo 12y ago

Lets say i have a serious problem i need solved and i see gittip as a great way to encourage someone to do. How do i go from this homepage to giving my money to the person who will solve it? Or is this just for the case where someone has already done great work, and i want them to continue it (literally a tip)?

tshepang 12y ago
More the latter than the former. There are more suitable tools for the former, e.g. Paypal.

joeyh 12y ago

This reminds me that I have a small amount of tips on gittip. However, I can only withdraw it by adding a bank account. Security concerns make this not appealing, at least not at the current level of funds. The cost/benefit is not there for me. And so I've not yet really made money on gittip, which doesn't give me much incentive to promote it. (Beyond thinking the open company idea is pretty cool. But that also means I value their time, so I'm not seeing the cost/benefit on emailing them for a manual bitcoin withdrawal, either..) On the other hand, flattr at least lets me withdraw money using paypal.. Or they have so far. They seem to be possibly moving to european bank account only, which will kill it for me.

greatbigtable 12y ago
Add Paypal withdraw support. People don't like having to spread their account information all over the place. Leverage what they already have access to in their lives; note the proliferation of Twitter and Facebook logins all over the web.
- canvia 12y ago
  Cryptocoin would be a nice option as well.

morgante 12y ago

Maybe I'm confused about the mission of Gittip, but I always thought it was (based on the name) supposed to support valuable open source work. Given this, it seems sad that the leaderboard prominently features people whose contributions are definitely not made in the form of git commits.