The whole “crowdfunding bounties” idea is a bit like “kickstarter, but decouple who proposes a project from who works on it”, right?
Yes, that’s a very good way to put it.
And I agree that investing-in-the-team is important and shouldn’t disappear with this model.
So to reiterate the idea:
Someone would come up with an idea, which would be far more general/bare bones than the usual kickstarter project. Something more like “An HPMOR video game” than “An HPMOR video game, with these mechanics, and these graphics, and this story, etc...”.
And people would commit money as a show of interest in an idea, sort of like an investor saying “I’m interested in startups working on VR, send me your pitch”.
Then if enough money has been committed to attract teams/individuals to the project, they would have to pitch themselves and their vision to the crowd (with varying degrees of investment before the pitch, that part doesn’t change from kickstarter/startups), and the crowd would have to decide together whether to accept that pitch based both on the team/individual and their vision.
If they do, the promised funds have to be transferred, though not necessarily in one go. It could be dependent on certain milestones, for example (I think this is also common in the startup world?).
-
But even with lots of talking and figuring it out theoretically, it would probably need a lot of actual testing to get right.
A simple first test of this could be to crowdfund a simple a bounty with kickstarter (perhaps for LessWrong posts), create some voting system to let the funders pick who wins the bounty, and see what we learn from it.
Ah, ok, fair enough, so the initial “commitment” of money isn’t really much of a commitment, it is basically a collective signal of interest in kickstarting projects of a specific sort. And then, specific teams basically run a regular kickstarter “under that banner”, hoping to attract those specific investors. Plus, perhaps, some additional flexibility on when funds actually get transferred.
So it sounds to me like the simplest version is to make a website “parallel” to kickstarter, ie, where kickstarter investors can indicate how much $ they think they would invest in various projects (and where kickstarter projects can submit their kickstarters as supposedly meeting those requirements, and investors get notified, and have an easy interface to approve funds).
I did mean an actual commitment, that’s why I said it’s a technical problem in my original comment. I don’t imagine It’s a commitment you can’t walk back on at all, but there should be terms on that (say, a week/month notice, perhaps changing depending on the project), so potential developers* can be confidant the amount shown is the amount they’ll get (That’s really the important bit). Otherwise they have to guess whether people are still interested, and they have to get them to then actually pledge money, so it would end up not actually helping them that much—and if it doesn’t help the developer then it also doesn’t help the investors.
So what you suggested can work as a precursor without the commitment mechanism, but I think the commitment mechanism is important enough that it wouldn’t actually tell us much (so it wouldn’t really be an MVP).
*What’s the right word for the person/team that takes on a projects? executors? because they execute the project? Sounds a bit dark though, lol.
Yes, that’s a very good way to put it.
And I agree that investing-in-the-team is important and shouldn’t disappear with this model.
So to reiterate the idea:
Someone would come up with an idea, which would be far more general/bare bones than the usual kickstarter project. Something more like “An HPMOR video game” than “An HPMOR video game, with these mechanics, and these graphics, and this story, etc...”.
And people would commit money as a show of interest in an idea, sort of like an investor saying “I’m interested in startups working on VR, send me your pitch”.
Then if enough money has been committed to attract teams/individuals to the project, they would have to pitch themselves and their vision to the crowd (with varying degrees of investment before the pitch, that part doesn’t change from kickstarter/startups), and the crowd would have to decide together whether to accept that pitch based both on the team/individual and their vision.
If they do, the promised funds have to be transferred, though not necessarily in one go. It could be dependent on certain milestones, for example (I think this is also common in the startup world?).
-
But even with lots of talking and figuring it out theoretically, it would probably need a lot of actual testing to get right.
A simple first test of this could be to crowdfund a simple a bounty with kickstarter (perhaps for LessWrong posts), create some voting system to let the funders pick who wins the bounty, and see what we learn from it.
Ah, ok, fair enough, so the initial “commitment” of money isn’t really much of a commitment, it is basically a collective signal of interest in kickstarting projects of a specific sort. And then, specific teams basically run a regular kickstarter “under that banner”, hoping to attract those specific investors. Plus, perhaps, some additional flexibility on when funds actually get transferred.
So it sounds to me like the simplest version is to make a website “parallel” to kickstarter, ie, where kickstarter investors can indicate how much $ they think they would invest in various projects (and where kickstarter projects can submit their kickstarters as supposedly meeting those requirements, and investors get notified, and have an easy interface to approve funds).
I did mean an actual commitment, that’s why I said it’s a technical problem in my original comment. I don’t imagine It’s a commitment you can’t walk back on at all, but there should be terms on that (say, a week/month notice, perhaps changing depending on the project), so potential developers* can be confidant the amount shown is the amount they’ll get (That’s really the important bit). Otherwise they have to guess whether people are still interested, and they have to get them to then actually pledge money, so it would end up not actually helping them that much—and if it doesn’t help the developer then it also doesn’t help the investors.
So what you suggested can work as a precursor without the commitment mechanism, but I think the commitment mechanism is important enough that it wouldn’t actually tell us much (so it wouldn’t really be an MVP).
*What’s the right word for the person/team that takes on a projects? executors? because they execute the project? Sounds a bit dark though, lol.