I'm working on a new project and thinking about alternative funding paths.
Previously I founded a startup around an open source project, had a corporate sponsor, raised VC funding, etc. But something about that feels misaligned with my values. I really tried to make it work and struggled.
I was wondering if anyone has made sponsorship or crowdfunding from users work? I noticed that Kagi the search engine toots that it's entirely user and crowdfunded after being bootstrapped by it's founder. What made something like this work?
muzani•1mo ago
It's a place for someone who has built a prototype to raise funds to scale. Partly it's to gauge that a market exists.
ADOM was one of my favorite examples, a game that was fine, except it was all in ASCII, and the creator wanted to raise funds to make it a proper, pretty roguelike. It was epic by the time it got on Kickstarter, they were mostly trying to see if people cared enough to want to see an ASCII game with graphics.