Building a Sustainable EthHub

Continuing to build the best place to learn about Ethereum

Background

From the very beginning, we have often mulled over how we can build a sustainable ecosystem around EthHub. We contribute as much personal time as we can to the project but ultimately we still both work full time jobs that are unrelated to the crypto ecosystem. EthHub is also completely independent and has so far been solely funded by us.

In short, if we want to realise the goal of making EthHub the best place to learn about Ethereum, we need working capital.

EthHub’s Growth

Before delving into how we plan to raise funds for EthHub, we thought it prudent to give the community an overview of the explosive growth that we’ve seen across all of our verticals (website, newsletter and podcast) since we launched the EthHub website on January 3rd.

We’ve had:

• Over 60 unique contributors to the EthHub Github repo
• 8000+ unique visitors and 50,000+ page-views of the EthHub docs website
• Over 80% growth in subscribers for the EthHub Weekly newsletter (it was previously the Block by Block newsletter)
• 11,500+ all-time downloads on the Into the Ether podcast (which launched a little earlier in late November 2018)
• Almost 3000 followers on the @ethhub_io Twitter account

Crowdfunding the future of EthHub

Today we’re launching the first iterations of our planned funding initiatives — a simple donation address that will also be tied to a Gitcoin grants program. The donation address is a Gnosis multi-sig wallet that’s controlled by both Eric Conner and Anthony Sassano.

We plan to use the donated funds to:

• Cover overheads (such as web hosting, domain registration, email etc)
• Pay bounties for EthHub content (on Gitcoin, Bounties Network etc)
• Fund developers building on Ethereum through the Gitcoin grants program
• Pay developers/designers to add extra features to the EthHub website

We want to make it clear that the donated funds will never be used to pay Eric or Anthony or to participate in any speculative activity (trading, staking etc). In saying this, any ERC20 tokens we receive will be immediately converted into ETH and we may sometimes trade this ETH for DAI in order to pay for certain things.

So, if you’d like to support the continued growth of EthHub, please send your donations to 0xa19fcdad77c1f0fd184689aca88babcf68010347.

We’re also in the process of setting up a recurring donation on Gitcoin grants and will update this piece once it’s live!

Further Funding Initiatives

Additionally, we have ideas for other revenue-generating activities that will allow us to inject the capital straight back into growing EthHub. These activities will be launched slowly over the next few months.

Some of the ideas we’ve had so far:

• EthHub merch shop (t-shirts, stickers, art pieces etc)
• Patreon and/or Staketree
• Sponsored spots (newsletter and podcast only)
• Referral links and promo codes
• ICO (kidding)

It’s important to note that no advertising will ever take place on the documentation section of the EthHub website as we believe it’s wrong to monetize this content (as its predominantly community contributed). You may see referral links on the website but the proceeds generated from this will be treated in the same way as donations.

We really appreciate the support everyone has shown us so far and look forward to continuing our journey of making EthHub the best place to learn about Ethereum.