“Teams Work”
Five months ago I introduced the idea of blog-post driven development—what is the blog post we want to be able to publish and how do we get there?—as a way to focus our product development efforts. The first post I put out there was “Pay Your Heroes.” I want to put a second post out there:
Teams Work
We’ve shown in the past that an individual can find a living directly on Gratipay: we had someone making $1,000 per week on the site. Now, we have someone who is taking $1,000 per week from a team on Gratipay. This is significant because it means that you don’t need to be a micro-celebrity to find a living on Gratipay.
We shouldn’t count takes from the Gratipay team itself.
But I’m Confused
I’m confused about the relationship between the first post and the second. In one sense they are opposite ends of the spectrum of use cases we were working with at the retreat:
- individuals giving to individuals
- individuals giving to charities
- individuals giving to businesses
- organizations (whether charities or businesses) giving to individuals
- organizations giving to organizations
- individuals taking from organizations
In Growing Gratipay I proposed basically that we start at the top of that list and work our way down. However, comparing ourselves to Patreon makes me feel like we’re really muddy about what problem we’re solving. Patreon addresses a crystal-clear pain point:
Patreon is not for people starting making content, it’s not for people with no fans. Patreon is for people on the cusp of making a living, who have hundreds of thousands of fans. It’s for people who are micro-celebrities, and for people who are making stuff and having tremendous success, and are still working at Starbucks for ten dollars an hour, two days a week, because they can’t afford to do it with just their ad revenue.
In comparison, we’re a mess:
What’s the pain point we address? Who is Gratipay for?
