Craigstarter: DIY Replacement for Kickstarter | Hacker News Reader

Craigstarter: DIY Replacement for Kickstarter

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163 pointspeterldowns35 comments

As more and more “curation” happens with the big providers, it’s fun to see people rediscover the benefits of running their own sites that they control.

I’d love to see more distributed models around forming and maintaining communities start to pop up. A distributed directory similar to DNS that no one entity totally controls pointing to independent content publishers.

It’s time for the Internet to get back more on the distributed side of things, especially since the modern equivalent of a nuclear attack is a large site just up and banning someone for a vague TOS violation with no human to appeal to unless you get lucky in shaming them enough on Twitter to respond. Yeah, I want my livelihood dependent on that service model.

I did the same thing right from the start with my newsletter* — referral engine, editor, archives, mail stuff, etc. Nothing worse than building a massive audience on the back of substack & co.

* https://briefingday.com

Have a blog post or other documentation on your endeavors to own your destiny to share with other content creators? I think there's enormous value in communicating to those folks the value prop of what you describe.

I guess your handle would be the reason why not — but will consider it ;)

I feel you :) Appreciate it!

+1 for this!

GP wrote "Nothing worse than building a massive audience on the back of substack & co." and I'd value a "here's why, and (esp) HOW to avoid that route"

Not parent commenter, but Ghost is a pretty great way to “own your stack” - custom domain, software is open-source, supports paid memberships, and it can send blog posts as newsletters. (No association with Ghost either - just a happy user)

I wrote a blog post on how to accomplish a Stratechery-style newsletter/blog with paid memberships on my blog[1] — you can hook into Zapier so there’s lots of opportunity to build a full community around Ghost’s built-in membership system, in case you want to send Slack invites, add them to a Mailchimp newsletter, etc.

[1]: https://www.mailinglisthackers.com/creating-a-member-support...

Hosting on shopify.

Ipfs, tor/onions are giving publishers total control.

> Ipfs, tor/onions are giving publishers total control.

Total control and also no customers.

I've wondered if there's a middle ground between moderation and curation where I 'follow' a set of people and I mostly see what they already liked. The grey area between 'I disagree strongly with this sentiment' and "this is wrong and nobody should see it" plays out everywhere, even here.

There are some critics who you trust in most genres but not one. Being able to see the 'best of' that is the union of things people chose instead of the intersection of things they did not reject is an experiment I'd like to at least observe.

What we have a lot of now is anybody can submit, and it's up to the moderators to cull the bad stuff. That's really cool when a site is small, but eventually it's just way too much stuff, and the moderators are always the bad cops. If I 'follow' someone, they get to be a good cop. Effectively it's retweeting without Twitter.

My initial reaction to this was that this was dumb because Kickstarter gives you something very important: a large userbase.

But Craigstarter makes a good point - > if you already have a community built up, and have communication channels in place (via a newsletter, for example), and already run an online shop, then Kickstarter can be unnecessarily cumbersome.

I'm sure there are lots who meet that criteria. Now I just need to build my newletter mailing list...

For certain types of funding, kickstarter could be seen as negative signalling.

> But Craigstarter makes a good point - > if you already have a community built up, and have communication channels in place (via a newsletter, for example), and already run an online shop, then Kickstarter can be unnecessarily cumbersome.

I think the above mainly applies for projects that are looking for minimum viable funding (for example, to fulfill a minimum order quantity).

For projects that are looking to sell as much as possible, Kickstarter's value comes from the discovery they provide, including them emailing a user's followers whenever the user backs something.

A (now sold out) example: https://shop.specialprojects.jp/products/kissa-by-kissa

That's really cool - wish I would have caught it when it was being funded. I'd love to take a more walking-focused trip to Japan

According to the newsletter there'll be a second, slightly different print coming out later this year. So you might be able to!

Successful crowdfunding campaigns require substantial marketing efforts outside the crowdfunding platform, such as email lists, a community or customer base familiar with the brand/product/team, social media ads, etc. Exceptions exist, such as getting funded solely by being featured on the homepage or having an extraordinary product featured by the media, but those are relatively rare. Thus a campaign's success is mostly decoupled from the platform itself.

This is a great idea to avoid substantial platform usage fees in exchange for the ever reducing value proposition that Kickstarter or other centralized crowdfunding platforms provide.

Kickstarer's search is useless. Not sure what value they provide other than collecting money and a page to describe the proposal.

Book maker here. This is a great idea! For my 2nd book, I kinda hacked my own system to just do this. I was targeting a low amount and paying a middleman any % of that was atrocious to me.

Kudos on this. Craig always delivers when it comes to making books.

What will it take to make it Wordpress friendly?

It sounds like you were self-publishing, right? If so, did you consider a POD solution like Lulu or any of the others out there?

I did not consider Lulu or other such platforms. I was only focused on crowdfunding at that stage and most of these platforms felt overwhelming/doing too much to me.

Isn't there some amount of trust in backers using kickstarter that the funds are returned if they don't reach their targets?

While this looks great, it seems like you are donating directly to the creators. Are people willing to hand over their money that easily?

With Kickstarter, the credit card isn't even charged until the campaign's over.

I believe this value proposition was more important at the start of contemporary crowdfunding (~2010), in order for folks to trust crowdfunding. As I note in the Craigstarter README:

> The lack of goal-triggered payments is probably the biggest "downside" to Craigstarter. Technically, I believe you can have charges be authorized on checkout, but only pushed through on "shipping" — allowing one to approximate the Kickstarter experience on Shopify. However, these charge authorizations are short lived, and this would only work (as far as I can tell) for quick campaigns.

> That said, many Kickstarter campaigns are run as promotional tools more than strict fundraising tools, with the intent by creators to ship no matter what. In theory, one could set a minimum goal on Shopify which, if not met, would trigger a manual refunding of all backers (minus the ~2.8% processing fees). Robin Sloan rigged up something similar with his 2020 Sloanstarter campaign.

> In the end, if you have an audience, and you have reasonable baseline goals, then the issue of "raising enough funds" for a project launch is often not an issue.

As with all tools, they can be used for good or bad but as a frequent contributor to /r/shittykickstarters I am afraid my worldview might be warped and I think this will be used a lot more by scammers to sidestep whatever meagre checks Kickstarter has in place.

I assumed this was so named because it was supposed to disrupt kickstarters cut in the same way craigslist disrupted classifieds, but it seems it’s because the creators name is Craig. A happy accident, then, because I think my interpretation still works

This won't stop Craigslist from sending him a Cease and Desist anyway, but hopefully they won't back it up with a lawsuit, wasting everyone's time.

I'd bet they'd actually have strong case.

I looked through the tutorial video, and it doesn't seem very simple... thought Shopify would have a plugin system where everything would be wired up without you having to edit templates and code.

Shopify does have a plugin system, and there are several freemium/paid crowdfunding plugins that seem to require minimal configuration.

https://apps.shopify.com/search?q=crowdfunding

If anyone would like to turn it into a free plugin, please do, as that would be within the spirit and terms of the license.

I've been meaning to do something like this, but imagined it as an interface that takes information, saves Stripe payment tokens, and only charges them when the goal had been met and optionally the timer was up. I'd provide a minimally styled HTML template for the low-code crowd and let others style it however they like after grabbing the info from an API. Still losing about 3% but then the user wouldn't be beholden to Shopify.

Built on shopify, so presumably shopify is taking their usual cut of payments. Seems weird to me to self-host with another middle-man...

The project is pretty clear that the benefit is you're merely paying 2.8% instead of 10%. It's not about completely cutting out the payment processor as a middleman--that's essentially a requirement for credit card transactions--it's about clawing back the 7.2% you're paying for the platform. I think it's great.

Interesting, you are right. I was under the impression that shopify added a pretty sizable transaction fee, above the base rate of the payment processor, but that is not really the case. Shopify's base rate is basically the same as paypal and stripe's base cc processing rate. Cynicism retracted!

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