So the big news for June is that Benefactor v1 is finally live! Here is the very first Problem Bounty related to mental health:
This took 3x longer than expected but v1 is fully-functional with crowdfunding and supports both Kickstarter as well as IndieGogo style campaigns. Anyone can now pile on an existing bounty like this one or seed their own and set an unlimited number of bounty conditions for payout.
This now enables the first instance of retroactive public goods funding being applied to the realm of impact projects. The magic here is that by creating the ability for anyone to specify and crowdfund a bounty with specific payout conditions in order for the bounty to be unlocked, it enables a secondary market today of savvy investors who can back projects and support them in the pursuit of unlocking the Problem Bounty. This puts market dynamics to work in creating an efficient alignment of all stakeholders (knowledge workers, philanthropists and impact investors) in solving big problems.
Other Wins
Other developments of note:
- I redesigned the homepage to better tell the story to each of the above segments by enabling the visitor to self-identify and have all the marketing update to speak to that specific segment:
- I also made it so the top nav displays as text links on desktop (makes it more clear as the icons really only make sense for the squished experience on mobile).
- I created a canary monitor that will alert if/when the message queue service goes down. This is key as things grow because being down kills notifications for everyone and things like trade notifications and alerts on anything anyone is monitoring silently fail without this. I came up with a fairly elegant way to handle this that’s not subject to the inherent Catch-22 of trying to monitor a system’s uptime with itself.
- I implemented HotJar at a UX mentor’s recommendation to start to get a better understanding of the funnel falloff and how people are interacting with the application.
- I also added the ability for a project owner to edit and/or hide an existing project bounty (a simple capability that should’ve existed this whole time).
Challenges
I’m just now returning from Hatch Europe where I spent the last week meeting the wonderful folks of that community and going through that event. We had a great time in Caux, Switzerland and I made friends with some great folks.
Main challenge as always remains the time constraints as the solopreneur behind this all. I’m going to attempt to start offloading some of the Bubble dev this month by creating some paid bounties and using those to recruit some contract workers and see if I can find some competent Bubble help. I need to also very soon sort out the legal/tax compliance issues now that crowdfunding capability is live.
Next Month’s Focus
Platform
Main push will be to begin figuring out the outreach to the various stakeholder groups. I’m looking at ways to leverage AutoGPT and some of these other autonomous agents for recruiting participants, philanthropists, NGO’s, municipalities and impact investors. It’s about to get interesting.
Project Success
Onesta and Message Anywhere are the two leading projects right now and my focus is in supporting them to arrive at v1 ASAP. We’re putting the finishing touches on a problem bounty for the Digital Divide problem and then it will be a matter of getting both problem bounties funded and finding the dev labor for each.
Events
I’ve got another conference coming up and then after that I’ll shift into the mode of planning our next event likely early-mid August. The goal for that one will be to have developed the necessary tooling so I can use the app itself to organize the event and not cheat by accessing the database directly. That will pave the way for being able to start offering others the ability to bring this to their respective cities.
Content
I met some great people at Hatch and am intending to interview a few for the podcast. Stay tuned on that front.
The technical roadmap as always can be found here.