<story><title>Introducing Backer: crowd funding for features</title><url>https://backer.app.net/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>quadrangle</author><text>This is NOT a new idea. This is just a feature-focused threshold system the same as using Kickstarter. There are also tons of feature focused sites.&lt;p&gt;Here&amp;#x27;s the exact same thing already: &lt;a href=&quot;http://catincan.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;catincan.com&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;
There&amp;#x27;s also tons of bounty-style feature systems like &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.freedomsponsors.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.freedomsponsors.org&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;I could go on and on. There&amp;#x27;s no particular reason this variation is going to fail, but it&amp;#x27;s not new. The only thing notable is the no-fee for Open Source. The Bitcoin focus isn&amp;#x27;t even remarkable, because there&amp;#x27;s &lt;a href=&quot;http://bitcoinstarter.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;bitcoinstarter.com&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;Oh, and the idea-validation is already inherent to crowdfunding. Anyway, I wish people didn&amp;#x27;t keep wheel reinventing all the time. At least recognize it.</text></comment>
<story><title>Introducing Backer: crowd funding for features</title><url>https://backer.app.net/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>iandanforth</author><text>I think this is really cool! I can see these campaigns dropping into one of two buckets. 1. Funding to pay for development time and 2. Validating the idea. I think it&amp;#x27;s up to the campaign runner to determine how much to ask for for bucket 1 type campaigns, but it could be &lt;i&gt;immensely&lt;/i&gt; helpful for Backer to offer clear guidance for the second.&lt;p&gt;For example, lets say I have an existing user base of 100,000 people, and I normally charge $15 &amp;#x2F; m for my service, of which 5% of my users actually pay. What is a sufficient contribution to validate the idea of a new feature for the paid version? For the free version? Over time, finding the proper heuristics&amp;#x2F;weightings for Backer users could be very very helpful.</text></comment>