"I try to remember all the products I’ve talked about that I won’t even bother to cover—and that nobody’s going to buy."
—
Fever Dream of a Guilt-Ridden Gadget Reporter
What refreshing honesty.
Stella the dinosaur expert
What if a little site you love doesn’t have a business model? Yell at the developers! Explain that you are tired of good projects folding and are willing to pay cash American dollar to prevent that from happening. It doesn’t take prohibitive per-user revenue to put a project in the black. It just requires a number greater than zero.
So, today I recorded a future episode of the podcast about this very theme (before I saw this post). I’m a happy paying user of Pinboard, one that even pays the extra money for the archiving feature. Not only do I believe this idea to be true but, as I announce in that upcoming show, I’m willing to put my money where my mouth is by sending, anonymously, cash to a service I use and love daily that has no outward discernible business model.
Here is my idea:
What if, 1% of the users of a particular free service of 36 million clients and growing, were to decide to drop $10.00 cash every month into an envelope and mail it to said service? What if that envelope had no return address? Perhaps there was an note inside that begged them to create a model to let us pay them to use the service. To make sure the service continued on once the bubble inevitably bursts and the VC’s take their payout and fly to the Grand Caymans.
My guess is that such a service would have to keep the money. Perhaps they would go through a couple of months of having their offices flooded with 300,000+ ten dollar bills. This might get to be a hassle so, perhaps, maybe, they finally get the hint and have a few million dollars of starting cash to launch a way for us to pay directly for this thing we use and love.
Crazy, right? Yep.
So, here is the address I’m sending my unmarked cash with the note in the envelope with no return address.
Tumblr, Inc., 35 East 21st Street, 9th Floor, New York, NY, 10010
I welcome those that care as much as I do to do the same.
Update: Forgot to mention, and I never ask this… Please reblog the shit out of this one.
You are Awesome
"Please explain evil. Show your work."
We need more of this.
(Source: minimalmac)
"This is what is so facinating about science and the real world - it doesn’t matter what people think, or what theories they come up with, or what rationalizations they make to defend wrong theories - everything in the real world keeps on working by its own rules. Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away. If you want to make real impact, rather than trying to impose your beliefs on the world, you need to be always searching for the world’s true nature."
