What Crowdfunding Would You Like to See?

[ysabetwordsmith]

It occurred to me that there may be folks wondering if they should try crowdfunding, or wondering what kind of project to attempt.  That got me thinking about what kinds it would be nice to have more of.  

There are tons of people writing fiction but some niches still under-served.  A handful of us writing poetry, more would be good.  A handful doing character icons, good ... but I haven't seen anyone who currently does more than a single character per icon or who specializes in non-character icons like houses or starships.  There used to be an illustration project that sketched scenes from other people's work, with donation thresholds for working more on the most popular sketches.  A few music ones have come and gone.  Oodles of people draw webcomics, but there's not much of that activity here.  I know at least one fine art photographer into crowdfunding; more would be awesome.  I'm also very partial to nonfiction and would love to see more folks trying that in this business model.

What kinds of crowdfunding project would you like to see, or see more of?  What have you toyed with trying but haven't done yet?

Comments

[magistrate]

I never got around to doing the research on this, but I'd love to see something like Kickstarter except for... really small projects? Like, "If I raise $100, I'll be able to take two days to sit and hand-code a utility like the Bingo generator" sort of thing.

Kickstarter seems like it has way too much overhead, and I don't like that it's tied to time elapsed and not money raised; I want something where as soon as it funds, the campaign sends me the money and I can get to work right away and not wait another month.

And I know some things, like FundRazr, send the money right away, but... I dunno. Maybe it's just a matter of finding the right platform from among the gajillions out there, but I feel like what I want is a very simple utility and everything I look at is more complicated than I want.

(But hoo boy, if I could get into a groove with it, I would love to crowdfund a bunch of little web applications to help writers in various ways.)

Hmm...

[ysabetwordsmith]

>> I never got around to doing the research on this, but I'd love to see something like Kickstarter except for... really small projects? Like, "If I raise $100, I'll be able to take two days to sit and hand-code a utility like the Bingo generator" sort of thing. <<

That would be awesome.

>> Kickstarter seems like it has way too much overhead, and I don't like that it's tied to time elapsed and not money raised; I want something where as soon as it funds, the campaign sends me the money and I can get to work right away and not wait another month. <<

Kickstarter is right for a certain bandwidth of projects, and not at all for others.

>> And I know some things, like FundRazr, send the money right away, but... I dunno. Maybe it's just a matter of finding the right platform from among the gajillions out there, <<

Here is the guide to crowdfunding sites that I made. Where I could find information about how they work, I included it, but a lot of them bury that info or don't even list it, which makes comparisons very difficult.

>> but I feel like what I want is a very simple utility and everything I look at is more complicated than I want. <<

Agreed. Feature bloat is more like ... feature caterpillar zombie explosion. 0_o It produces choice paralysis for some people, where they can't even get started. For others, they try to work their way through the options methodically but it's so complex and counter-intuitive that they drop things or make mistakes and it just turns into a mess. Like the post office now, used to be you had limited options but they were very clear and it was easy to decide. I spent a fucking hour the other day on their website trying to figure out how to send things at the best price, and still realized later that I'd missed some vital information. *headdesk*

A very simple crowdfunding site would probably be popular for that alone.

>> (But hoo boy, if I could get into a groove with it, I would love to crowdfund a bunch of little web applications to help writers in various ways.) <<

Trying to raise funds that small, you might be able to do it by hand, on your own blog and/or this community. You're the only coder I know who's doing things like this but some of what you do would be immensely useful. I would happily chip in toward expansions for the bingo card generator, I use that thing a lot. Being able to automate the prompt merger function, for instance, or that character generator that's on another page -- because the setup is over my head, but I can use the easy-click bingo stuff.

One of my author-friends wrote a program to plot human generations for his crashed colony, to see how far they could breed before dying out. It told off the births and deaths, so he could see clusters of deaths, and he wrote those into the novel (Dark Water's Embrace). It was apparently a pretty simple program, as such things go, and you just put in how many breeding-age males and females you started with (he had 7 adults if I remember right) then it plotted the results. Add another layer of coding and it could be customizable ...
* What is the average lifespan? (human ~75 years, dragon ~500)
* What is the average breeding span? (human age ~12 to 50, dragon age ~50 to 400)
* What is the average number of young per birth? (human 1, dragon 12)
* What is the average number of years between births? (human ~2, dragon ~100)
* What is the average birth rate per breeding adult? (human 3, dragon 36)
AND/OR
* What is the average replacement rate per breeding adult? (human 2.5, dragon 1.5)
... basically taking the questions out of the lists of datapoints used to map population curves, however detailed you want to get. You can pin down variables like death rate if you know them or let the computer randomize.

Coding for more than 2 sexes would probably be MUCH more complicated. I'd love seeing the results. But even a vanilla-human model would be incredibly useful. I have tons of SF colonies. I could get so, so much use out of Let's Launch a Colony! just wanking the numbers until interesting things happened.

Re: Hmm...

[chordatesrock]

The dragons in your example undergo reproductive senescence? That is a really uncommon trait! Now I'm interested in dragon reproductive senescence!

Re: Hmm...

[ysabetwordsmith]

Everything wears out. Many lifeforms die near the time their reproductive capacity ends. But the more complex the lifeform, the wider that margin tends to be because there is value in elders if they can perform other duties. Since I'm imagining these dragons as sentient, but pretty violent, they clutch like dumb lizards but have a high mortality rate. Elder dragons tend to be wise and powerful, which helps them survived even past breeding age.

It varies though.