How will your network grow? Not on kickstarter apparently Thomas Boutell 8/22 '14

So apparently kickstarter is not the right way to fund scaling up your social network.

Their guidelines prohibit campaigns "to fund websites or apps focused on e-commerce, business, and social networking."

Interesting. But there are lots of ways to go about scaling the site, and the work before us right now doesn't require more money. It requires solving the riddle of building interest and bringing intact networks of friends aboard.

I stumbled across this discovery while hoping to answer an unrelated question: how to fund adding certain features to the Apostrophe open source CMS. That, my employer could do on kickstarter, but it sounds out of their usual line.

Today I changed logins so that your login should "stick" for a long time, rather than just the current browser session. And I added a little nudge to invite a friend if you haven't done so yet (or more accurately, not since today, since I just started keeping track).

Also, Sean Puckett shared a post about his work toward improving the look and feel of the site. Can't wait!

MORE
8/22 '14 5 Comments
Have you considered indiegogo.com? It's the second-most trafficked crowdfunding site, which isn't really saying that much. You won't get a lot of traffic from the site itself, whereas in the recent campaign I ran on Kickstarter we got 31% of of our backers from people surfing on Kickstarter.com. But if you can get some media coverage and drive traffic to indiegogo yourself, I think it could work.

BTW hello! I like the site so far. Social media can be so noisy... this is much better.
Jen Ketzl
Hi! Thanks for the impressions of indiegogo. I am pondering it, and it's helpful to know I need to bring my own audience.
Thomas Boutell
What's the difference between a OPW friend and someone I follow on OPW?
Robert Bryan
Mutual follow, I think.
Brett Heller
Right now, that's correct, it's mutual following that makes locked posts visible.

I didn't rush to do something more nuanced because people didn't prioritize it particularly high in my survey.

However, Sean is really motivated about it and I don't disagree with him.

So we're working towards a setup where, when you follow someone, you will then be asked if you want to give them access to anything special, or just plain follow them. And mutual follow won't be magical anymore.

(If someone unfollows you, though, they might still lose any special access you've granted. That kind of makes sense, because you'll start thinking of them as "gone," and they shouldn't popup SURPRISE! later with full access.)
Thomas Boutell