A Kickstarter for WordPress ideas? / How to get a WordPress project funded in advance

[PeterK]

I'm sure there are a lot of you out there that have some awesome ideas for WordPress plugins, sites or themes, but can't justify developing them outright because of a lack of time/funds. I have a dozen ideas I would love to develop, and most of them would be great commercial solutions for individual companies/parties. But developing them means putting down work that pays bills, something I'm not able to do at the moment. Basically I wish I had a customer who wanted the solution I was eager to build and is willing to pay, or somebody to fund the development - i.e. invest.

The other issue is if building a plugin that fulfills a niche feature, if you develop it in your spare time and release it as a free plugin, one deals with either a lot of popularity which usually amounts to a lot of support requests ..or a plugin that is so niche, only a few people use but people rely on, so it creates an obligation to them to keep it updated in the future.

Creating a paid plugin is a pretty long road to take, you basically have to organize a business around it. After development development, you need to setup professional support, systems etc and market the thing.

I was wondering if there are people with good suggestions or experiences on how to get a WordPress project of personal choice funded before or during development.

I thought of the Kickstarter/indiegogo model, it would be cool if there was a dedicated WordPress version of that. That would be really intriguing.

Another idea would be a different kind of job board, where you could post a project you want to develop and a client can decide to hire you to develop it. Kind of like a matchmaking service. Is there a place like that for WordPress projects out there already?

Is this pie in the sky thinking? Anybody got tips on getting a project funded in advance?

ps. I have the kind of projects in mind that would benefit greatly from a couple hundred dollars investment and upwards.

[Ryan]

Work hard enough during a short stint that you can bankroll yourself for a period of time without any income.

Beyond that, seed funding from an investment company, bank loan etc. work too.

I have a few friends who are on an artists benefit. Somehow they justified web development as "art" and so get a few hundred dollars pay per week which keeps them afloat whilst building their own companie(s).

[PeterK]

Work hard enough during a short stint that you can bankroll yourself for a period of time without any income.

Beyond that, seed funding from an investment company, bank loan etc. work too.

I have a few friends who are on an artists benefit. Somehow they justified web development as "art" and so get a few hundred dollars pay per week which keeps them afloat whilst building their own companie(s).

Thanks Ryan. I´ve done it that way (bankroll), I´m sure that´s what most of us end up doing. Looking for a better way though.

Seed funding could work for substantial projects, but that also means creating an entire business around the project and they would probably only fund something which is going to make their money back - not all projects would fit into that category.

Interesting about the artists benefits. Coding is a form of art.

[PeterK]

A little update:
almost 3 months after posting this, but I haven't let this one go. I looked at kickstarter (not available to non-us folk) and indiegogo (underwhelming when it comes to tech projects) and decided to build something simple for myself. I've been working on a WordPress solution to help people get their projects funded and launched. It's turning out to be a nice theme/plugin running on WP with features I'm very excited about. Anybody interested in Beta testing? I could do with some feedback. Beta should be ready by the end of the month!

[Jeffro]

I'm interested in playing around with it. Perhaps put a demo site together that we can register on and play around with as well?

[PeterK]

I'm interested in playing around with it. Perhaps put a demo site together that we can register on and play around with as well?

Definitely will do Jeffro, thanks! I'm putting up an early demo late next week and will post the link here.

[PeterK]

Definitely will do Jeffro, thanks! I'm putting up an early demo late next week and will post the link here.

update:
not quite demo ready yet...dreaded feature creep! But I'm really jazzed about how its turning out. Will put up a link in the week, hope I can get some good feedback.

update 2:
Made enormous progress this week...but the demo's not there yet.
ps. If there are any designers reading this, if you're interested in joining this project, let me know!

[ericmann]

not quite demo ready yet...dreaded feature creep!

Can you at least give us a preview of your feature list? I'd be very interested if/when this project gets off the ground.

I've pitched two projects thus far to Kickstarter, and both were rejected because they were too heavy on the tech side and too light on the "creative arts" side. Both would have been powered by WordPress, but I don't have the time or finances to build either out ahead of time. And the "work hard for a short period of time" concept is how I currently bankroll my volunteer activities in the WP community ... I can't afford to do both, so preemptive financing would be a godsend!

[PeterK]

Can you at least give us a preview of your feature list? I'd be very interested if/when this project gets off the ground.

I've pitched two projects thus far to Kickstarter, and both were rejected because they were too heavy on the tech side and too light on the "creative arts" side. Both would have been powered by WordPress, but I don't have the time or finances to build either out ahead of time. And the "work hard for a short period of time" concept is how I currently bankroll my volunteer activities in the WP community ... I can't afford to do both, so preemptive financing would be a godsend!

It feels like Kickstarter is pretty selective about the projects they approve based on the stories I have heard. My wife had a purely creative project rejected because she had a business name attached (and that would be too much businessy I guess). As they get an increasing amount of submissions my guess is that fewer will get through.

I have a feature set that's been growing quite a bit, haven't typed it all out in one place yet as I've focused on getting out something that can be used quickly.
The overall goal is to make a great WordPress based tool for helping overcome 3 major obstacles to starting a project:
1) acquiring the resources/funding (solution is crowdfunding) in advance or during development,
2) acquiring a sufficient amount of interest to justify the project/ determining there's an audience that is willing to buy in to what you are doing (literally or metaphorically). And if there isn't it may not be a good idea to start at all.
3) building a community & having an audience to communicate to and get feedback from early (which is pivotal). And if it's a commercial project to have customers lined up when you're ready to launch...

Right now I'm focusing on functionality to build an email list (call it a prelaunch list, invite list or interest list) and building an attractive way for people to want to share it (similar to launchrock.com but with some variations to the basic idea).

Right now I have Mailchimp and Amazon SES integrations running so people can get started emailing and building a list at little to no cost. I'm managing the subscribers within WordPress so that its possible to reward and distinguish users that perform extra actions (such as referring others, pledging or getting the word out) and putting them higher on the list so they get some kind of benefit (for example: early access, a bonus, a kidney etc).

I will share more in a future post...but the end result will look like running your own crowdfunding page from a selfhosted WordPress install with some powerful features... or like Groupon, Kickstarter and Launchrock had a baby (that sounds a bit gross I guess).

The early demo's still a few days work away as a lot of Client work has cropped up over the past weeks (needless to say the pain of prioritizing paying bills through client work is something I hope to solve with this project). I'm happy with the progress though because I've tackled some of the major things I had no idea how to implement when I first started this.

I'd love to hear what you'd like to see in a WP based solution? What kind of functionality would be critical to you?

[jaxon]

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