determine if Gittip is viable for personal funding

[chadwhitacre]

I'm not interested in games here. To me, Flattr is a game. If it weren't, the people building it would be making their livelihood from Flattr itself, not from their 10% cut. Flattr is a game.

My proposal is that to make Gittip viable for personal funding we need to bump the tip amounts an order of magnitude, keeping a single "token amount" option.

---

Original: need to increase tip amounts an order of magnitude

I want people to make their living on Gittip, but the current tip amounts are too small for this.

$52,000 per year == $1,000 per week

If the average tip amount is 32¢ then you need 3,125 tippers to hit $1,000 per week. That's too many people. Think about the numbers you see in followers and friends on Twitter and Facebook. We need to optimize for Dunbar's number: 150.

$1,000 from 150 people is $6.67 each. We need to up our tips by an order of magnitude and then some:

$0.08 => $ 1.60
$0.16 => $ 3.20
$0.32 => $ 6.40
$0.64 => $12.80
$1.28 => $25.60

The current average tip is $0.47 to five other people. Let's surmise that options presented affect the average by setting people's expectations of what they're "supposed to" tip, that people basically distribute their tips evenly across the available spectrum of tip amounts. We have to assume also, though, that upping the amounts is going to reduce the number of people tipping. Let's pretend that the difference between the $0.47 that people currently average and the $0.32 that is the average of the options can buffer some of the drop we'll see. The other thing is that $52,000 is above the US average of $42,000. But there's health care, of course, and also that number is from 2005. Meh, I think this is a sensible next step, anyway.

I believe the $25.60 per week option would satisfy @jacobian's use case of tipping $100 a month to 10 people (#76).

[chadwhitacre]

Existing tips would be preserved, but if someone wanted to change a tip they would have to go to one of the new options.

[chadwhitacre]

The risk I see is that this would flatten our growth to the point of death.

[chadwhitacre]

Of course, if people can't make a living on Gittip then it's as good as dead to me, anyway. :-)

[synapticarbors]

I think it would be better, if you are going to increase the tip ranges, to either:

1. Add a box to take custom amounts to collect data about what people are willing to give, while still trying to skew the expectation.
2. Have a button that either increases or decreases the suggested amount on the buttons by some fixed factor. This maintains the increased expectation, but allows tippers an out that is discrete in nature (like the original idea of the fixed-amount tip buttons).

[chmullig]

(As always, feel free to ignore me. I'm not planning on putting much, if any, money into gittip anytime soon, nor can I imagine any circumstance where people would tip me).

I have two divergent feelings:

1. Yes, some people should definitely be able to make a living off gittip
2. Most people won't and shouldn't.

The reality is most people aren't contributing so much that they should be making any substantial amount of money off gittip. Some will get a beer or two every once in a while. Others might get an annual laptop upgrade paid for. Others may get a large chunk of living expenses, and some might find it their primary income source. I think gittip should honor these asymmetric situations. The list of people I'd be willing to tip $1 a month to is pretty long, the list of people I'd tip $25 a week to is quite short (namely, zero).

I like @synapticarbors suggestion of custom amounts. Let me tip $100/week to someone if I want to, but certainly don't disallow a quarter a week to some new developer that I want to give a token amount to.

[chadwhitacre]

@chmullig You're right that there's a range of possibilities that need to be considered, and you've described them well. It should be possible to make a living on Gittip but that needn't be the modal use case. Question: Is the low end, $1.60 per week, too high?

@synapticarbors Well, I'm reluctant to make it too complicated, and I think the distribution I just put up on the stats page gives us some interesting data about what people are willing to give (see below):

Amount ($)   %   No.
--------------------
   0.08    27.9  212
   0.16    15.3  116
   0.32    15.0  114
   0.64    12.2   93
   1.28    29.6  225

What I'm seeing is a bimodal distribution, where we've got a bunch of tips that could probably be even higher than $1.28 a week, and a second bunch of tips that want to hover down in the range of the "token amount." For IHasAMoney.com I figured the "token amount" was $2.99 a month (I tried to price it so it felt free), which is about 75¢ a week. @chmullig suggests 25¢, or $1 per month. Is $1.60 per week, $6.40 per month, too high for a "token amount"? I think so. Maybe we drop the bottom down? How about this:

   Per Week  Per Year (x 52)   Per Month (÷ 12)
   ---------------------------------------------------------
$     0.25          13                 1.08
$     3            156                13
$     6            312                26
$    12            624                52
$    24           1248               104

This keeps us well under the $13,000 per year where we start to get into tax implications in the US (#96). It gives people an option who are looking to tip a token amount, and a range of options to people interested in more significant support, thereby steering people towards that option and counteracting the natural gravity towards zero.

For the record, I like the multiples in the higher amounts because it helps with anonymity in the lower reaches. If I receive $24 a week, do I have one, two, three, or four supporters? Or 96? :-)

[chadwhitacre]

I'm rescheduling #22 for next week to make room for this ticket this week. I'm starting to see this ticket as a critical moment for Gittip: I don't have bandwidth for or interest in Gittip as an eternal side project. I need it to look like it can provide an income for me in the foreseeable future, or I'll have to hand it off or wind it down.

I'm not interested in games here. To me, Flattr is a game. If it weren't, the people building it would be making their livelihood from Flattr itself, not from their 10% cut. Flattr is a game.

I'm interested in input from @jtauber, @alex, @jezdez, and anyone else interested in whether Gittip is viable for personal funding.

[chadwhitacre]

Copied some of the previous comment to the top and renamed the ticket. Going to call for input on Twitter.

[alex]

I want gittip to be viable for personal funding, and I agree that higher amounts can help towards that. But I also think you need to look at better marketting and conversion. ATM there are under 1000 users and only 52 with a credit card. Getting those two numbers up is the number one thing to focus on. Github has over a million users, stay focused on developers and target that market aggressively.

[chadwhitacre]

@alex What are we marketing? A fun game, or something more?

[alex]

Gittip should be two things:

1. An ability to give back, to say thanks.

2. An ability to help make the next great open source project.

We're all users of dozens of great projects, and if you ask the creators of any of them what they're missing to make it better, or to create the next thing, the answer is always time. Gittip is a way to try to give them that.

[jtauber]

• I want gittip to be viable for personal funding too and am starting to explicitly ask people to support me via it
• I think it's very early days and initial growth has been good so I think it's a little too early to worry it's just an eternal side project
• I agree with @alex that the focus should remain on developers on Github
• I also think the ability to tip an order of magnitude more is useful (and necessary)

[chadwhitacre]

The strongest marketing for Gittip is when Alex Gaynor and James Tauber and Jannis Leidel say at conferences and on the Internet, "I make my living on Gittip." If I hear that, I'm like, "Oh, wow! That must be serious."

So it's chicken and egg.

@alex and @jtauber: You each have ~4,300 followers on Twitter. The math needs to be more like:

(300 * $5) + (2,000 * $0.25) = $2,000 / wk

And less like:

4,300 * $0.47 = $2,000 / wk

Tippers will be some fraction of Twitter followers. The data above shows that a) a good number of people are willing to give more, and b) we still need a "token" option.

[chadwhitacre]

I think it's very early days and initial growth has been good so I think it's a little too early to worry it's just an eternal side project

Fair enough. I'm at a point where I need to a) spend less time on Gittip, or b) see more promise in it. Trying to navigate that. I've removed some of the "sky is falling" from the description.