[brudgers]

Economically, the issues I see are related to the fungibility of money and its time value. My $100 and your $100 are interchangeable. Our workproducts, probably not. If I authorize a payment to a company through Stripe it happens immediately (barring charge backs) and imposes minimal logistic overhead beyond counting the money and delivering the product on the company. If I commit to ten hours of work, due to the nature of time, it is a promise not 'cash' in hand. Moreover, there is the burden of coordinating that work. Maybe it's six months until the company needs an office design and that slips to a year and in the interim I'm busy and so it's fifteen months until it happens.

Busy people tend to trade money for time. Not so busy people are often not so busy for a reason. Moreover, professionally competent people tend to have no shortage of opportunities to work for free.

Anyway, it is an interesting idea. I think the key bits are building an economic community and creating trust.

Good luck.

[ideaphore]

Thank you very much. These are great points and exactly what we set out to solve when we undertook the project. We will definitely put a time limit on when pledged time can be claimed (likely 3 months after campaign closes). Aside from doing work for simple rewards, rewards for pledged time will include cash and equity. So building a profile of some free work could lead to pay work pretty quickly.

[brudgers]

You're welcome.

My experience over the years with 'work for free/discount and I will tell all my friends about you' rather quickly led me to realize that having someone tell all their friends that I will work for free was not a good way to find paying work. Most gig people learn this pretty quick if they didn't know it intuitively already.

I don't think that profiles are a viable first order alternative to the time value and fungibility of money. My Twitter might be worth the investment required to curate and manage it over time because there is evidence to suggest possible positive effects.

On a site like CrowdRaising there's an long causal chain:

  make profile -> volunteer on project -> complete projects -> solicit positive feedback -> update profile -> volunteer on project -> complete project ->..... get substantial benefit

It is lengthy, unproven, imagined, inherently fragile, and largely out of my control. I'm probably better served by investing in Github or Linkedin etc.

User stories that depend on high levels of commitment to the platform are probably not sound premises for business decisions. Crowdfunding sites are built around two sound psychological models: casual users who will swipe a credit card for something that looks cool and a few people who don't encounter much ethical friction taking their money.

[ideaphore]

That's very interesting. I think this assumes that companies will be asking their crowd to do for them what they do for a living. But we are focusing on customer development (e.g. surveys, interview), and business development (introductions, and social media shares). These are useful, simple things that startups need and are fairly fungible in terms of time-value. For less fungible work, like what you do for a living, those will likely be limited to instances when the company is hiring. In this way, they can distribute one project to all the people who pledge time to that tier and interview the best result(s). Everyone else gets a reward. Also, the site will be gamified in that for every hour you pledge, you'll be given an hour. In other words, if you pledge 100 hours to take surveys and do social media shares, you'll be able to run your own campaign and raise 100 hours for your project for free.

[brudgers]

100 hours of someone else's work means lots of my time coordinating and supervising it...and a non-trivial probability that I will not like what I get. I mean, my first thought regarding social media shares is that someone will just write a bot or outsource it to someone with a bot.

But again to the economics. There is an implication that the companies using the platform are doing so as an alternative (and perhaps not by choice) to capitalization. Betting (time or money) on an under-capitalized company is not the same as betting on a long shot (VC's bet on adequately capitalized long-shots).

Anyway, the proof will always be whether or not people adopt the platform.