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by dlandis 3309 days ago
> * Run a Patreon (Vue). Pro: you have autonomy and recurring revenue (yay!). Con: now you're a personality. This is limited to celebs who are good at marketing _themselves_ as much as their software

I don't see this one as necessarily true. And it doesn't even seem to hold up in the one example you gave of Vue. Looking over the patreon page, Evan seems to be totally marketing the technology and not marketing "himself" at all.
1 comments
jashmenn 3308 days ago
Ah sorry! I absolutely did not mean this to disparage Evan. I think very highly of him and love Vue. So in that case, my example may not fit my point, which is that it's hard to become a personality (and/or brand) that is known well enough to support a full time income.

One might say that other open-source projects don't make a significant income because they don't have value, but I think you only need to look at e.g. the npm download stats for many packages to see that this isn't true.

Put another way, _many_ software libraries enable huge amounts of business value that is not captured by the authors of those libraries.

For instance, if you're a JS dev, you've probably used lodash or moment, but maybe can't even name who the authors are of those projects.

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nolanl 3308 days ago
Maybe it's more accurate to say that, when you're on Patreon, part of your job suddenly becomes a "hustle"? E.g. in Evan's case I get the feeling that without a constant stream of conference appearances and blog posts it would be harder to drive Patreon donations.
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jashmenn 3308 days ago
I like this. It's not as if Evan is a "celebrity" a priori - he writes good software, he travels and speaks, and Vue's success is in large part because of his hustle, as you put it.

This idea of "hustle as your new second job" is a better phrasing than my parent comment where it sounds like I'm implying that self-promotion is bad or somehow empty.

Becoming a personality is an excellent strategy - if you're known and loved you'll never starve.

I'm mostly trying to point out that time spent hustling takes away from time building. It's still valuable in it's own way, but many OSS devs (who have created software people find valuable and use) don't want to travel to speak at conferences to pay their bills.

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