[Chris86]

The general idea is that for those that wish to bootstrap their business, and/or delay time before they take investment, they're odds of success increase significantly if they're able to show consistent progress, get support from peers and earn experimental or operational capital.

For example, our first winner plans to spend their funds as such:

"I'll be able to pay for the CI/CD pipeline for the next billing cycle, this lets me route the amount planned for that cost into the referral program which will, hopefully, help the platform acquire more users."

Essentially by choosing this project as their winner, the community has enabled the startup to cover some of their core operational costs so they can experiment with a new marketing/sales channels. This is exactly what we were hoping HackerStash could do :)

At face value 'points' can lead to distorted incentives, but we're working hard to ensure that altruistic behaviour is most rewarded. Second to altruism is evidencing clear progress in your own project, with some big features coming in the next few weeks to support that. In fact I'd say the later is our current weakness but not for lack of attention, just we've decided we'll learn and iterate faster with more eyeballs on the product, users in the contest etc.

Thanks so much for the feedback, also glad to hear you like the UI!

[thirstysprout]

post this in https://www.facebook.com/groups/pitchback - its a community of founders exchanging feedback on their startup pitches and ideas