This is a compelling angle for many (especially older) Kickstarter projects: when what you're buying as a backer is not the eventual product, but rather causing the product to be made at all. You're buying its production. The eventual product is like a positive externality.
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Subscription content producers have a similar vibe. Buyers aren't paying to unlock some article's paywall; they're buying into creation of future work. I wonder if this is more compelling if purchases plausibly cause marginal output: "I'll write fulltime when I get X subscribers"
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Nadia observes that sometimes the production "product" being bought is access—feeling closer to the creator, a private community, sneak peeks, behind-the-scenes, etc. My instinct is that this offering can only scale so far, but I'd be curious to learn about counter-examples!
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This has been a compelling angle to think about funding my work. In this frame, my output artifacts are public goods (essays, interfaces)—positive externalities from an ongoing process which is itself the product. My "customers" buy a verb, not a noun.
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Of course, I don't know what it means to make my production process a product. Patreon still has a "charity" vibe that doesn't seem right. I'm increasingly thinking of it more as "crowdfunding an NSF CAREER grant," which captures the causative angle. Still feels like not enough.
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I like this line of thinking!
At risk of sounding negative, here is my concern: you're effectively selling entertainment. Therefore, the incentives will be to make the production process as entertaining as possible/to work on projects with entertaining production processes.
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Yes, this seems bad. I’d want to find some way that it’s not about selling entertainment. The notion that you’re buying marginal production seems to dodge this, but I don’t know how to operationalize it compellingly.
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Is there a difference between buying marginal production and investing? Maybe the reasonable expectation of a financial return.
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Yes, I think that’s the difference, really. Fig tries to represent that difference vs Kickstarter: backers get equity. Hard to make that make sense when making public goods, but could make sense for production of private goods.
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1/ Question spawned by the discussion: does it help or hurt if there were weak decoupling between money and support for public goods?
ie. Pay into a shared pool and then say how important you think different projects are. I could imagine it moving away from utilitarian calculus
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Maybe! Getting to “vote” on an OSS project’s roadmap motivates people and companies to pay into those production processes (eg Apache foundation, W3C)
Maybe that fits with a membership model. Periodically invest in influence over a production process.
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