seek funding from Mozilla

[chadwhitacre]

In conversation at #314, Louis-David Benyayer suggested that we seek funding from Mozilla and other large open-source foundations.

https://twitter.com/LDBenyayer/status/735556364269916162

---

We're writing our proposal at https://public.etherpad-mozilla.org/p/gratipay-moss-track-2-2016.

The application form is at https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1rwYQTT-9-eldS-kElY646bMwMzJpxfL8lDskX86xgCQ/viewform.

[chadwhitacre]

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/grants/

[chadwhitacre]

https://wiki.mozilla.org/MOSS/Projects_in_use_by_Mozilla

[chadwhitacre]

https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2015/10/23/mozilla-launches-open-source-support-program/ https://wiki.mozilla.org/MOSS

[chadwhitacre]

Looks like there are three main programs, and the one we'd fit best is Mission Partners—which has a deadline in a few days!

The deadline for applications for the first round of awards is 23:59 on Tuesday 31st May 2016.

[chadwhitacre]

To: [Mozillian introduced in private email by LDB] Subject: Gratipay & Mozilla

Thank you for the introduction, Louis-David! Moving you to bcc ...

Greetings, []! I'm not sure what Louis-David has shared with you already. I work on a project called Gratipay, which provides payments for open companies. We launched four years ago and have moved a little over 1M USD. We are funded via pay-what-you-want (prix libre) on our own platform, and we operate as openly as we responsibly can.

So far we have been bootstrapping from revenue, but Louis-David and I had a conversation during OuiShare Fest in which he suggested that Mozilla might be a good partner to help capitalize Gratipay further. I've started looking into Mozilla's funding initiatives on this public GitHub ticket. Are you a good person to talk to further about this? I note that the Mission Partners program has an initial deadline of May 31. Do either of these times work for you for a video call?

Friday, May 27 (tomorrow) at 15h00 Paris time Monday, May 30 at 15h00

My preference would be to use Google Hangouts on Air so that we can live-stream and archive the call on YouTube. Skype or another private method would be fine as well, though I'll at least need to summarize our conversation publicly for the sake of the Gratipay community.

Thanks for your time! :-)

[chadwhitacre]

Ping @bbangert @tarekziade.

Do you think Gratipay is a good candidate for the Mozilla MOSS Mission Partners track?

[chadwhitacre]

Hmm ... maybe @Gratipay should apply? Discussing here: https://github.com/gratipay/inside.gratipay.com/issues/637 …. cc: @AlexSalkever @tarek_ziade

https://twitter.com/whit537/status/735841509501751296

[chadwhitacre]

Looks like the Mission Partners track was launched a couple weeks ago:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.moss/kEfcZkfb2Go https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2016/05/11/mozilla-open-source-support-moss-now-open-to-all-projects/ https://twitter.com/mozilla/status/730421316432613376

[chadwhitacre]

Therefore, applications for Mission Partners do not require a Mozillian to support them, as applications for Foundational Technology do.

https://wiki.mozilla.org/MOSS/Mission_Partners#FAQs

[chadwhitacre]

Instead, they must be endorsed by a well-known and respected figure from a wider software community of which the project is a part, who is not directly connected with your project. This could be a language community, or a national community - it does not have to be the international open source community.

Finding an endorser within the deadline seems like a big part of the work here. Who could we ask?

• Guido?
• Resig?
• Kenneth?

[chadwhitacre]

The other interesting questions are:

Requested amount:

Please give in US dollars (max: $250,000)

What are the concrete, specific outputs and outcomes this grant would produce, and how do those activities further the Mozilla Mission?

Please describe what you would use the funds for - what you are going to build, hack or fix. Also, explains how it furthers our mission, perhaps tying your activities to items in the Manifesto - https://www.mozilla.org/about/manifesto/. (Max 8k chars)

Please tell us more about how your project is managed. Please describe your core team.

Please tell us more about your community.

[chadwhitacre]

Finding an endorser within the deadline seems like a big part of the work here. Who could we ask?

Maybe Jeff Spies?

[chadwhitacre]

I skimmed through GratiPay's site. I'm not the right person to talk to about business, I have an engineering role here. I also host lots of events in our space (in Paris). And I don't know personally the right people in Mozilla (I know their team and names though). So if you found information on how to get funding from us, you know more than I do.

I'm not sure it's useful to record our conversation as there will be nothing official I can tell you. But if you still want some informal contact (who knows if I have an important info for you), let me know and I'll get on hangouts by 15:00 tomorrow.

Cheers, and maybe tomorrow !

---

Thanks, []. Let's hold off on a call for now. The MOSS pages list some potential contacts, I think I will follow up on those.

Thanks for the response and best wishes for now! À plus tard ! :-)

[chadwhitacre]

Draft 1

Project description:

Gratipay offers payment products for open organizations: pay-what-you-want payments from customers to organizations, and take-what-you-want compensation from open organizations to their collaborators. Our customers include open-source projects, open SaaS products, and coworking spaces. We've been around for four years and have moved over $1 million (US), though we had to reboot the business a year ago due to legal concerns. Now we're approaching 200 customers on Gratipay 2.0, and we move $1,000 per week. Gratipay competes on price because we're pay-what-you-want on our own platform (our "soft fee" ends up being 5% of total volume), and we compete on mission because we're here to cultivate an economy of gratitude, generosity, and love! :-)

---

Requested amount:

Please give in US dollars (max: $250,000)

$250,000

---

What are the concrete, specific outputs and outcomes this grant would produce, and how do those activities further the Mozilla Mission?

Please describe what you would use the funds for - what you are going to build, hack or fix. Also, explains how it furthers our mission, perhaps tying your activities to items in the Manifesto - https://www.mozilla.org/about/manifesto/. (Max 8k chars)

== Outcomes ==

This grant would fund two orders of magnitude of growth for Gratipay. As mentioned, we currently move $1,000 per week for ~200 customers. Our goal with this grant would be to reach $100,000 weekly volume for ~20,000 customers within two years. The grant would fund activities of the Gratipay core team, including but not limited to marketing, sales, product design and development, customer support, accounting, security, compliance, and governance. Here are specific projects on our plate:

Improve the product.—There are many glaring deficiencies in our basic giving workflow for individual and corporate givers, and on the receiver side as well.

Reimplement take-what-you-want compensation.—Our main innovation is take-what-you-want compensation, but we turned this off after a two-year pilot when we rebooted as Gratipay 2.0. We need to bring it back.

Implement identity verification.—We need to store and verify national identity information in order to participate more fully in the global financial system.

Strengthen security.—We need to evolve our security program, especially as we start handling identity information.

Diversify payments infrastructure.—We need to work with more partners to reduce risk and costs, and expand our service.

Account for funds.—We recently set up a double-entry accounting system with a CPA, and now we need to input four years of data.

Clean up tech debt.—In particular, we made some database schema mistakes that are slowing us down in other areas.

For more details, please see our recent "Making it Right" blog post:

https://gratipay.news/making-it-right-f8e1eccb46e

== Mission Alignment ==

Mozilla's mission is "to ensure the Internet is a global public resource, open and accessible to all. An Internet that truly puts people first, where individuals can shape their own experience and are empowered, safe and independent."

Fueling Gratipay's growth furthers Mozilla's mission by contributing to a vibrant and sustainable open-source software ecosystem (Principle 7).

Fueling Gratipay's growth protects and empowers individuals on the Internet (Principles 3, 4, and 5), because Gratipay's pay-what-you-want model is less invasive and privacy-eroding than the ad models currently prevalent.

Fueling Gratipay's growth improves the organizations that provide the Internet (Principles 5, 6, and 8), because Gratipay strongly encourages open organizations.

Gratipay's values of safety, consent, transparency, openness, and love ("the ladder of love"— http://inside.gratipay.com/big-picture/brand/) strongly align with Mozilla's principles of security and privacy (Principle 4), individual autonomy (Principle 5), and transparency (Principle 8). Indeed, Gratipay has been a leader in developing "[t]ransparent community-based processes [that] promote participation, accountability and trust" (Principle 8). Furthermore, Gratipay aligns with Mozilla's principle of balancing "commercial profit and public benefit" (Principle 9): we exist to make collaboration economically normal.

---

Please tell us more about how your project is managed. Please describe your core team.

Gratipay is managed as a benevolent dictatorship with a core team of about seven people from four countries. Our internal processes are documented on our (public) intranet, /Inside Gratipay/:

http://inside.gratipay.com/big-picture/welcome

---

Please tell us more about your community.

Gratipay has two layers of community: contributors and users. We have had 100+ code contributors and 900+ GitHub issue commenters over the past four years, and 100 people took compensation from Gratipay during our 2-year take-what-you-want pilot. We've held three annual in-person contributor retreats. In our 1.0 phase we saw about 4200 users from 30+ countries, and under Gratipay 2.0 we currently have 187 approved receivers and about 750 givers.

[chadwhitacre]

To: Resig Subject: dustin' off the ol' Gratipay

John!

Hey, man. Hope you're well. :-)

I'm writing because we're starting to ramp Gratipay back up again after a couple rocky years, and as part of that we're looking to apply for a grant from Mozilla. One of the things they're asking for is an endorsement from "a well-known and respected figure from a wider software community of which the project is a part, who is not directly connected with your project."

They're asking for "a paragraph or two on why supporting your work via this grant is a great idea." You wrote such a nice post about Gittip back in the day—we could almost use parts of it verbatim here.

Would you be willing and able to endorse Gratipay for this grant application? :-)

[chadwhitacre]

I posted a message on the mozilla.moss Google Group, but it seems to have gotten swallowed—perhaps into a moderator queue? I'll check again later ...

[chadwhitacre]

Yesssssss ...

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.moss/CZY1TiyZOyY

Some questions which occur to me:

• This seems a little like a request for VC money. Is it?
• Is Gratipay's software open source? I assume it is because that's a stated criteria, but it's not noted anywhere.
• It's not clear how $250,000 will translate into two orders of magnitude of growth (as opposed to, say, one, three or no orders of magnitude).
• It's not clear how $250,000 maps onto the list of tasks that need to be done, other than that it's the maximum amount you are allowed to ask for and there's lots to do.
• It's not clear how "take-what-you-want" works and in what context people would use it.
• The Mission Alignment section makes many statements but doesn't back them up very well.
• Perhaps a wiki page rather than an issue might be a better place to collaboratively or incrementally author a document? :-)

(John Resig would be an entirely appropriate person to be an endorser.)

Gerv

[chadwhitacre]

I've moved the draft to an etherpad. I'm going to pursue the conversation over on mozilla.moss without cross-posting here, since mozilla.moss is an open list.

[chadwhitacre]

• [x] Explain how $250,000 will translate into two orders of magnitude of growth (as opposed to, say, one, three or no orders of magnitude).
• [x] Explain how $250,000 maps onto the list of tasks that need to be done, other than that it's the maximum amount you are allowed to ask for and there's lots to do.
• [x] Explain how "take-what-you-want" works and in what context people would use it.
• [x] Back up statements in the Mission Alignment section.

[chadwhitacre]

Finding an endorser within the deadline seems like a big part of the work here. Who could we ask?

Maybe mitsuhiko?

[mattbk]

Stats for growth (payday 208):

Gratipay processes about $1,000 per week for 178 Teams and about 700 ~users.

1 OOM growth: $10,000 per week, 1,780 Teams, 7,000 ~users 2 OOM growth: $100,000 per week, 17,800 Teams, 70,000 ~users 3 OOM growth: $1,000,000 per week, 178,000 Teams, 700,000 ~users

To get that sort of growth, I think we need to address some of the core "financial system" issues we're having and make things easy. How to make taxes easier? How to include as many different payin and payout routes as possible? At the same time, how to scale up Team review or really proxy out the KYC stuff?

[mattbk]

This a great exercise to think about growth, anyway. If we're focusing on the long tail and using the processing amount as a growth measure, the number of teams and ~users will probably grow much, much more in order to meet each order of magnitude increase in processing.

[kaguillera]

Some questions which occur to me:

• This seems a little like a request for VC money. Is it?
• Is Gratipay's software open source? I assume it is because that's a stated criteria, but it's not noted anywhere.
• It's not clear how $250,000 will translate into two orders of magnitude of growth (as opposed to, say, one, three or no orders of magnitude).
• It's not clear how $250,000 maps onto the list of tasks that need to be done, other than that it's the maximum amount you are allowed to ask for and there's lots to do.
• It's not clear how "take-what-you-want" works and in what context people would use it.
• The Mission Alignment section makes many statements but doesn't back them up very well.
• Perhaps a wiki page rather than an issue might be a better place to collaboratively or incrementally author a document? :-)

(John Resig would be an entirely appropriate person to be an endorser.)
Gerv

My only concern is how were are supposed to address all of those points in 8k chars. 😱

[chadwhitacre]

@kaguillera :-) Check out the thread. We had some additional back-and-forth.

To get that sort of growth,

@mattbk I think what Gerv is questioning is how predictable growth is. VCs are in the business of taking risks—counting on 9 out of 10 investments to fail, so number 10 has to really win. We have to keep in mind that MOSS isn't VC, it's a grant.

Maybe a middle ground between the "$X for Y feature" and "Zx growth" paradigms would be to put together an annual budget, and use that together with this tool (https://github.com/gratipay/inside.gratipay.com/issues/405#issuecomment-195014364) to make some worst, likely, and best-case predictions. Here's a spreadsheet. What numbers should we plug in for you, @aandis @clone1018 @mattbk @rohitpaulk @TheHmadQureshi et al.? What other line-items are missing or should be changed?

[clone1018]

I'll take $1/week. Are hosting costs included in operations or is this just "payroll"?

[chadwhitacre]

http://paulgraham.com/aord.html

Our revenue right now is $200/wk. Our expenses are $100/wk, so technically we're default alive right now but only because we're all willing to work for free, which isn't sustainable and defeats the whole purpose of Gratipay. A few scenarios:

Growth Rate (%)	Weekly Expenses ($)	Capital Required ($k)	Years to Profitability
0.00	3,000	∞	∞
1.25	3,000	432	4.2
1.25	4,000	672	4.6
2.50	3,000	218	2.1
2.50	4,000	322	2.3
2.50	5,000	467	2.5

[chadwhitacre]

Are hosting costs included in operations or is this just "payroll"?

Payroll is "Core Team" on that spreadsheet. I'm taking the operations number from the old finances spreadsheet, which includes (is mostly) hosting costs.

[chadwhitacre]

Alright, so (re)reading http://paulgraham.com/aord.html, our biggest problem is our 0% growth over the past year. Number of teams is increasing, but users and volume are constant, and revenue is slipping:

[chadwhitacre]

That doesn't make us look very good. 😞

[chadwhitacre]

What the company should have done is address the fundamental problem: that the product is only moderately appealing. Hiring people is rarely the way to fix that. More often than not it makes it harder. At this early stage, the product needs to evolve more than to be "built out," and that's usually easier with fewer people.

Asking whether you're default alive or default dead may save you from this. Maybe the alarm bells it sets off will counteract the forces that push you to overhire. Instead you'll be compelled to seek growth in other ways. For example, by doing things that don't scale, or by redesigning the product in the way only founders can.

http://paulgraham.com/aord.html

[chadwhitacre]

Gah. I am feeling like applying for a MOSS grant is a waste of time until we can demonstrate some growth. 😞

[kaguillera]

I don't agree...The reason (in my opinion) that we have not grown is because of the removal of payroll/payments. This was/is our may features that allow open-source developers and their contributors the ability to work on there project full-time. The same applies to the Gratipay's core team. The core team including you need to be able to focus on the development of the system and this funding would allow that. Thus this Paul Graham may have a point but I don't we are an exception to this case and thus could do with the Grant. Think of how you can build Gratipay without having to worry about money or working for someone else and taking your time away from developing your dream. Again the worst that can happen is the say no.

[chadwhitacre]

Maybe mitsuhiko?

To: Armin Ronacher Subject: endorse Gratipay for Mozilla grant?

Greetings! Hope you're well. :-)

I'm writing because Gratipay is seeking a grant from Mozilla, and one of the things they're asking for is an endorsement from "a hacker with a reputation." We thought of you! :-) The commitment would be to write "a paragraph or two on why [Mozilla] supporting [Gratipay's] work via this grant is a great idea," and possibly to field follow-up questions from Mozilla.

Would you be willing to help us out with this?

[chadwhitacre]

I am feeling like applying for a MOSS grant is a waste of time until we can demonstrate some growth.

On the other hand, we're at least stabilized—we're not shrinking. :-)

[chadwhitacre]

I note that PyCon is happening right now. Armin may be away from email.

[bbangert]

Whats the gratipocalypse?

[chadwhitacre]

Whats the gratipocalypse?

@bbangert The Gratipocalypse is the week we went out of business because the legality of our old terms of service were questionable. Deets at https://gratipay.news/gratipocalypse-42fd0ec0d9e8. We bounced right back but have been flat for a year since while we clean up and get reoriented.

https://gratipay.com/about/stats

[chadwhitacre]

@bbangert Wanna endorse us? 😎

[chadwhitacre]

Alright, I've reworked the application in light of the conversation with Gerv.

https://public.etherpad-mozilla.org/p/gratipay-moss-track-2-2016

I took the 4% best-case scenario from the spreadsheet at https://github.com/gratipay/inside.gratipay.com/issues/78#issuecomment-51561491 (which is in months; I divided by 4.333 to convert to weeks).

[chadwhitacre]

Didn't get this in before the first-round deadline (largely for lack of endorsement). Let's keep an eye on the first-round results and consider applying down the line.

[chadwhitacre]

The first eight awardees are:

Tor: $152,500. Tails: $77,000. Caddy: $50,000. Mio: $30,000. DNSSEC/DANE Chain Stapling: $25,000. Godot Engine: $20,000. PeARS: $15,500. NVDA: $15,000.

https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2016/06/22/mozilla-awards-385000-to-open-source-projects-as-part-of-moss-mission-partners-program/

[chadwhitacre]

Now that it's out, "Roads and Bridges" (cf. #732) should be the basis of our case here.

[chadwhitacre]

The way to approach this is with a small, defined pitch. We're not Tor. $250,000 is laughable. We should come up with something in the $15,000 to $50,000 range. Furthermore, based on the post announcing the first mission partners, we need to make it really really easy for them to write a sentence of the form "This award will be used to __."

So what should we write the grant for? Looking at our roadmap, we are inching closer to bringing back takes for Team Gratipay. The next thing on our list is to finish cleaning up from the Gratipocalypse. That's not very exciting. Other things that come to mind are design (#298) and travel (#711), though with a deadline tomorrow for #711 that's probably too late (and we're not clear about it anyway). If we're building off of Roads and Bridges then of course it's 3.ii. on the roadmap that we want to pitch: "Solve Corporate Sponsorship of Open-Source." The problem is that we're not ready for that yet.

Here's what I'm leaning towards:

1. Fold "2.ii. Make Widgets 2.0" in with "3.i. Tighten Onboarding Flow."
2. Pitch Mozilla on a design refresh.
3. Design refresh runs in parallel with the rest of "2. Finish cleaning up from the Gratipocalypse" through the remainder of 2016.
4. Design refresh sets us up to launch into "3. Knock pay-what-you-want out of the park" in 2017.

"This reward will be used to refresh Gratipay's visual identity."

Thoughts?

In terms of https://github.com/gratipay/inside.gratipay.com/issues/179#issuecomment-129602076, this would be trying to avoid crowding out by putting money into non-technical work. We could easily spend $50,000 on a redesign, no problem. A year or two ago I referred a fairly straightforward website project that ended up costing $65,000. Compared to the $50/wk that we're talking about paying ourselves (#747), there's real potential for you/me/us to feel resentful. Would it be better to pitch something that involves the money going through team takes? Could we find designers to join our Team Gratipay rather than hiring an agency?

[chadwhitacre]

In private email (https://github.com/gratipay/inside.gratipay.com/issues/732#issuecomment-236776740), Nadia Eghbal declined to endorse us, because of general reservations about crowdfunding as a sustainable solution.

[sheerun]

Is etherpad unavailable only for me?

[mattbk]

@sheerun I can't access it either, I get "Service Unavailable."

[chadwhitacre]

Is etherpad unavailable only for me? I can't access it either, I get "Service Unavailable."

It's back now for me:

https://public.etherpad-mozilla.org/p/gratipay-moss-track-2-2016

[chadwhitacre]

Okay, I've rewritten the grant based on https://github.com/gratipay/inside.gratipay.com/issues/637#issuecomment-236044779. I ended up pitching it in terms of "improving the new customer sign-up process" (aka #432).

https://public.etherpad-mozilla.org/p/gratipay-moss-track-2-2016

Now to find an endorser ...

[chadwhitacre]

Probably the thing to do is to go through our current teams and reach out to some of the folks from that list, explain that we're trying to jump-start Gratipay and ask for their help. We want "a well-known and respected figure from a wider software community of which the project is a part, who is not directly connected with your project," so let's maybe target the more well-known projects we've managed to attract.

[chadwhitacre]

Here's an etherpad with our teams on it:

https://public.etherpad-mozilla.org/p/gratipay-moss-track-2-2016-endorser

I'm going to go through that and whittle down a list of higher-profile projects to approach in private email.