Ask HN: Review our startup (bitloot)

http://www.bitloot.com

by drewcrawford • 18 years ago

41 56 18 years ago

brk• 18 years ago

Looks like a neat idea. Reminds me of http://www.gimado.com/, just more targeted. I think these investment sites could be a very lucrative way to raise money for small startup operations.

tptacek4• 18 years ago

Why is this going to work where every other open source bounty site has failed?

drewcrawford10• 18 years ago

Open source bounty sites are, in my experience, geared toward solving developer problems. It's rare to see non-coders visit an OSS bounty site and create a bounty.

We're geared toward normal people funding the software projects. Normal people don't want to compile sourcecode; we provide developers incentives for distributing binaries. Normal people don't use wiki markup to describe what they want; we let them use a WSIWYG editor.

Normal people also use different platforms (mostly Windows and Mac). Making binaries work across platforms (12 people want Windows, 5 people want Mac, 3 only care about the source...) and giving the developer the tools to field those platforms (Is there demand for a Mac port? Is it worth my time?) is something that hasn't been solved yet by any bounty system I've seen.

davidw2• 18 years ago

I'd be as happy as all get out to see a solution to one of the problems of open source economics: connecting developers with money in order to create a positive feedback loop where developers make more money and can spend more time on their projects.

However... "It's rare to see non-coders visit an OSS bounty site and create a bounty." There's a good reason for that: normal people are going to look for something that does what they want, now, not go through all the hassle of bounties and other things only to possibly see some code who knows when.

Maybe the site can be 'salvaged' by doing some creative tweaking to make it into something else that is a little bit more likely to make money? Good luck in any case!

tsetse-fly5• 18 years ago

Who are these "normal people?" Can you give an example of software they would be interested in funding?

I'm having a hard time imagining exactly who you're targeting.

How is this different than microPledge?

fauigerzigerk• 18 years ago

Normal people are not interested in open source. You should make that optional, but it's probably an ideological decision on your part, not a business decision. I accept that.

cool-RR• 18 years ago

This looks cool!

tsetse-fly5• 18 years ago

Is this guy a spambot?

clay• 18 years ago

I recommend adding as many ideas as you can and even fund stuff out of your pocket. I click browse and all I see is "test" and "wordobe test"...

alexkay2• 18 years ago

I like the idea, even though I'm a bit pessimistic about it kicking off...

A few glitches I noticed:

* The video takes awhile to load, while loading there's a black rectangle. May be use an image while the flash is loading, or bootstrap your flash with a preloader a la youTube.

* The "Help" form is behind the flash video.

* Consider dimming the background when the help form is open. Also, close it when the user clicks anywhere not on the form or presses Esc. ThickBox, GreyBox, LightBox, Uservoice, etc all do that, it's something the users expect.

* As clay suggested add some real content, no one is going to contribute to a test site.

drewcrawford10• 18 years ago

On what browser/platform is "Help" rendering behind the flash video?

alexkay2• 18 years ago

FF3 and Chrome running under Vista x64. Works fine with IE7 though.

rw• 18 years ago

Cool.

UI crits: 1) Try browsing without javascript enabled (cough). 2) Try using the back button in any project-specific page. You have to hit it multiple times, quickly, to go back.

breily• 18 years ago

Seconding these criticisms - they make it very difficult to browse the site. A related problem is that you can't right click links to open them in their own tab from the browse page. All in all a cool idea though (not sure I see the business potential though).

fendale• 18 years ago

> A related problem is that you can't right click links to open them in their own tab

That is THE most annoying thing a web developer can do to a user if you ask me!

rokhayakebe2• 18 years ago

Great idea, what is your marketing plan?

I would suggest finding a few businesses that spend a substantial amount of money every month on proprietary software. Then ask them to support the development of a free and better version by pledging a small amount each.

The supporters can see it as a form of advertising for one. Every company would love to have its name behind a piece of software that has the ability to change the game. They also get to fix a problem and reduce future expenses.

Not only that, this new software will be constantly updated by talented people who are passionated about the problem they are solving and they will not have to pay a penny more for new versions.

drewcrawford10• 18 years ago

We've got a couple of companies we're in talks with, but of course we're looking for more. If you can think of any, shoot me an e-mail (in profile).

rokhayakebe2• 18 years ago

I do not have any from the top of my head, but visit VCs website and search their enterprise portfolio. Once you find a few companies you like, go to their sites and see what the customers they target and email those guys.

catone• 18 years ago

I would be careful using PayPal. Another bounty site - microPledge - recently shut down because using PayPal to hold money in Escrow is against their TOS.

I wrote about it here: http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2008/10/09/open-source-fundin...

I'm sure there are a lot of project owners from microPledge looking for a new home, but using PayPal might just lead your down the same path.

brandon272• 18 years ago

Yeah. Referring to PayPal as your "secret vault" is probably misleading, too.

drewcrawford10• 18 years ago

This is top on our list. We decided it was better to launch and start responding to market feedback immediately than delay launch while we integrated with a (more-reliable) payment provider.

It's good to see this getting such attention here, because it's something we discussed at some length internally as a potentially really big problem, and it validates that we're spending time talking about the right things.

benhoyt• 18 years ago

Hi, Ben from microPledge here. Hmmm ... it's not that PayPal is an "unreliable" payment provider. We found them to be pretty reliable. It's that we (and you, by the looks) are contradicting their ToS in quite an up-front way. We didn't know this at first (i.e., we didn't read the fine print carefully enough.) It's partly holding money in escrow, and partly collecting money on behalf of other "traders" (the developers).

As soon as they catch a whiff of that, they'll shut your account down, and lock your money in for 6 months.

It's not very pleasant, to put it mildly, and if I were you I'd switch to AlertPay or some other provider ASAP. Sorry to be negative about this ... but I'm commenting so you hopefully don't have to go through what we at microPledge did. :-)

(Edit: Oh, just curious, how much did you know about microPledge before you launched? I wouldn't be surprised either way, and certainly good on you for trying ... but your descriptions of the site on Bitloot sound awfully familiar. :-)

newt0311• 18 years ago

Nice. Very similar to http://schneier.com/paper-street-performer.html

Nice to see some implementation of it.

sanswork2• 18 years ago

I couldn't find the info on the site but how do you decide when to release the funds to the developer?

I've developed a similar site in the past but never publicly released it as there was a few flaws in the system that I couldn't work around. I've since moved on but I'm wondering how you managed to get around them.

For my system you got votes based on the amount you contributed. This opened the site up to people pledging just enough to get 51% of the vote then accepting any solution even bad ones.

The other way where the creator of the bounty gets the final say also opens up to people creating popular bounties then claiming them for themselves with no acceptable solution posed.

Outside of automated solutions I suppose you could have staff review each claim manually but I decided against this idea as it just couldn't scale.

Anyhow, curious to read your solutions to these problems.

drewcrawford10• 18 years ago

Voting algorithms are hard. If people game Digg and Reddit, you just know they're going to be all over you when there's money involved.

We've got some pretty good metrics that we're looking at. The obvious ones, like number of contributors, voting times, and so on. We also look at activity, and construct minimum spanning trees for various subsets of users as an automated "Someone should look at this" flag. Contribution times and rates are also something we look at.

Probably the biggest single stopgap measure is decidedly low-tech: there's a short delay (a day or so) between project release and release of funds. If any real people at all are downloading the stuff they paid for and it doesn't work, hopefully they'll shoot an e-mail off to us and we'll take a look.

sanswork2• 18 years ago

The last solution you mentioned was one I ended up implementing but I just wasn't happy enough with the rest of the solution to work out better fraud detection.

One other suggestion for going forward might be to implement none software bounties as well. A large portion of my development was based on the idea of community bounties. Say Bountyville wants their park cleaned up so their kids can play they all chip into a bounty on your site. Receive proposals from companies then choose the best one to do the job. This would help you get more "normal" people involved in the site which might translate into these people discovering the software side of the site as well.

The only difference you need for those are a two stage voting process where by users vote on proposals before the action and also on the result after.

Anyhow, best of luck.

epall• 18 years ago

I don't like the behavior of the tabs. When I wanted to back to browsing all projects, I clicked on "Browse." That didn't work, so I tried my back button. That didn't work either. Then, several minutes later, I noticed the "Back" link. This was definitely not intuitive.

Also, once I click "Next" when browsing for projects, I see absolutely no way to go back!

JesseAldridge• 18 years ago

This could be ridiculously awesome... if it actually works.

dexter• 18 years ago

Tone down the reverb on your demo video!

jhickner• 18 years ago

As a developer, wouldn't it seem odd to do the work up front, and then have a group of people you don't know vote on whether or not you should be paid? I can't imagine that would be very attractive.

drewcrawford10• 18 years ago

If they vote no, you can always take the project somewhere else. Contributors are voting on demos or samples, not on the real code. We don't release that until the election passes.

The hope would be, of course, that developers would resolve their differences with the contributors. But if they don't, developers can walk and take their code with them (shareware it, say, or take it to a third party)

tsetse-fly5• 18 years ago

It's shareware except you've made it much more complicated. What happens if I vote yes and the other contributors vote no or vice-versa? Does the vote need to be 100%? That sounds like a pain in the ass -- I want my software, now.

This is also not very good for the developer. They have to perfect the software to please all the contributors before getting paid. How long until everyone agrees that it's ready? Where am I supposed to take it if I walk? I just wasted all this time writing code, thinking I was going to get paid and now I have to try and sell software that I didn't even come up with the idea for. At least with Rent A Coder, I don't have to please a group of random people.

marketer• 18 years ago

It's been tried before, check out http://www.micropledge.com . That site doesn't seem to be active any more.

jackowayed• 18 years ago

1st note: before I allowed scripts all I saw was:

Blog and Contact were links, but that was all that was on the screen. Your site isn't that shiny and fancy, so it has no reason to be so dependent on JS.

It's a cool idea though. I could see developing on it.

13ren• 18 years ago

This strikes me as a market research tool - trying to find out what people want, the needs, the problem to be solved, the pain to address. It's tricky for users to make the connection between problem and solution (hell, it's tricky for anyone - so why not users?)

Here's my suggestion: target developing knock-offs (copies of existing products). There's a long and glorious tradition of this in open source (linux, gimp, open office, samba, mySQL, etc). It works because users already know they need it, and how to use it, it's already integrated into their behaviour and their other processes and other software - and programmers have a clear specification to work from. This narrowing the kind of project you seek to fund (i.e. a niche) will help you in many ways, as any business book will recommend (even though narrowing your options seems like a limiting thing...)

But please don't use this to undermine good-guy programmers, who took the risk of working to understand a problem, design a solution and get it accepted - use your bounty powers for good, not evil. That is, use it to break monopolies that are hurting customers in small industries. If they have any sense, the monopolist will back down, and some good will be done (whether the open source product is actually used or not). Sounds like good, heroic fun!

jcromartie• 18 years ago

You broke the back button. You should also add a feature to banish the really stupid ideas, like the one where someone wants to configure DosBOX to launch Lemmings automatically.

natch3• 18 years ago

So instead of a model built on trust, this is a model based on distrust.

It doesn't feel right to me, for various reasons, starting with the above.

Also it vaguely says that code must be "open source" but this is not a well-defined term. The GPL (just one example of many possible licenses for open source software) requires that GPL-licensed projects have the source code available in the preferred format, an important distinction that is not necessarily present in all open source licenses. A developer could provide an assembler dump of their code, and claim that was open source, and walk away with the payment.

Worse, of course, they could just do a slideware demo, or they could do a demo using Microsoft Word, but claiming that it was software they had written.

Also you claim to be more centered on normal users, but normal users don't know or care about open source. To them, they just want the program. Yes, open source gives them benefits too, but they don't know that, nor do they really want to know.

As a developer, I would feel hesitant about committing much time to a project - it would be huge gamble. On a normal open source project, I could get things started, get the code base maybe 80% done, and then when that last 20% needs to be done (which in reality is actually 80% of the work ;-)) others typically would be pitching in, to the point where I could even walk away and development would continue without me, ensuring my initial work was not wasted, and ensuring the project got done. But with your site, the developer risks that the "normal users" will see any rough edges and deliver a total rejection - binary thumbs down - and I won't get paid. So it forces me to do way more work, and even then, the users can still say no based on some arbitrary whim - "I like the OK button on the left, not the right, this sucks!" - that's just an example; please don't bother trying to debunk it unless you can address the more general point.

All that being said, I could be wrong! It's happened before! I'll be curious to see how it turns out.

natch3• 18 years ago

1. Have you (the founders) ever contributed to open source projects? It seems to me you are taking the time resources of open source developers for granted. 2. Is your project (bitloot) open source? 3. Repository URL?

inimino• 18 years ago

Nice idea. (Aside: I'm running some experiments on similar themes, the first one is at: http://inimino.org/pffs/experiment )

As others have said, the site would benefit greatly from proper use of Web standards and accessibility. Perhaps these problems are due to GWT. What you have is probably good enough to test the idea, so I won't beat this into the ground.

As for the model, I think users are much more likely to fund software that they already know and use. Once software is actually released, it develops a community of users, some of whom may be willing to support it. Asking the small fraction of users with the foresight to anticipate using a program to bear the entire cost of developing it may work for a few cases (e.g. device drivers, or cloning existing software) but there are many other software projects that would have more success if they can rely on donations after they have been written and released.

A model that finds a way for developers to work on credit against donations from future users would be interesting.

gojomo• 18 years ago

See also 'BountySource': https://www.bountysource.com/

(Never used it, don't know much about it, just made a note of it when it first got attention.)

Ask HN: Review our startup (bitloot)

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