New $1-2 Patreon Tiers! And Funding Update

Hey everyone 👋🏼

Following the successful launch of the Bounce Beta last week, we felt this would be a good opportunity to review how A New Social is progressing eight months in. I wanted to provide some insight into our projects and our financial health, as we aim to operate Bridgy Fed and Bounce sustainably in the long run.

But, before we get into that, I'm excited to announce that we're launching $1 and $2 a month tiers on our Patreon today!

We know many community members want to help fund us, and setting our lowest tier at $5/month is a lot to ask in a subscription-filled world. Hopefully, this allows more folks to help us continue building toward our mission of liberating people's networks from platforms.

In fact, let's start by discussing how our incredible community already supports us.

Community Funding Update

Both Ryan and I agreed early on that we should try to be as community-funded as possible. To do so, we started a Patreon and a merch store, allowing people to support us based on their preferences.

This is why we're launching $1-2/month Patreon tiers today.

We currently have approximately 110,000 accounts on Bridgy Fed, some of which may be the same individuals bridging from either side. But if enough people from the community can donate a couple of dollars every month, we'll be in a position to become majority community-funded in the long term.

It doesn't mean we won't try and get other forms of funding. But the more we can receive from the community, the more we can stay focused on what our users want. We've seen what happens to non-profits when their funding comes primarily from large for-profit organizations, and we'd like to avoid that as much as possible.

If you'd like to chip in a dollar or two a month to help us continue running Bridgy Fed and Bounce, you can support us here:

How We Pay Our Bills

So, you may be wondering, how are we currently paying the bills? Here's how our finances are being handled today:

• Ryan has generously been paying for Bridgy Fed's cloud infrastructure since even before the organization was founded, and continues to do so.
• I have been paying for all of our other organizational fees since the founding.
• Ryan and I have been paying out of pocket to attend and sometimes help with various events.
• Via Patreon, we currently receive $315/month.
• We have a merch store where we've gotten a small amount of funds, but it primarily exists because it helps spread the word.
• We recently received a grant from the Interledger Foundation specifically to fund a project to integrate the Web Monetization standard into Bridgy Fed. We will not be taking a cut from any money transferred over Bridgy Fed, and Web Monetization will not be a recurring revenue stream for us.

Ryan and I have been full-time volunteers since December. We've been more than happy to: we started this because we're passionate about the work, and that hasn't changed since day one. It's not every day you get to work on groundbreaking projects like this.

That said, to sustain our organization, we have to cover our expenses. And while we both have very generous spouses who believe in our mission, we would eventually like to earn a salary so we can continue doing this work.

On that note, let's dive into all the work we've done so far.

What We've Accomplished

In about eight months, here's just some of what we've been able to do with only the two of us as full-time volunteers:

• Formed the organization under the fiscal sponsor Exchange Point Institute
• Significantly reduced the cost of running Bridgy Fed
• Launched a Bridgy Fed settings page
• Added support for Fediverse admins to opt in users at the instance level, including automatic custom Bluesky handles
• Launched Bounce, a first-of-its-kind product
• Launched a Patreon
• Launched a merch store with self-made designs
• Attended, presented, and sometimes helped out with four open social web events
• Fixed a bunch of bugs and improved the reliability of the service

We also have a launch planned for next week (!) and are already busy with some exciting upcoming partnerships, all of which we'll have more to share about soon.

We're honestly running at a pace that neither of us expected, and we're genuinely proud of what we've done so far. We have no plans to slow down anytime soon, but with additional community funding, we'll be able to continue this effort further into the future.

Our Goals

I wanted to set some goals for our Patreon so our community can understand where their money will go. We want to be as transparent as possible with our work and where our finances go, so here's a high-level look at how we want to use our funds responsibly:

• $2,000/month: Break even on infrastructure, making room for scaling up to 300K users.
• $5,000/month: Break even on all operational costs (services, events, etc.).
• $10,000/month: We can scale to millions of users and can form formal partnerships with large platforms.
• $15,000/month: We can start paying ourselves a little bit for the work we're doing.
• $20,000/month: We can start working with external designers and pay for contributions.
• $30,000/month: We can run this for the long haul and work on loftier projects.

Ryan and I both believe that this organization can have a lasting impact on social media, but we also know that sustainability is at the core of any organization. We want to keep working on this for as long as we are able.

Building For People

Last November, Ryan wrote a piece about how Bridgy Fed was slowly becoming load-bearing infrastructure for the open social web. Around the same time, I was drafting what would become Bridges & The Last Network Effect. After that, we had a discussion that helped us realize we shared similar thoughts on what Bridgy Fed meant for the future of the open social web.

Specifically, we agreed that Bridgy Fed, and what would eventually become Bounce, could be the center of an open social web user advocacy group. One where we could help people vote for platforms and protocols using their social graphs, and help them center their social media experience around their people instead of where their people reside.

This philosophy led to the founding of A New Social and drives all the decisions we make every day, including keeping Bridgy Fed and Bounce free for all users, regardless of the open social web platform they come from. And we're so proud of how far we've already come.

Thank you for believing in and supporting us through the early phases of this organization. We're only getting started, and we can't wait to share all of the other exciting things we've been working on.