App.net gets funded

As of yesterday, App.net reached its goal of $500,000 initial funding.  Total funded amount is currently $572,550 and still rising.  It got backings from 6,629 members, 1,851 developers and 56 pro developers.  That's 8,536 backers to get App.net launched.

Congratulations to Dalton Caldwell and his team.
This is a great start for opening social network and
charting a new way to fund a project.

First, big congrats to Dalton Caldwell.  When I first saw the vision of App.net, I was skeptical that he was able to get enough backers to get it funded.  But he and his team kept at it, and was able to generate conversations around open alternative to Twitter and Facebook by continually sharing his vision on what App.net will become.  Great work.

I'm also very excited to see how he was able to attract backers to his project.  He created his own Kickstarter-like site to ask users directly to fund the project.  Unlike a free-to-join Web 2.0 site, Caldwell was able to approach end users and get enough of them to be excited about open social platform to make it financially viable.

There are many products that do not have financial incentive alignment where users are not directly paying for the service.  All newspaper businesses are like that, all social networking sites are like that, and even our political system is like that.  Users who are using the product and receiving values from the product are not the one funding the product.  It may have been easy to get to fast user adoption, but this creates one big problem.  In long run, makers of the product don't cater to users, but instead who pays their bill.

In addition to Caldwell's great work of crowd-funding his way to launching App.net, I like the simple UI that he put together.  It looks like App.net is already running as alpha, and Buffer app has included support for App.net.

I will look forward to seeing the launch.