It’s the crowd funding pool you can create before the other less involved crowds can come along and ruin anything.
We let you define new products or services, to be created by an experienced and cooperative team that has demonstrated an interest in seeing your ideas become real, utilizing a pool of funds gathered from all the other people who want to make it real too!
You get to choose the team designs you want to fund with your own buy-in, every major step along the way.
We will always require every team to make your Dream Good as open source, modular, full cycle reusable (not just recyclable!), and home repairable as possible.
This is a lot like how other companies make and fund things with customer crowd input; except without all the worker exploitation, customer-product-market fit risk, and other deeply problematic notions like “planned obsolescence” and “vendor lock-in”.
What is a Dream Good, or an Open Goodness?
Any product or service that you can buy today, to make some aspect of your life a little easier, can be considered an economic good. A Dream Good is an economic good you can’t buy yet, because nobody has put it on the market for you yet. That’s why you have to describe it and fund its creation via BeforeCrowd.com — nobody will put it on the market for you otherwise!
An Open Goodness is a Dream Good that is purely open source digital assets, which can be used either as software or as instructions to recreate open hardware, optionally using other open hardware tools (like 3D printers). This is why Data Roads Foundation can exclusively fund Open Goodness projects via donations — they never compete directly with for-profit business enterprises.
What is the difference from other crowdfunding services?
Those other sites all set up web pages where you can pre-order things before the first big manufacturing run, very much like an early pre-order on any other retail site, usually to fund something already well in progress and in final steps of development. The teams and designs for each product or service are already set in place well before you see them, and you are merely affirming that you would like that almost-already-done thing to finish its last few steps to market.
Here at BeforeCrowd, you get to define the Dream Good to be made from the outset, however you want. Even if you just buy-in to someone else’s idea of a Dream Good, you get to choose who makes it, and how it gets made, every major step of the way.
You can distribute 20% of your buy-in funding to a team design of your choice at their Design, Prototype, Alpha, Beta, and Delivery phases — they don’t get paid until you are satisfied with their demonstrated progress.
You can even tweak your own idea of how it should be done, separately from the original.
When you’re in the BeforeCrowd, you decide the future you want to see, and help select the team that will make it real. You are buying-into your own vision of a better future, not anyone else’s.
Regardless of whether you submit your idea here or there, we will work with you to help make it a reality!
If you start out at our partner nonprofit DataRoads.org, your funds will be considered a donation that helps fund the development of a new open source product or service, a.k.a. Open Goodness, and you will only ever get digital assets delivered in return (such as design files, source code, 3D printer instructions, assembly instructions, and other documentation).
If you start here, you will be buying-into the chance at getting your Dream Good hardware or other boxed items shipped directly to you, or a subscription service for a defined period of time, and another B1G1 style copy to someone in need — not just the open source files needed to recreate them.
Any open source stuff related to your Dream Good will be contributed to Data Roads Foundation either way.
What is the default license here, for all works produced with BeforeCrowd buy-in funding pools?
What a very astute legal and business question — thanks for asking! We only use the most worker-democracy friendly licenses available. That is currently the Peer Production License by the P2P Foundation. Other open source or creative commons licenses that require reciprocal contributions and share-alike terms will be considered, for special cases as needed.
Why shouldn’t I just get the funds elsewhere, to make this Dream Good myself?
Good luck to you then! Please return when you’re feeling a little less confident. This service is for people who don’t have the immediate access to funds, incorporation costs already paid, already know the developers who can make their Dream Good the best it can be, nor how to bring it to market without losing all their own money and access rights in the process.
Your other crowdfunding options will all take anywhere from 5 to 15% of all funds as service fees to repay their investors and marketers, not including up to 8% and $25 per transaction in payment processing fees, so we will always aim for the lower end of that scale. As a democratic worker cooperative, without any extractive investors or profit-maximizers in Board driver seats, we can afford to take a much lower cut out than any other for-profit competition.
By acting as our marketers via our affiliate discount program detailed here, you are also helping to minimize all our marketing costs, so Dream Good maker teams get to keep more of the funding pool without any sales related distractions.
We don’t take anything out above bare service costs for Shop.DataRoads.org Open Goodness projects, and we don’t subsidize those projects via high fees like other “free” social crowdfunding associated funds — we provide all donations only out of our own profits.
Due to the way we are gathering these funding pools well ahead of full production, some of these funds may also be pre-taxed ahead of production cost deductions. We will help to minimize that tax burden in aggregate, using legal net and gross accounting methods that are not available to any individual project teams.
How will you protect my privacy?
We only record the email associated with your payment, and give you access to internal and third party services based on that email address alone. We will only ask you for a real world address when we need to ship you something there. That is the only non-anonymous information we will ever ask from you — you can use pseudonyms or account specific labels for anything else, whenever you want.
You can reveal identifying information to your Dream Good project teammates as fast or slow as you want.You are in control.
We don’t sell any information to any third parties, and we only use tracking cookies or other identification methods to show you appropriate Dream Goods and help secure your access to our services.
We will always encrypt your private data, both at rest and in transit, whenever doing so is technologically feasible.
We abide by DMCA takedown rules when requests are appropriately filed and public evidence provided is convincing, but otherwise we will not censor any of your legal Dream Good content after our initial curatorial approval.
Can I start my new bajillion dollar ICO for my BlockChain startup here?
No.
You can fund open source component development at our partner nonprofit DataRoads.org — including distributed cryptographic ledgers in Merkle DAG form, distributed consensus systems like Paxos and Raft, and distributed databases like Kademlia. That funding is only for open source code development, not fake-coin hash lotteries, nor anonymous returns on money laundering schemes.
If you’re serious about creating new online markets in unused network hardware capacity, then make distributed market software part of an Open Hardware support offering in your Dream Good package — where the hardware generates all market-value tokens based on actual useful work performed, not before. We call this “embodied market-value hardware” funding, which you can do here.
Why should I give you my idea before anyone else submits something similar?
A few top reasons:
your idea will always be a little different,
you can always change your idea to incorporate their best details later,
and the first person to submit a particular kind of idea gets the highest affiliate discount rate when they convince others to buy-in.
At the very least, waiting for someone else to beat you to submitting an idea may cost you a bigger affiliate discount, which could amount to buy-in perks that are practically free! (As in free with initial purchase.)
The longer you wait to submit your idea, the longer it will take to make it real, and the more it will cost you for not letting development start sooner.
What is this affiliate discount you just mentioned in the answer above?
After you define a new Dream Good at BeforeCrowd.com or buy-in to someone else’s, and your payment and idea or changed content are all accepted, we then consider you a bought-in and vetted affiliate of that Dream Good project. You are accordingly given a unique shortened https://b4c.me/random URL link with information about that project, with any customizations you applied to it at buy-in or afterward. Every time someone else uses your unique shortened URL link to buy-in too, then you get a single digit percentage (subject to change based on time and location of buy-in) of their total buy-in payment amount.
The minimum you will get discounted for each buy-in using your unique URL is 1%.
This means once you convince 100 people to use your URL to buy-in to the project at the same price you bought-into it or higher, then you get at least 100% affiliate discount credit back, which you can then use to buy-in to more units or other projects.
Unfortunately, we currently can’t just give you that cash back without destabilizing this project’s cooperative funding and Data Roads Foundation donation pools, so the affiliate discount acts just like a store credit, which lets you effectively buy-in to more units or other similarly priced projects without any additional payments — practically (but not legally) speaking: free! (With prior purchase.)
We may eventually develop a way to preapprove project affiliates without requiring an initial buy-in payment, which would allow you to have a unique shortened URL link set up without paying anything up front.
Don’t hold your breath for this option, because a global web-of-trust and distributed notary system will need to be established online first.
After you are preapproved without any payment up front, then the above >=100% affiliate discount scenario based on 100+ hypothetical buy-ins would result in buy-in credit sufficient for full access to the project for the actual price of free! For now we have to depend on existing payment systems in our approval process, but early buy-in will put you top on the notification list when this changes.
Is the affiliate discount program described above a pyramid scheme or “multi-level marketing” (MLM)?
We’ve never heard of a pyramid scheme where you only have to pay for a single thing you actually want up front, and only ever get functional store credit in return for convincing others to buy-in too. That’s why it’s called an affiliate discount, not any form of payment for marketing or resale. That said, this question is another reason why we will probably never give direct cash payouts for affiliate discount credits.
We may in the future host BeforeCrowd Retail sites exclusively for successfully produced Dream Good projects. At that time, we may allow you to resell any units you previously bought-into on this site, at any price you desire (within payment processor limits, usually $10-$10K), including any purchased via affiliate discount credits.
This is similar to how you could already resell the same units via Craigslist, eBay, Etsy, or Amazon upon receipt. We do not consider this a form of cash exchange for affiliate discount credits, as you are taking on the risk that no one is interested in buying your resale stock, and your resale customers are the only ones paying you anything in this process.
The time, involvement, patience, and risk required for this kind of return on investment does not resemble any “get rich quick” schemes we have ever heard of. Have you?
Since affiliate discounts can’t be a pyramid scheme, almost by definition, will I get any discounts for my indirect sales?
We are never paying out cash for any of these affiliate based sales, so we can apply discounts even when your affiliate URL results in indirect sales, as in when someone who buys-in to your Dream Good URL link convinces others to buy-in using their link. You can still get half of whatever affiliate discount they are getting, as a reward for bringing them into the Dream Good development ecosystem prior to their success.
At a $10 minimum buy-in, the half discount from these indirect sales goes to pennies at about 4 levels deep, so we simplify calculations by cutting this discount off past 6 levels or below a penny per sale (whichever comes first).
At a half discount per additional degree of separation, the burden of sales numbers to attain any 100% discount doubles for each level (1% discount requires 100 direct sales, 200 at two degrees, 400 three degrees, etc.).
Look up “Dunbar’s Number” to learn why 100 sales is a perfectly reasonable number for anyone to achieve. Strong connectors can probably manage double that easily, so it behooves you to sell to them first whenever possible.
Halving at each step also means the max discount we are taking out of the funding pool for each sale is only double the direct discount.
For example: a 2% direct discount rate maxes out at 4% subtracted from any sale (at six degrees this more accurately rounds down to -3.8%).
That sure beats the 20% to 60% that most marketing programstake away from product development funding!
Look up “Zeno’s Paradox of the Tortoise and Achilles” to learn why this is the case.
This also means we will never give anything close to 50% discounts or higher. This is part of why we stick to single digit percentage discounts.
As we grow, we will strive to reduce the impact of payment processing fees on all project funding pools, so this affiliate discount will replace these financing costs with minimal marketing costs.