A Service
At my work I provide a snack box of assorted salty things. This started out as a result of being dangerously close to a BJ’s Wholesale Club, buying a single 36 count box of Cheez-It’s to have at work for snacking was the start. Slowly but surely a simple system of free but donations accepted lead to an expansion of snacks made available1. As this system grew I took in feedback from people who got snacks, primarily into which snacks to offer. A few months later the system is mostly self sustaining with a dedicated base who will regularlly donate $5 bi-weekly to account for snacks taken in the past, or snacks they’ll take in the future. This simple floating balance combined with the low price allows people to pay when they want and only a few dollars a week.
There is an interesting line between what people see as a community service and a business. People view the service in a different life then they would a typical business. The relation between myself as the purveyor and themselves as clientèle isn’t formal enough to warrant those titles. Yet they choose to support the system because of a combination of factors they appreciate. Knowing that the system only continues to exist in it’s capacity because of their donations, wanting to maintain a friendly relation with a fellow co-worker, and a simple cheap system.
Individually none of these factors is the magic bullet, each is required for this system to function. Each is a small reason to support beyond the simple craving for a delicious tasty salty snack.
After all this, the system maintains itself. After adding my own money for snacks I’ve consumed, the system generally breaks even. Occasionally I push the budget to far with an experiment, or there is a slight shortage, but the system is self correcting. Less snacks are bought when there is less money contributed, more snacks are bought when there is more money contributed. A non-existent long term budget means that only what is available when snacks run out, is what will be used to restock. This quick and mostly closed feedback loop keeps people honest, and keeps out snacks that either tend to get eaten by fringe users who don’t donate.
So could this be turned into a business model?
Unfortunately, keeping the “brand” of a community service in another medium, like software development for example, is hard. To do so would require mostly anonymous end users to donate for a service and/or product they get for free. The only way I could see to successfully apply it is follow the principles I use for buying snacks; keep it cheap, keep it simple, keep it really cheap. Ultimately that leads to simple nag-ware applications that probably couldn’t support a single person full time.
Hmmm…. Your homework is to make a social network p2p site that leverages a community governed economic revenue stream that will at minimum pay for my your hosting costs.
Footnotes
1 Austin Crackers, Goldfish, Chex-Mix regularly supplied, with approximately once a month seeing some experimentation to determine other viable food stuffs.