I don’t want to surprise announce funding, or some other major decision. I’d rather lay out the situation and discuss pros/cons and other possible paths

I’ve been working on Kinopio on-and-off for ~5 years. But it hasn’t really been economically sustainable. So I need to decide what to do about that going forwards

Kinopio is a super fully featured app, it’s more flexible and more powerful than most of it’s competition – but it’s the only commercial canvas/whiteboard app that doesn’t have millions$ in funding and a staff of 10+

When Kinopio launched growth was slow and steady but upwards. For the last two years, growth has been pretty flat

There’s still lots I want to build, but I can’t both build the app, and grow/market it at the same time, by myself

There’s a never ending stream of feature requests, and some big tent pole releases I’m really excited about

yup, nothing beats word of mouth

I would like to keep working on it and I would like help, but I can’t do that on the current path I’m on

Want to be able to afford to keep working on Kinopio

Want to grow the audience for it and bring in new users,

both personal users, but especially businesses/teams because kinopio collaborators have a nimble-ness advantage and more efficient decisions

hire a small staff so we can build and grow at the same time

3 options under consideration

A $500k to $1million investment to grow the app and reach new b2b markets

angels: There are some really nice well-off people out there happy to give 10k to 15k to support projects they enjoy

+ crowdfunding: I can only think of one example, but software (non games) can also be crowdfunded through a kickstarter-like process where backers get equity

Get a fulltime job and work on Kinopio on the side

did crowdfunding after 7 yrs, many founders, was doing 10k$ MRR per quarter

The obvious implications of this are a much slower rate of dev

That said, there may not be any interested investors that share that vision, and with whom I share principles with

they also dipped in and out of working on it, during the last tech recession

I’ve seen native app devs do this, but I don’t know of many SaaS apps as complex as Kinopio that have done this tho?

In my recent experiences, most VCs are looking exclusively at AI startups, or new products currently riding a huge hype wave (which are usually AI based w big promises)

While parttime is possible, the overhead of finding new jobs is high and continuing this approach makes me feel like I’m trapped by Kinopio

legal constraints of investment crowdfunding only allow americans to invest

I can come back when the economy isn’t so dire and consumers are more open to spending

That said, with reliable money from a job there’s other classes of features I can do much more easily, like frames and possibly commissioned webgl backgrounds

Possibly this might be a more viable path when Kinopio is a little older and the economy is in a less dire place

This would also take away growth pressure which could potentially be a good thing really long term

try to find more angel investors. do you know any?

Another thing I’ve thought about is inviting other ppl to be partners that would be interested in helping me focus on growth. More a profit share than a salary thing. Not sure if that’s compelling to anyone tho

This is the least immediately stressful option, but the long/medium-term implications are unclear

contact republik to assess viability

do you know of other app crowdfunding platforms?

while $10k~ is a lot of money, it’s not nearly enough to make longer-term strategic changes

ya it’s a hard problem for sure

Ya looks like he was able to get a decent amount done despite working at medium

This approach is more gathering up many small amounts that can add up to something significant

I’m leaning towards that (3). Outside of power users, I think the app is more than full featured enough for most ppl. It’s possible that ppl wouldn’t even notice really so long as the discord and support emails were well tended to

I don’t think I could build a team with this money, but it could give the latitude to work towards sustainability

Really interesting option. Tinyseed applications start in feb so I just signed up for a reminder for then

good crowdfunding resource! thx

Applied and was rejected for tinyseed

:) I try and keep things really small and efficient

ya kinopio doesn’t cost that much to keep running, it’s pretty efficient

Kinopio has social elements but it’s definitely not social media. So I’m not really optimizing for that model