Building with love, and paying for it

A quick note before this one: this post isn’t intended as commentary on any internal conversations at ProPublica. We care a lot about sustainability, fundraising, and memberships! But this piece has a broader focus.

I remember the comment like it was yesterday. The social networking platform I was building had already been used by major non-profits, universities, Fortune 500 companies, and even governments. It was created in the public interest and distributed in such a way — under an open source license, with accessible code — that anyone could pick it up and use it. And we dared to think about an underlying business model.

“Nobody pays for open source,” the comment read. “You should do this for the love of it.”

I was aghast. I was doing it for love! I could have been paid an order of magnitude more money if I’d made a career in big tech. Public interest technology was not a choice I made for glory or riches. But also, I was doing it full-time. I needed to keep a roof over my head, pay my bills, and, you know, buy food.

“Can I buy food with love?” I asked my cofounder.

He shook his head (and maybe mentally rolled his eyes). The answer was, no. I could not.

The funding problem

Everyone who’s building something, even if it’s in the public interest, needs to find a way to make it sustainable, both as a project and for themselves. That means, as much as some of us might hate it, we have to talk about money sometimes.

I’ve worked in public interest tech and public interest media. It turns out they both have the same funding problem: they’re doing something good that makes an impact, and putting it out into the world for free. There’s no paywall or subscription fee for the core product. That means finding funding for it is an uphill battle. Versions of the same conversation are happening in both communities, in spaces like Atmosphere Conf, the Online News Association Conference, at FediForum, and online.

Public interest media has a stronger funding stack: donors and foundations with fixed theses. Support for public interest tech is much thinner. But even this media funding is primarily aimed at the big players; startup newsrooms have a much harder time finding funding. Elizabeth Hansen Shapiro’s analysis of media impact funders, widely-circulated in the industry, made a recommendation that she characterized to Dick Tofel this way:

[We need to] really take stock of what are the solutions that are out there that are working, that are ready to scale, that have a track record or that we have some confidence could grow into next generation field infrastructure, and then we basically pick winners.

The report is an important public good in itself, and its core recommendation to build shared infrastructure for news is vital. But it’s also important to consider what happens if you’re not one of the winners that funders pick. It’s not that funders should fund everyone — that’s obviously not tenable. But there’s a real risk that picking winners starves the experimental edges where new models actually emerge. Given that some of the most interesting startup local newsrooms and infrastructure tend to be more representative than incumbents, reaching underserved markets and perspectives that might not fit within a funder’s worldview, there’s a real potential gap.

The same dynamics are at play in public interest tech. Social media platforms like X have become less safe for people from vulnerable communities. As a direct result, many people have fled to platforms like Mastodon where they can have smaller, more controllable networks that lead to safer spaces to find likeminded people and have conversations with them. There are a great many Mastodon instances specifically provided for communities that might be under threat elsewhere. Mastodon has become infrastructure used by millions of people, including journalists and at-risk communities.

And it has very little money. There is some grant funding here and there, and some revenue trickling in from its services operation. But institutional funders have bypassed it, and the donors page is thin given the level of use it receives. 2024 was a transformative year, and it received €2.2M — up from €545k the previous year. Even with that funding, those millions of users are served by six members of staff and a network of volunteers. And it largely came from a single donor: Jeff Atwood, cofounder of Stack Exchange. Such a dependence on major donors is always an existential risk: there is no guarantee they will continue to give.

Meanwhile, Bluesky PBC is often put in the same category as Mastodon but is different in important respects; for one thing, while Mastodon is a non-profit, Bluesky is venture-funded. To date, it has raised over $123M across three funding rounds in order to build and grow its platform, based on the decentralized AT Protocol. That might seem like a counter-example, but that funding was largely predicated on the Bluesky network’s potential scale and its position as the custodian of AT Protocol; other companies who are actually building on that protocol, in that ecosystem, are having a very hard time finding funding. Even if Bluesky PBC funds some of them, that’s another dependence: a financial form of centralization that puts their future sustainability at risk if Bluesky itself ever goes away or pivots. Bluesky has its own goals, and its own investors who will seek a financial return.

Many newsrooms, of course, are in exactly the same place: dependence on a small number of major funders who, as we’ve heard, increasingly are being encouraged to pick winners and consolidate on them. And open source software and news share a major characteristic: they’re freely available and very few people want to pay to support them.

For public interest innovators, I think there are two related questions to answer:

• How can this risky dependence on a few large funders be reduced?
• How can more money be brought into the ecosystem overall?

These imply a third, prerequisite question, whether for a newsroom or public interest tech:

• What is its real value to its community?

Optimizing your ask or growing the base

Increasing the funding that comes from small donors or customers can both make an initiative less dependent on big donors and bring in money that was otherwise unclaimed. But to do that, we need to take something that people have been reluctant to pay for and figure out what is valuable enough to them that they might.

If a public interest innovator with an established community — Mastodon, people building on AT Protocol, local newsrooms — wants to raise money quickly, it has two fundraising concentrations to choose from. It can either find a lot more people to bring into its community, some of whom will hopefully pay (assuming it has an established way for someone to do that); or it can look at its existing community, people who are already committed and loyal, and figure out how to more effectively ask them for money.

Of course, a thriving organization should be doing both, but if you’re resource-strapped, you can probably only concentrate on one. So where to begin?

If you increase the base, you get more people in the door. But if you haven’t optimized how you ask people for money, you’re leaving increasingly larger amounts of money on the table. It’s also a slower, more expensive burn to bring lots more people in than to get to know your existing community better; starting by optimizing your ask for your existing community is the right first move for anyone on a restricted budget.

And optimizing has real impact. Today, fewer than 1% of Mastodon users donate. Increasing that number to 5% would exceed the entirety of its 2024 revenue. By way of comparison, around 10% of public radio listeners donate. Public radio has far more mature fundraising expectations and infrastructure, but the potential is there.

To optimize the ask, you need to understand what the value is to your community to begin with. Here’s the thing that’s sometimes difficult to accept: the reason they’re there may be substantially different from the reason you built it to begin with.

A non-profit newsroom may have been established to publish pointed investigative journalism that couldn’t find a home elsewhere. And that work is clearly core to its existence. But it’s possible that people are driven to donate, and excited about promoting it, not so much of the journalism as such but because of the cathartic feeling that someone is doing something in a world where they feel powerless. The journalism is the “how”, but the driving “why” for them is to feel like they’re punching up. As a result, while asking people for money to keep doing journalism might yield some donors, asking people for money to keep holding the powerful to account, or to speak up for an underheard community that doesn’t feel like it has a voice, is likely to yield more.

This idea also applies for public interest tech. The people building Bluesky might be excited to be creating a decentralized protocol and an open source platform, but it’s not a given that the people already using Bluesky care all that much about that. For them, it might be more important that there’s a real alternative to big tech platforms. The Mastodon team might be excited to build a federated platform using open source principles, but Mastodon users might feel more invested in the idea that their social channels are independent from US interests.

The truth is, you don’t know until you ask them. Tech has promoted the idea that you should statistically instrument everything and survey your users at scale; this is useful beyond a certain community size, but it doesn’t capture the stories of the people in the community who love what you’re doing. Particularly when you’re small, the biggest thing you can do is get on the phone and get to know members of your community, 1:1, conversationally. Understanding your community and optimizing your ask means doing a lot of human-scale research and gathering the points of view of people who care about you. It’s never “would you pay for this?”; it’s “why are you here?”

And it turns out that’s also important for widening the base. Once you’ve optimized the ask by understanding your community, you can use those same insights to improve your messaging and optimize your value to people who haven’t joined your community yet, too.

None of this absolves you from creating an amazing product. You do that with an adjacent skill: figuring out what your community really needs and providing it better than anyone else. The newsroom actually has to do great journalism that makes the impact it claims to. Your public interest tech platform has to be a better solution for the people that use it to the alternative. But the way it emotionally lands is important: it’s how you ask for money more effectively.

If you’re solving a real problem for real people well, connecting to their actual needs, and landing with them emotionally in a way that makes them want to support and promote your work, and if you’re making impact while doing so, that will also do work towards attracting those larger, institutional funders and prove that your ecosystem is worth supporting. It won’t solve the problem on its own: there needs to be both outreach and institutional reform. But it will certainly help tune a project’s storytelling for funders.

The onus shouldn’t just be on innovators. Funders can and should do work here too: by providing more resources to help public interest innovators to connect with their communities and do this human-centered work, they can increase their impact and broaden the collection of initiatives they could potentially support. If they’re picking winners, they need to continually interrogate what a “winner” actually is, and which communities they’re learning from. Otherwise they will pick solutions from the same old communities and innovators, leaving other communities that could really use their help unaddressed.

Buying food with love

When my cofounder and I were asked to do our work for the love of it, we had three weeks of funding left. The situation was getting dire.

We could easily have given up, but that’s not what we did. Instead, we reached out to people in the community who had picked up our software and really got to understand them. (Quickly. Money was running out.)

Our ambitions — decentralized social networking, not unlike Mastodon’s today — were not important for our community. The technical ideology of our work mattered for us, but not for them. What they did want to do was create safe spaces to learn from each other. And that’s what we doubled down on.

From that low point, our conversations helped us to acquire new customers, and eventually, build products that helped us move from a hand-to-mouth bootstrapped operation into one that had real money in the bank. There was certainly more we could have done — you never stop learning — but connecting to the emotional core of our community helped us rapidly improve.

We might be excited about the work. The people we impact are excited about the effect the work has on them. Those are two distinct ideas — and learning the difference can be make or break.