Every project has strengths and weaknesses and FundRequest is no different.

Our strengths are

Team Composition Vision Idea validation and a Proof of Concept available prior to the ICO Already 380+ Slack members and 1800+ Twitter followers Attracted advisors to help us out with token economics and network effects Working with PwC to cover legal Already raised over 700,000 USD in a private seed campaign

Our weaknesses

Our concept is still evolving and we’re actively iterating Getting open source incentives right is a big challenge We aren’t marketers We aren’t the best forumtalkers

We are aware that marketing can and should be done better. We are working on it and are recruiting additional talent to help us out to ramp up towards the token sale.

Team composition

The original idea came from Karel and Quinten . Tim joined after a couple of months and soon after so did Gerbert, Davy, Nico, Thomas and Steve. Most of the FundRequest team has worked together on multiple projects for the past couple of years in Belgium. The team members share the FundRequest vision and have different areas of expertise and cover a wide range of skills.

Vision

We believe that blockchain technology and smart contracts can help us cut the middle men, who take profit on other people’s work, out of the picture and evolve to a decentralized society where developers can reap the benefits of their work and where companies pay only for the support and development they need.

Companies using open source software are willing to pay for quality software, for new features they want and for bug fixes that they need fixed, but not all companies can pay an expensive yearly support subscription. Our aim at FundRequest is to make it possible for companies to fund specific issues that are of value to them. The funding that companies provide have to go fully to the developers resolving the issue and not to a middle man.

Once we have issue funding in place we will extend the FundRequest platform with the possibility to fund whole projects, where companies only pay for the value they receive and where development teams can organize themselves and get a fair pay for their work without middle men taking a substantial cut on the funding.

Hey, and why not fund peer-to-peer help, where communities organise themselves answering each other’s questions like on StackExchange and Quora.

We have many more ideas that are visualised on our roadmap and will be implemented later on, so stay tuned!

Idea validation resulting in an adjustment of token design

The original idea of FundRequest was always to easily fund and reward open source contributions. Businesses should be able to incentivise community members directly to build features they value and reward them for their contributions. Originally with our token sale we planned to reward FND holders by applying a fee to the funds. This in essence would have been a dividend. There were two issues with the original concept

A fee and rewarding open source contributions? It seems contradictory to the open source philosophy. The token wouldn’t be considered a utility token but a securities token and legally it is a whole different ball game.

Broadening the horizon of FundRequest

We tested out our hypothesis about funding and rewarding open source contributions and received a lot of positive feedback. With interviews and talks we broadened the scope to our current roadmap which we visualise in an easy to understand infographic

Roadmap 2018

Roadmap 2019

Although we suck at marketing we do have

A one minute introductory video

we’re developers, not marketers. We show code, not ads

Currently our platform is running on the *Rinkeby* network (so please verify your metamask network!).

To play around you can logon using a Google or Microsoft account and you are able to fund issues with Rinkeby FND’s. To get your hands on Rinkeby FND’s please let us know your address in the #faucet channel Please be aware that for testing purposes *only issues that exists in the following gitrepo are accepted* : https://github.com/FundRequest/area51/issues Documentation : https://docs.fundrequest.io/display/PUB/Alpha+MVP

Conclusion

We are biased here but maybe FundRequest is an undervalued project since we haven’t been marketing well. In the next weeks leading up to our Token Generation Event we will put more focus on spreading the word about FundRequest. If you’d like to get involved and help us fix opens source contributions you can join our upcoming TGE at https://register.fundrequest.io