Gittip’s second birthday was two days ago. A year ago we had about 1,200 weekly active users exchanging about $3,600 in gifts each week. Today we have about 3,000 users (+150%) exchanging $13,400 (+272%). Last year we had 351 communities, with 7 over 150 members, now we have 1,016 (+189%), with 21 (+200%) over 150. We paid out $41,020.13 in our first year, and we paid out $299,536.93 (+630%) in our second. Our top receiver makes about $41,500 per year on Gittip.

That’s not nothing.

But is it enough? Gittip’s second birthday is the day I had personally set for myself as the go/no go date for Gittip. Do I still love this? Is it working? Am I going to keep going with it? The binary answers are “Yes!” “No,” and “Yes.”

Do I Love Gittip?

I love Gittip now more than ever. I love working on it. I love our team. I love our users. We recently tweaked our mission to read simply, “Gittip’s mission is to enable an economy of gratitude, generosity, and love.” I believe in that whole-heartedly, and Gittip does in fact help me personally to live out of a place of gratitude and generosity and love. The answer to the first question is a resounding, “Yes!”

Google Trends search for Gittip and Patreon

Do I have doubts? Yes, mostly when I look at Patreon, because they’re nominally similar to us, and they’ve hockey-sticked while we haven’t. By that standard, Gittip is “vegetative.”

Since I’m not ready to throw in the towel—I love Gittip!—how do I stay motivated? I remind myself that Gittip is not Patreon. We have our own unique mission and goals, and we should judge ourselves by that.

Our mission is to enable an economy of gratitude, generosity, and love. We’ve set the plow deep. Our mission has led us to insist on being funded on our own platform. Has that hampered our growth by essentially double-bootstrapping? Likely. Our mission has led us to develop a truly innovative company structure. Has that hampered our growth by alienating investors? Probably. Our mission has led us to run an emphatically open company. Has that hampered our growth by alienating professionals from the design, marketing, accounting, and legal fields, not to mention some users? It would seem so. I’ve personally adopted a policy of only doing open interviews. Has that hampered our growth by alienating the press? Yes.

All of these growth-hampering decisions are made intentionally, believing that any other course would compromise our long-term mission. When I look at how fundamental of a change we’re trying to effect in the world, I’m actually encouraged that we’ve grown as fast as we have.

We doubled three times by dollar volume during 2013, a little taste of exponential growth. It’s only in the past three months that this has slowed down. In fact, we’ve met most—but not all—of the growth goals we’ve set for ourselves so far.

Does Gittip Work?

A year ago I said, “My hope is that we’ll see people reaching the bottom rung of sustainability on Gittip within the next year.” Stan Seibert followed up by identifying two proxy variables and projecting them out another year. He concluded that we would need to solve “interesting and difficult problems” in order to reach our goal, because the data “do not predict an increase in Gittip incomes to the level required to sustain an individual” at our then-current pace. We exceeded the two benchmarks Stan set for week 103: we moved $13,420, +110% over Stan’s projection of $6,400, and we paid out to about 140 participants, +61% over Stan’s 87.

Today, the top receiver on Gittip, diversity activist Ashe Dryden, makes $41,500 per year (pre-tax, based on the average of her weekly receipts for the past 10 weeks). The U.S. Census Bureau estimates the 2012 median income across all households at $51,017, so the upper income limit on Gittip is 81% of the overall U.S. median. The Gittip limit is 134% of the “non-family household” median of $30,880, and 347% of the poverty level for a single individual, $11,945.

We’ve clearly met and exceeded our goal of having someone reach the bottom rung of sustainability on Gittip by the two-year mark. We rose to Stan’s challenge, “winning Gittip’s second year.”

Does Gittip Work for Gittip?

Gittip works for one person, but of course that’s just the start. Does Gittip work for Gittip? Do we make enough money to sustain the people working on Gittip? As the founder, am I making a living on Gittip? Until Gittip itself is sustainably funded, anyone depending on Gittip is at risk.

The Gittip team receives $20,339 per year (averaging the past ten weeks). There are 39 people splitting that money. Two of us are trying to work on Gittip full-time, a few more are working on Gittip part-time. Most are contributing occasionally. Clearly, Gittip is not yet sustainably funded.

My own early goal, when I quit my day job a month after launch, was to receive $104,000 per year through Gittip within a year. I didn’t reach that goal last year, and I haven’t reached it this year. In fact, I’ve revised my expectations down to $39,000 per year, but still I’m only at $27,860 per year (based on the average of the past 10 weeks), which is 71% of my goal, and 37% of the U.S. median of $75,694 for “married-couple households.” This is 9% below the poverty level for our family, $30,678. I have failed to reach my personal goal of finding a living on Gittip within two years.

Am I Going to Keep Going?

So am I going to keep going with Gittip? Yes. I love Gittip and I believe in it now more than ever. Gittip will work for me and the rest of the team when it works for many others. Right now it works for one other, so there’s hope.

The last time we hit a rough patch in our growth curve was six months in. I identified some possible causes, implemented solutions, and set a growth target: “My goal is to see Gittip grow an order of magnitude in 2013. That is, I want to see us with 1,000 or more funders giving $10,000 per week or more by the end of this year.” We pretty much met this goal: our first $10,000 week was on January 16, 2014. Now our growth seems to have stalled again, so it’s time for the same exercise.

Why has Gittip stalled? Because we’re not doing well enough at engaging with people about our product, and we’re not improving it fast enough. Last year we went from a team of one (me) to a part-time team: I made 91% of the commits in year one, and 54% in year two. However, this seems to have come at the cost of overall productivity: we made 2,509 commits the first year, 2,282 the second. (Granted, commits are a proxy.) We need to keep up the team-building momentum and build a full-time team this next year, a team that is more productive than I am alone.

Moreover, we need more than just programmers. We need customer support staff, product designers, marketers, sales people, accountants, lawyers, etc. Open-source principles and practices are just starting to trickle out to these communities, so part of the challenge for us is outreach, education, and integration. Earlier this year we launched a website called Building Gittip, a documentation site for Gittip staff where we’re trying to make it easier for people with various skill-sets to get involved. We need to continue building Building Gittip. We also need to find conferences and meetups and other opportunities outside the tech industry where we can present Gittip, and we need to make it easier for people besides me to do so. We should also look at hosting and/or co-hosting Gittip-specific meetups to promote our vision of an economy of gratitude, generosity, and love.

Of course, Gittip is understaffed because there is so little money available to those who would work on it. Such is bootstrapping. A month ago we started recruiting a marketing and business development team to do user research and find more companies to invest in open-source through Gittip. We need to continue that effort to increase the money coming in the top so we can keep building and retaining our team. We’re also working on refining our open company concept to ensure that we welcome and support users from marginalized groups, who have driven much of our growth this past year.

Leading Gittip feels to me like backing up a triple-trailer truck. I’ll make a living off Gittip when many others are. Others will make a living off Gittip when it’s a useful product. Gittip will be useful when our team engages users and writes code. The Gittip team works well when I point us in the right direction. So my job is to point, and trust that all the hinges are lined up right and I’ll end up with a living!

(In the mean time, my wife and I are looking for creative ways to make ends meet for another year. We’ve started renting rooms through Airbnb, and I’ve started consulting again. In both cases we’re experimenting with “pay what you want” models, to align with my work on Gittip.)

So where am I pointing Gittip? Our next goal is another order of magnitude by our third birthday—our first $100,000 week by June 1, 2015. As Stan said last year, the current status quo will not get Gittip to its next milestone. We have interesting and difficult problems to solve. We achieved our goal this past year, and I look forward to celebrating bottom-rung sustainability for the Gittip team with you next year!

Thank you for all of your trust and support and feedback and contributions! Thank you for continuing to participate in the Gittip economy!