Hey all,
The topic of financially supporting me for the roughly 3.5 years I’ve spent on SilverBullet has come up many times over the years. Thus far I have always held off on this topic for two reasons:
- Since money would come into play, I’d fear that my level of motivation would be connected to how much money I’d be receiving and if it would be “worth my time.” And the chances of getting sufficient donations to be able to quit my day-time job were extremely low.
- I didn’t need the money, since I had a well paid full-time job.
Nevertheless, a few months ago I have started to accept donations via Github Sponsors which a few of you have signed up for, and I appreciate this a lot! But of course, with the current $35/month I receive through this, I mostly pay bills of running the various silverbullet.md websites and services, not much else. That was the original goal, so all good, but I’d like to explore if I can expand this.
A few things have changed for me recently:
Primarily, I have quit my full-time “jobby job” to pursue a mix of income streams:
- Consultancy
- A paid version of my management educational site
I’ve been focusing hard on this for the last month or two — hence my absence. The good news is that with a mix of these two I now seem to be getting to a minimally sustainable income again, with explicit time left to spend on SilverBullet. This new setup allows for more flexibility in where I spend my time.
This opens the door to a third potential income stream:
- SilverBullet something
Luckily I don’t need to go all in, “bet the shop” style, but I would like to carefully explore ways to slowly get to a sustainable financial model here as well.
I say careful because I’ve seen many open source projects be enshittified by pushing too much on the commercial aspect. I’ve worked for those companies and understand the tricky choices they have to make to balance “what’s right” vs “what’s profitable.”
The goal: long term sustainability of the project.
Previously I spent time on SilverBullet when I had it: nights, weekends, occasionally during the day when I hit a blocker that I needed to resolve to be able to do my regular job, for which I also use SilverBullet heavily. Sometimes I could spare a lot, sometimes hardly any. The only way to really solve this is for me to either hit the jackpot elsewhere, retire and do this full time, or — the more likely scenario — explore ways to generate income from SilverBullet.
The calculus is simple: the more income I can generate from SilverBullet, the more time I get to spend on it.
Options
Let me start with options I’d actively like to avoid:
- Go proprietary. While I could technically fork SB and continue to develop it as a proprietary product that I charge for, this is not a great option. I think a lot of users come here specifically because they want something open source and unencumbered. In fact one of the triggers to start SB was because I wanted an open source solution.
- Go open core: make part of SB open source, then build paid features on top. I don’t know what those paid features would be, but I know this inevitably going to result in a worse product, because the temptation to do build something into a commercial version to get some more $$$ is going to be big.
- Feature sponsorships or “bounties”: tell me what feature you’d like developed and you’ll pay me for my time to do it. I’m less against this option, but still don’t like it because this may steer the product into directions that are worse for the larger community. For instance, what has come up is adding multi-user/team support. This would a huge undertaking that would involve changing a ton of assumptions. Some users may really like this, but it would get a lot more complicated for everybody else and really distract from SB’s current primary use case: personal knowledge management.
So let’s look at options that I think would make more sense. What I really would like to hear from you if any of these make sense to you, if you’d be interested in “buying” them, or if you have other, fresh ideas.
Donations, sponsorships
This is already live but I have not actively pushed it. I’d likely publicize this option more, put it on the main website, maybe hint more at it in the software itself. I can open more options, for those not a fan of Github sponsors.
Of all the options, this is the healthiest option. It’s not connected to “if you do this, I will give you money” rather it communicates:
SilverBullet is valuable to me, let me support you in continuing to spend time on it.
If there’s interest I could connect this to visual indicators e.g. in the community (with a badge of some sort) to showcase you’re a SB financial supporter. Or give you access to a private forum where we can all talk about how awesome we are 
Newsletter
Closely related and perhaps part of the donation/sponsorship idea, but I think it may be valuable to launch a (paid) newsletter. Every other week or month I’d collect current goings on in the SilverBullet community and feature development progress and send it around. This could be included in a sponsorship to get more of a feel you’re paying for something that you wouldn’t already get for free.
Obvious drawback: if you don’t pay, you’re missing out. And it takes time to write these things, time not spent on SilverBullet development.
Video tutorials, walkthroughs
I was notified a few days ago by Youtube that people have now watched an accumulated 5000 hours of SilverBullet related videos. That’s quite a lot. Partially due to poor general documentation, I think a lot of people would be interested in more video material, and screencast style things work quite well.
So another option would be me recording a bunch of videos where I go more in depth, and then sell those e.g. in a bundle.
Topics could include (but here I’d be very interested in your input):
- A more extensive walkthrough of SilverBullet’s feature set
- Guides on how to deploy SilverBullet in various configurations
- Space Lua for beginners: Lua basics and how they integrate into SB
- How to use objects and queries in SilverBullet
- Technical architecture of SilverBullet
These are just some initial ideas. Again, let me know what would be of interest to you.
Hosted SilverBullet
This would move dangerously to pitfalls around open core, but still it’s something to explore: I could adapt SilverBullet to be easier to host in a SaaS style, and either open source that work or keep it to myself an offer it as a subscription, $5/month let’s say.
The potential pitfall of this is that it’s a significant project and operational overhead that would take a lot of my time. Time that I would then not spend on developing the SB core.
As I said — these are just ideas a this point. Let me know what you think. And if you don’t want to wait and jump in and support me immediately, sponsorships are already open.
The first of these two options might be less predictable/steady, I imagine.