Show HN: Building a Production Finance Model for Open Source
by positron26 | 2025-07-30 01:21:09+00:00
It started off with the simple idea to cram together the accountability of Patreon (quit when you want) with the coordinated action of Kickstarter (thresholds).

The MVP behind the link demonstrates the very first iteration of this concept.

The second big idea was keeping power with the backers. Let communities of users freely move between different people who make stuff instead of being captives like with Star Citizen. This also lets creators focus on making stuff instead of selling the next Solar Roads.

Along the way I realized that there are opportunities where the world can deliver a ton of value for not that much cost but the money still can't flow. Why can't the capital move? It's because of value capture difficulty or value production uncertainty. However, the downstream often doesn't care. Consumers and downstream businesses are not sensitive to the profitability of upstream. They want stuff and they don't want to wait on startups to figure out how to bootstrap to profitability to get out of the chicken and egg dilemmas.

Deep tech and open IP are those kinds of things. Welcome to https://positron.solutions. Our mission is to connect demand for downstream value creation to upstream enabling technologies.

This Production Finance concept is very broadly applicable. This can be a remedy to the extremely poor monetization of independent media. My main point is that these things are worth building, and PrizeForge is a feature complete product the moment that we realize that we want things like PrizeForge to exist and that this MVP is a way for us to get there faster.

For now, I want to focus on the consumer open source market because it's a deeply distressed market where billions of willing dollars are stuck behind the volunteer's dilemma. It's also a simple market because there's no IP law to juggle. Open source has a strong tradition of killing stupid competition and delivering lots of indirect value that pays big dividends.

In getting ready for this moment, I pulled together a modest YouTube following, some Github stars, and developed my own takes on where open source thinking needs to go to win. I will be inviting my Github Sponsors over pretty soon and, above all, introducting features on our sub-Reddit to get the iteration dynamo going.

The MVP is a full-stack Rust application. It has a Leptos reactive frontend and Axum on the backend, talking to Postgres and NATS. I'll have a lot to say about that while courting some communities and engineers. https://positron.solutions/careers

I came up with the binary fragmentation idea while developing. I was just going to truncate. I chopped out two planned features becuase they were going to require fixed-point calculations. I'm glad I did because last night I crafted a bad kubernetes secret and discovered it only because a header unwrap in Stripe's library was panicking. I am toasted.

The Elastic Fund Raising feature was easier to get an MVP going, but our communication and decision delegation tools are probably going to be more impactful. We need social decision systems designed for open communities, from first principles, for the information age, not the age of horses and ballots.

I need to cut chase for now. I've got several communities I need to pull together. I've done a lot of ground work to build up my reputational constraints, figuring out video production, and talking to people to find out what clicks.

Log in, top-up, and enroll. The system is pre-pay. Funds are not truly mine until matched and I don't want to go to SBF jail, so you can trust me to implement logouts and refunds as soon as possible. Follow my socials and go be social yourselves. It's not about what you can do. It's about what millions of angry gamers who want VKD3D right now can do if only they have a better Kickstarter.