Hi HN,

I'm Arvand. I built and recently launched Ransom. I’m new to programming and Ransom is actually the first thing I’ve built. So aside from your thoughts on Ransom generally, if you have any technical feedback I would love to hear it. Or if you’d like to ask some technical questions go for it! I’ll try my best to answer. A little more about Ransom and why I built it:

Ransom is a site that lets you crowdfund the release of your work. Once the Ransom has been paid by anyone, the work is available for everyone. Even if they didn’t donate. It's a new way for creators to make money from their work without sacrificing its reach or impact. Or that’s the hypothesis anyway.

The idea for Ransom actually came from some tweets I came across early last year. PG tweeted that “One novel consequence of the new paywall model of journalism is that only your subscribers even see your articles. It used to be that when an important article was published in a national newspaper, everyone concerned had read it. Now only subscribers have.” [1]

I agreed and thought it was interesting. What was more interesting to me were some of the replies. One person quote tweeted, suggesting that one solution could be “pay per article” with “dynamic pricing”. PG replied to that saying it was “actually an interesting idea”. And then came the tweet that ended up consuming my life for the next year and a half.

Patrick Collison replied to PG saying “I also liked @VitalikButerin's idea (from @BitcoinMagazine) of "article ransoms": unavailable until a fixed total amount is collectively paid.” [2]

I’m not certain if this is the exact source that Patrick was referring to, but I’ve linked an excerpt I found from an Vitalik Buterin interview with Tank Magazine [3]. In the interview, Vitalik mentions that around the time he initially heard about Bitcoin, he tasked himself with earning some. The problem was …

“I didn’t have any of my own money. I did the only thing I could and started looking for people who offered jobs that paid in bitcoins. I found a person who curated a bitcoin blog. He offered five bitcoins per article, which was worth $4 at the time. Even though I got paid $2 an hour I succeeded in earning savings. I invented a business model. I’d publish the first paragraph of an article on the forum and then held the rest for ransom. If the community managed to crowdfund two and a half bitcoins into an address, I released the whole of the article. It actually worked! We ended up getting something like $20-40 per piece.”

I searched around to see if someone had built this at scale but they hadn’t. I decided that I had to build it. Two big differences between this idea and the one that Vitalik implemented. Firstly, this is built on Stripe, we don’t accept cryptocurrency (yet). Secondly, I felt that one of the biggest risks of the business model was the risk that you may pay a Ransom and the creator doesn’t actually deliver what they promised. Users would quickly grow tired of being scammed. So, I implemented an escrow system. Users have 7 days post Ransom unlock to review the work. If the creator didn’t deliver what they promised, users are refunded in full and the creator doesn’t receive any of their earnings.

Building Ransom has been an incredible learning experience. Whilst I’m proud of having built this MVP, it really is just step one. Arguably, one of the easier steps. It’s nice for me personally but in the grand scheme of the company, it’s not massively significant.

Right now I’m focusing my efforts on solving the cold start problem. Whilst the original context of those tweets was regarding journalists, I think Ransom has a lot of interesting use cases and applications. I actually think it could be especially valuable for music artists. I think a lot of artists create a lot more value than they capture, and they underestimate the demand for their work, especially from super fans. I think Ransoms are a complement to their existing revenue streams and could help them capture more of that value.

I’d love to hear your thoughts HN. Or if you’d like to post a Ransom or know someone who might want to, I’d love to help out. Either way, I’m waiting patiently by my screen, ready to respond. :)

[1] https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1219911533070897153

[2] https://twitter.com/patrickc/status/1220037918007287808

[3] https://tankmagazine.com/tank/2019/05/vitalik-buterin