Gratipay, Year Four

Today is Gratipay’s fourth birthday! Last year, our annual check-in came right after we had gone out of business in the Gratipocalypse and rebooted as Gratipay 2.0. In that sense, this birthday is like our first birthday all over again! As one venture capitalist recently offered, “Most businesses only get to fail once.” Yet here we are, clinging like the proverbial cockroach to the proverbial lichen-covered rock. In other words, our primary accomplishment this past year was not going entirely out of business.

That said, we did accomplish some positive things. We spent half the year migrating off of Balanced, and working through the implications for our escrow. We brought closure to a painful chapter in our history. We cleaned up from the Gratipocalypse, and started to map out the road ahead. We built relationships in the security and the collaborative economy communities. And, of course, we collected $60,562.84 from 726 participants, and sent out $113,065.37 to 1,090 people and teams.

That’s not nothing.

Our own team is stronger than ever. We have people managing customer support and security triage. We have folks working on product development and accounting. Perhaps most encouraging, we quietly passed a milestone two weeks ago when we completed our first payments cycle with founder Chad Whitacre offline (attending OuiShare Fest in Paris!). We’ve rotated this responsibility among three people for several months now, but this was the first time that Chad was completely unavailable.

Moreover, while our dollar volume has been flat for a year (in fact, it’s been gradually slipping), we do have a steady stream of new teams joining Gratipay 2.0. This week we’re up to 187. Clearly we have some major product problems if we’ve been adding customers without adding dollar volume. Let’s work on that during Year Five, as we continue to cultivate an economy of gratitude, generosity, and love together.

Thank you for being part of this adventure for the past four years. We invite your team to apply to be a part of Gratipay, and we welcome your feedback publicly on Twitter or GitHub, and privately via email.

This post took shape on GitHub.