Bah, I've written before about why "crowdfunding" research is cute but entirely ineffective. I should just save the response and paste it every time an article like this comes up.
Basically, this can only work for tiny projects. Any life sciences related project can't be funded at all. Consider a single vial of antibody (50uL of liquid) costs roughly $300. Reagents are expensive...there is a reason the NIH hands out grants which are $100k to $1m.
Hell, just paying for a technician to perform the experiment is about $25-30k/year (which is dirt cheap compared to basically any other field of skilled labor), ignoring benefits.
This could become the new type of charity. Instead of giving money to an organization that wants to "fight cancer" you could give your money directly to the research project of your choice.
Typical charities like the Michael J Fox foundation fund the most promising programs and researchers they can find (they spend a LOT of time doing this).
Is there really any benefit to giving your money to some guy who wants to do research in his garage? I mean, if he was so good, why wouldn't he be working at an academic institution?
I have been working on this idea in Python/Flask in my spare time while doing school. Perhaps not a smart move on my part. I thought my science background would really help things get off to a good start.
This has been a terrible month. Breakup with SO of four years, killer midterms, this. How does HN deal with this kind of thing? Do you still push forward with your unfinished work?
Edit: I'm a computational biochemist / computational chemist with LOTS of lab experience. I can work gloves-on or gloves-off.
Edit: Moved the following from a grandchild post for greater visibility.
I'll have to drop out this semester and find some Atlanta Python hackers... Is it wise to do so? (PyAtl may have some.)
I wanted to do it as a labor of love, but force open publication for anyone accepting funds. I don't want a pay cut except to keep things running. I also want to focus on molecular bio, medical and disease research, etc. Maybe it's "less romantic", but it has a much greater potential to collapse technological reverse salients.
Amazon payments would also keep out a large segment of the world. That's unacceptable. I'd rather have someone on staff to handle things manually.
Equipment procurement, etc. would be great for smaller schools and labs.
I also thought it would be cool to let the teams have a blog/vlog where they show the public how their ongoing research is progressing. The public would be very intrigued to see how difficult and painstaking it can be. Public education is a major return from this.
Here's a big problem though--you can't just fund a "project"! You have to fund every step along the way of inquiry:
Question A --> (fund) --> Answer, New Question B --> (fund) --> Answer, New Question C -->
... --> Question N --> Wrap it up in a pretty bow for publication.
Every step needs funding, because quite often you reach dead ends when traversing some large inquiry space.
It's science. Since you're exploring new territory, you never know how deep the rabbit hole is. You don't know how hard you'll have to look. You can't anticipate how much you'll screw up and lose weeks/months of hard work.
I also wanted to pull in rankings of the top/most-cited authors, etc. as a factor for more informed funding decisions. It would also be a great way for new scientists to start gaining a track record instead of waiting to become the "grey beards in charge".
This sort of process would be _amazing_ for cancer researchers. You can really break it down to every question being asked and let the public become fully aware of how things are progressing.
While first to market is a good thing to have, I think this space is still evolving so I don't think we can declare winners yet. Launch your product with reasonable differentiators. For example, what really drives most kickstarter projects is not just helping to fulfill a project they like but also the tangible rewards people get out of it (both to use and show off).. This is going to be very tough for purely science related projects because most of the time there may not be a tangible reward directly coming out of funding the project it self. This probably is also the reason why most successful projects on kickstarter are arts (comics, films etc), technology/retail (iphone covers, chargers etc) related. So probably you can differentiate by hosting projects will a tangible outcome for backers. For example a DIY glowing bacteria or growing indoors bonsai plants or a aeroponics/hydroponics mini setup etc... You can even try getting people to create projects that create science kits at the end along with educational videos...
Though one problem I see with above approaches is that you may not control what project proposals you get... that's okay as long as a portion of your projects are of tangible output type...
This is nothing. My advice will be to still go ahead and finish what you have started. Make a decent product and market it as much as you can. You are in school, start there first. Ask your colleagues to review it, they can be your first beta users. Getting published in TechCrunch or being on front page of HackerNews is definitely good. But think of how much actual researchers that is going to bring to the site who are actually going to do some work.
This is no small market, you can have more than one players in this field. Even if you had launched first that wouldn't have changed a thing. You can always find a reason to quit.
In the end, what your product does and how well it does it, matters. Everything else is just fluff.
That's not a bad idea at all! Software isn't what makes this work, necessarily. It's the networking and deep knowledge of the scientific process. My colleagues and I have the latter part already. These guys look like software/VC folk. I don't think they have that.
How much would your brother charge if we operated as a non-profit? Is it a hosted platform, or do we need to deploy ourselves?
Edit: I contacted the company via their form. Hopefully I can hear back from them.
Why does PetriDish worry you? It's literally kickstarter wrapped around one end-goal (science research). Great, but nothing brilliant here. It's a re-targeting of an existing model.
Like the concept, not so much the projects they have right now.
BTW is just me or these crowdfunding sites are all the same? are there any examples of someone modifying the "formula" and coming up with something new?
i'm one of the two founders of crowdtilt, in the current yc batch - our modification on the model is crowdfunding for groups of friends (ie instead of a $40,000 documentary it's a $800 party-bus or $500 tailgate), though now it's being used for bigger things like renting out a space for sxsw or renting out a big house for group vacations.
note: crowdtilt doesn't really enter the discussion of this thread, but figured i'd answer your question above
Basically, this can only work for tiny projects. Any life sciences related project can't be funded at all. Consider a single vial of antibody (50uL of liquid) costs roughly $300. Reagents are expensive...there is a reason the NIH hands out grants which are $100k to $1m.
Hell, just paying for a technician to perform the experiment is about $25-30k/year (which is dirt cheap compared to basically any other field of skilled labor), ignoring benefits.
Science is expensive.