Kevin Burton’s NEW FeedBlog

My little meme for selling TailRank Golden Tickets to help fund my startup is starting to take off. Scobleizer was nice enough to link to it today. It also made it on Memeorandum (which I can never seem to spell correctly).

The real question is whether a startup can be funded solely by donations and ad sales. I’m not sure. It’s an experiment I’d like to try. Right now we’ve made $80 in less than 24 hours which at this pace seems like it would be self sustaining. We’ll see. Usually these memes seems to trail off. Knock on wood.

I’d like the real test to be having the founders work on the project full time with a minimum burn rate and having the ability to buy hardware. This would really be amazing and I think would turn the entire concept of angel funding on its head!

God that would be cool! Instead of high net-worth individuals funding pet projects, consumers would be able to directly fund ideas they find cool! Awesome! Kind of like MoveOn but for startups!

I think I need to up the stakes - make it easier for people to donate.

- If you donate $20 not only will you get a Golden Ticket, a free 6 month PRO account, but I’ll throw in your name and your blog URL on my About page (note that this will be a nofollow link and you won’t get PageRank which I think would be wrong.).

- If you donate $100 I’ll put your companies logo/sticker on my laptop! This would be huge since it would be seen at all the cool conferences in Silicon Valley!

Any more ideas guys? I’m going to post screenshots of TailRank here in a second.

Update: As I write this I received another donation! Sweet!

Update: Damien Mulley suggested that I auction off the names of our APIs and server names?. What do you think? For the right price you could be immortalized with frank.tailrank.com as our webserver! What about TailRank email addresses? Would that be worth a donation? Hm.

Update: Scott Beale and Tara Hunt have posted pictures from last night.

Here’s a good picture while I was giving my presentation on TailRank.