jijosunny

very thoughtful. just bought you some coffee!

Gotta love the progress y’all made in the last few months! Congrats on the launch!

We charge a 5% platform fee. So if you earn $50 on Buy Me A Coffee, we'll take $2.5 as our cut.

Thanks!

Thank you!

Our insight after getting into the audio space was that podcasters are relatively happy with monetization. This is obviously not a popular opinion, but that's what we saw first hand. Ad rates are pretty good, and unlike other content types, listeners enjoy host-read ads. Meanwhile, Buy Me A Coffee started getting a decent amount of traction even among podcasters, so we wanted to go all in and build it out :)

We are the same company/team, and our goal is to help creators get paid for their work. With Brew, we focused on audio creators. Everything we built so far revolved around this vision :)

I don't want to speak for YC, but the partners want you to iterate and succeed. Many of the successful YC companies (Reddit, Brex) got accepted for a completely different idea.

Fixed!

It is still valid, but we'd recommend connecting PayPal or Stripe for all these new features like instant payouts :)

Hey, I just came across your tweet [1] and wanted to say that we think about this a lot. The most effective way to attract more contributions is to offer something extra or exclusive. Obviously, this is not possible for everyone, so we designed Buy Me A Coffee in a way that every supporter and their comment gets featured on the top. We then notify the creators and encourage them to reply. This way, the act of supporting itself becomes the reward.

Thanks again for the feedback, and thank you for your blog!

[1] https://twitter.com/mattiasgeniar/status/1202111712264163328

We charge a 5% platform fee. This is on top of any transaction fees charged by PayPal or Stripe.

fixed -- thank you for taking the time to report this!

You're right. Thank you.

We do have a bug bounty and encourage bug reports from our users (https://twitter.com/PJijin/status/1186904518341955584). The policy mentioned above is to avoid any damages to the creator(s) on the platform. Thanks for the feedback!

Hey, this is Jijo from Buy Me A Coffee. Thanks for the feedback! We believe 5% is a reasonable fee to build and maintain a platform that allows creators to connect with their audience and generate more income.

One way to look at it is the % of additional revenue they earn because of Buy Me A Coffee.

Noted. We're working on a Community Guidelines page, and I'll make it a point to address these concerns. Thanks for taking the time to share this!

To be clear, there are no circumstances under which we'll unpublish an LGBTQ creator. Here's a fantastic writer that I've been following for years who recently joined Buy Me A Coffee - https://www.buymeacoffee.com/pSzjB85

Our community manager deals with account reviews, and she is more knowledgeable to answer the initial question. I shouldn't have said 'AFAIK' either way, my apologies.

Yes!

>Also, are there any geographic restrictions? Can creators outside the US use your service (in countries which are NOT on the US OFAC sanction list)?

Yes, Buy Me A Coffee is available to creators in almost all countries. Here is a breakdown of all accepted countries: https://help.buymeacoffee.com/en/articles/3314992-countries-...

>How do you define "adult" content? Does this include creators working on LGBTQIA activism? Does this include creators who create instructional content while showing non-nipple cleavage? Does this include creators involved in sex-ed/harm reduction campaigns?

None of these are against the terms AFAIK. We unpublish creators who promote explicit pornography or nudity. Broadly speaking, we abide by the content restrictions of the vendors and payment processors we work with. More on that can be found here: https://stripe.com/restricted-businesses

Connecting with the audience directly is always a great outcome for creators!

We charge a 5% platform fee. This is on top of the payment processing fee charged by Stripe and PayPal.

Twitch partially inspired many of our features. In fact, a big chunk of our active users are YouTubers who don't have a viable alternative to monetize directly (https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=buymeacoffee.co...). Same with Instagram influencers and Podcasters. Our goal is to help them connect with their "superfans" through shout-outs, rewards, and exclusive content.

To answer your question, we have seen that users are more eager to pay when creators host their best work on the platform. Here's an example - https://freebird.buymeacoffee.com/

noted, thank you!

We hate to do this, but payment providers have clear terms around hosting adult content. I sincerely hope this will change one day.

love it! and thank you for being an early user!

that's awesome - thank you so much!

Yes, you need a PayPal or Stripe account to start receiving payments. The main benefits are the community and publishing features. You can share rewards or exclusive content with your supporters.

Also, a significant portion of the activity that we see is driven by gratitude. People love supporting a creator and leaving a positive note.

haha, thank you so much!

I'm at jijo@buymeacoffee if you have any questions while setting up your page.

whoa, it's great to hear from you. I'm pretty sure I've used your plugin on one of my blogs. thank you!