Yes, exactly! Yeah, I’m quite sad that it hasn’t caught on.
I think there are just too few donors at the moment. That makes it hard for us to reach them because they’re so few and far in between, and makes it easy for them to find plenty of great funding gaps among the projects they know so they never need to search for them.
We’ll keep the platform running, so if AI safety goes mainstream or another billionaire funder pops up, we’re ready to serve them with our recommendations.
I also imagine that it hasn’t caught on is be because there is a lack of people just knowing it exists.
Have you considered cold-emailing people you that could plausibly find this valuable, for example finding potential people from a list such as this one?
Or sending out cold-emails and asking orgs such as these if you could have a quick keynote presentation for them (if there is potential EV) and having a Q&A in the end?
My intuition just tells me that this is an obviously valuable service for many, but, like many of these good SaaS products die, not because they aren’t good, but because it doesn’t reach a critical mass of users soon enough.
Yeah, we’re not marketing people, so we’ve probably made plenty of subtle mistakes. But we have compiled a CRM of hundreds of leads from EA Hub, Donor Lottery, conferences, etc. and cold-emailed them; gone through charities to try to get in touch with their donors; posted in various grantmaker Slacks and Discords; posted in various AI safety groups; held talks at many EA and LW meetups, events, and conferences; networked in the refi space; tried to tap into our personal contacts to get in touch with grantmakers; ran a newsletter; produced an explainer video for those who don’t like to read so much; etc. We also collabed with GWWC on a shoutout in their newsletter.
Over the course of a year I probably contacted some 500+ people and collected ~50 expressions of interest. But only 5 of them replied to our feedback survey, and none of those 5 ended up using the platform.
So while I imagine there are probably more than 50 donors in AI safety, it’s probably not much more, perhaps double or they are all far away geographically and socially. I sourced the first 10+ just from my friends, which took a week or so. The rest trickled in very slowly one conference 1:1 at a time or with every 50th cold email. So 50 is probably already a good chunk of them. (Not all were interested in using the platform for their giving, but an aggregate donation budget of $700k of them was.) And they probably all had an easy time giving away their donation budget, so they never needed to look for more projects to give to.
Groups like StakeOut.AI want to do more mainstream outreach for AI safety. That could create a new source of users for us!
Yes, exactly! Yeah, I’m quite sad that it hasn’t caught on.
I think there are just too few donors at the moment. That makes it hard for us to reach them because they’re so few and far in between, and makes it easy for them to find plenty of great funding gaps among the projects they know so they never need to search for them.
We’ll keep the platform running, so if AI safety goes mainstream or another billionaire funder pops up, we’re ready to serve them with our recommendations.
I also imagine that it hasn’t caught on is be because there is a lack of people just knowing it exists.
Have you considered cold-emailing people you that could plausibly find this valuable, for example finding potential people from a list such as this one?
Or sending out cold-emails and asking orgs such as these if you could have a quick keynote presentation for them (if there is potential EV) and having a Q&A in the end?
My intuition just tells me that this is an obviously valuable service for many, but, like many of these good SaaS products die, not because they aren’t good, but because it doesn’t reach a critical mass of users soon enough.
Yeah, we’re not marketing people, so we’ve probably made plenty of subtle mistakes. But we have compiled a CRM of hundreds of leads from EA Hub, Donor Lottery, conferences, etc. and cold-emailed them; gone through charities to try to get in touch with their donors; posted in various grantmaker Slacks and Discords; posted in various AI safety groups; held talks at many EA and LW meetups, events, and conferences; networked in the refi space; tried to tap into our personal contacts to get in touch with grantmakers; ran a newsletter; produced an explainer video for those who don’t like to read so much; etc. We also collabed with GWWC on a shoutout in their newsletter.
Over the course of a year I probably contacted some 500+ people and collected ~50 expressions of interest. But only 5 of them replied to our feedback survey, and none of those 5 ended up using the platform.
So while I imagine there are probably more than 50 donors in AI safety, it’s probably not much more, perhaps double or they are all far away geographically and socially. I sourced the first 10+ just from my friends, which took a week or so. The rest trickled in very slowly one conference 1:1 at a time or with every 50th cold email. So 50 is probably already a good chunk of them. (Not all were interested in using the platform for their giving, but an aggregate donation budget of $700k of them was.) And they probably all had an easy time giving away their donation budget, so they never needed to look for more projects to give to.
Groups like StakeOut.AI want to do more mainstream outreach for AI safety. That could create a new source of users for us!