Last July I excitedly began working on a completely apolitical domestic commercial venture. I did not say what it was at the time and I am not doing a reveal in retrospect. Suffice it to say it was going to produce payments in exchange for work product and then a long tail of recurring revenue.
The market served by this venture still exists, and it’s only a little bit impacted by the tariffs and related economic downturn stuff. The nature of it is such that it would keep running even if things get truly terrible. I am not sure precisely what happened, there appears to be some sort of disagreement about strategy among the management. I am crossing my fingers this is transient and it comes roaring back in November, but hope is not a strategy. I unpinned the room for this in my Signal chat to make room for something else (tbd) that is moving.
The startup I am working on is coming along nicely, but it’s in the polishing the pitch deck and setting meetings with funders phase - no money yet.
There is an older international NGO thing I was working on that was all set in June, then it too skidded to a halt. This week I heard from an organizer there for the first time in months. Still no joy, but I am crossing my fingers, because it would be fantastic. It’s a very long shot at this point.
There is a domestic thing I might get to do, it’s a sort of ongoing Personal & Organization Safety Consult. If this works out it’s just enough to cover rent, and it’s another long shot.
August, September, and October were covered by such consults, but there are only just so many people I know who need these things.
So what I am asking from you guys is this:
I need more weighty engagements, the $250 to $500 “help me with safety” are great, but November, December, and perhaps January gigs in the $2k range will be needed to get through to funding.
There have been five yearly subscribers at $55/year and three people I actually know signed up for the original $160/year rate. Inputs like these are nice surprises, they fund supplements and such.
Writing here has produced occasional monthly expense sized jobs and fantastic hardware donations, but the monthly recurring is small - just eight of 709 subscribers. It would be amazingly helpful if that were to come up enough to cover ChatGPT ($20), Claude($20), Figma($20), and LinkedIn($20), all of which I use regularly.
A 2.25% subscription rate is pretty good by Substack standards. Thank you :-)
There is a slightly more difficult thing that would also be of great benefit. I am running on other people’s retired gear and any of the following would be great.
I have a 6GB GTX 1060, any Nvidia desktop GPU with more ram would open doors, particularly a newer generation.
An AMD/Intel laptop with an Nvidia GPU would get immediate use, damaged display would be fine, it’ll be an LM Studio server.
Any sort of additional Apple Silicon Mac would be great, even another 8GB Air, laptop with damaged display would be fine, I’d be using it as an LM Studio server.
I was hoping the commercial effort was going to get an air clearing call this weekend, but this came in just as I was finishing this post, so I had to rewrite the closing.
So there you have it. Fluff Warrior and I are very concerned about what will happen for the month of November. Any assistance at all would be greatly appreciated. Doesn’t have to be Substack, you can use paypal.me/nrauhauser, I can take Amazon gift cards, and I can share cryptocurrency addresses if you’re so inclined.
