Built by People, Funded by Zaps: The HiveTalk Way of Doing Business

• Two and a half years, zero grants
• Why not take the grant money?
• The volunteers who kept it alive
• Want to learn frontier tech? Find a project, not a course
• Communities outlast companies

Every software startup pitch starts the same way: raise money, hire fast, grow at all costs. The story behind HiveTalk is the exact opposite — and two and a half years in, it’s still standing.

§Two and a half years, zero grants

HiveTalk has never taken a grant — not from OpenSats, not from HRF, not from anyone (HiveTalk Grows Up: A New Way to Pay for Video Rooms (and Make Them Yours) covered the headline; this is the inside story). The whole thing runs on monthly zap goals, and the community has hit them every single month.

“We’ve been always 100% community funded… I appreciate everyone who’s actually contributed, because without your support we would not be running it today. It’s not a cheap project to run for this amount of sustained time.”

The zap amounts are anonymous, so I don’t even know who to thank: “Whoever it is — God bless you. You keep zapping my project. We’ll keep running it as long as you keep zapping us.”

§Why not take the grant money?

People kept telling me to apply. Bitkarrot’s answer, from the Open Markets episode:

“If I serve the community directly and they’re funding me directly through zap goals every single month, then our interests are aligned… If I got a grant, the incentives are not aligned, because I would be answering to the grant committee. I’m not really serving the end user.”

Grants come with quarterly reports and a committee that acts “almost like an employer” — and, as other developers privately complain, sometimes with politics: who gets funded, who gets blocked, whose competing project sits on the committee. None of that serves the person actually using the software. When your users fund you directly, “if something’s broken, you come tell me, and I will respond as quickly as I can — because you’re ultimately who I’m serving.”

My advice for the ecosystem: more funding sources, competing in a market, not fewer gatekeepers deciding what deserves to exist. Or bluntly:

“If somebody still wants to be inefficient in 2026, they’re going to get overrun… If you’re trying to slow down and milk grant money — you done.”

§The volunteers who kept it alive

The other half of the story is the people. Between 20 and 50 people showed up over the years saying they’d love to contribute. Two stuck:

• Yeghro — frontend development, as a volunteer, for two years. (He “just enjoys doing frontend.” I very much do not: “I hate frontend. I really do.”)
• Buttercup — started with testing and social media, then learned the command line, GitHub, and how code works — mentored from zero to vibe-coding her own frontends and filing real pull requests in six months. She now runs her own servers for her own media projects, and her social media work is a big part of why the monthly zap goals keep getting hit.

§Want to learn frontier tech? Find a project, not a course

The deepest practical advice in the whole conversation, for anyone eyeing this space:

“The greatest learning opportunity is to go join a project in the Bitcoin, Lightning, Nostr space. It doesn’t matter what it is… If the project sincerely interests you, commit to it.”

Courses are fine, but they’re one-way — and easy to hide in forever (“you could get stuck doing courses forever and not actually get into a project”). What a real project gives you is what no tutorial can: someone who’s been around, who “might see something that you’re not going to see,” and whose someone-talking-nonsense radar is calibrated by years of frontier tech. Because frontier tech — Bitcoin in 2019, Nostr in 2023, AI agents now — has no playbook, and the only way through is to dig in alongside people who are already digging.

The catch runs both ways:

• You have to bring it. “Mentoring is really important, but you also have to bring it. You can’t just be a one-way street… you can’t be a parasite.” Out of the 20–50 people who volunteered over the years, the two who lasted were the two who followed through.
• The bar is follow-through, not talent. “Do what you say you’re going to do. If I have to chase twice, that’s a no-go… Don’t expect me to handhold you. If I point you at a resource, spend the time to go learn it.”
• It’s bilateral or it dies. “It has to be collaborative — people working together — not ‘this is my thing, you stay out.’ That kind of behavior doesn’t work either.”

That mentorship style is deliberate — the old apprentice model, adapted for open source:

“I could have run HiveTalk by myself, but I chose to support two other people… People should stand up themselves and say, ‘I like this, I want to work on this.’ It doesn’t have to be my project.”

Brian, the Fundamentals host, gave it the label I keep hearing: high agency — apprentices who don’t need chasing. My own August Substack essay, “High Agency in the Agentic Era”, makes the same argument about AI-era learning in first person — it’s short and worth reading alongside this post.

§Communities outlast companies

The closing thought and maybe the whole point of HiveTalk:

“A community who actually is sincere about growing and supporting each other — that outlasts companies and organizations.”

Software comes and goes. Grants come and go. What keeps a project alive for two and a half years is people who show up, and a builder who feels she owes them something back.

The new paid plans from HiveTalk Grows Up: A New Way to Pay for Video Rooms (and Make Them Yours) are the next step on the same path: a way for the project to stand on its own without ever having to ask a gatekeeper’s permission.

Read the original post on Substack: https://bitkarrot.substack.com/p/built-by-people-funded-by-zaps