Taking an idea directly from Adam Freed, one of our early contributors, we are thrilled to announce a $5,000 stretch goal to unlock the Passion Over Pay Podcast! We're excited by the prospect of introducing an additional format for promoting our featured projects. Please help us reach our goal by supporting and sharing the campaign!

Passion Over Pay is a crowdfunded book that highlights individuals working on passion projects that benefit others. The book will feature interviews with artists, programmers, makers, and other contributors to projects that provide value to people free of charge. We aim to surface stories and lessons that uncover their motivations, how they got started, and how they balance these efforts with other commitments.

Passion projects are typically overshadowed by competitive for-profit businesses. We want to bring attention to the less sexy projects -- both to give their creators some well-deserved recognition, and to help them spread the word.

We are interested in featuring a broad set of projects in Passion Over Pay. We want to speak with project authors that create outside of full-time employment, and are not focused on building a full-fledged business. A few examples:

• The founder of a collective to support the professional and personal development of women in creative industries.
• The author of an open source project that thousands of developers use for free.
• The creator of free educational videos that teach young adults the basics of personal finance and budgeting.
• A photographer who maintains a library of high-quality photos for public use.
• A blogger who provides tips and suggestions when traveling to remote destinations.

If you know someone with a passion project that fits this description, please help us by nominating them to be featured in the book! These creators deserve recognition, and we want your help to learn from and share their stories.

An environmental consultant by trade, Matt Lichtash started The Carbon Capital, a free website and newsletter that synthesizes climate change concepts into three bullet points or fewer. The sheer scale and breadth of the climate change threat can seem complex; The Carbon Capital communicates key information that helps people take actionable steps towards solving the climate crisis.

A producer at a Media company in Washington D.C., John Higgins spends his “free time” (a phrase he disagrees with) writing and maintaining Legendary-Peace, a personal development blog for young men. What sets LP apart from other blogs is its focus on giving young people the knowledge they need to succeed in the modern world. John believes that society’s traditional disseminators of knowledge (schools, media, family, etc.) are obsolete, and hinder young people's desire to grow and come to know themselves. LP seeks to fill this void, and has gained a large readership of youth in the past year.

We're excited to be featuring The Carbon Capital and Legendary-Peace in Passion Over Pay. Your contributions will help us promote Matt and John, and other creators like them. 

Reserve your copy of the Passion Over Pay book, secure the opportunity to nominate a creator to be featured in the book, or even get the chance to meet with a prominent creator. We’re constantly brainstorming new and exciting perks, so keep your eyes peeled for new updates coming soon. 

We need to raise at least $3,000 to support the minimum production costs of the book. But the more money we raise, the more we can invest in the quality of the final product. We are confident that we can produce a high-quality book that captures the inspiration and motivation behind incredible projects and work. 

We will be pushing hard to get the finished product to you as fast as possible without sacrificing quality of content or design. Here's a breakdown of our estimated timeline for the project.

A little info about us! We are buddies from back in college, and since then, have both found homes in the start-up world. We've kept in touch though, partly because of our shared affinity for part-time projects and side hustles - one of our original motivations for pursuing this project. We are excited to drive this campaign forward and feature people that we admire.