heliostatic / selfstarter

Roll your own crowdfunding

Selfstarter

Selfstarter makes it easy to roll your own crowdfunding site. To get started, fork this repository and change around config/settings.yml to suit your needs.

See it in action

Background

After a rejection from Kickstarter, we decided to follow in the footsteps of App.net and make our own crowdfunding site for Lockitron. We've been absolutely blown away by the response. As a first step in what will hopefully be a long history of giving back, we have decided to open source the crowdfunding platform that got us here. Please send questions, comments, or concerns to [e-mail]!

Selfstarter is a starting point. We made some specific choices with Selfstarter for Lockitron and we recommend you tailor it for your project:

• We use Amazon Payments for payments. You can use Stripe or WePay. We used Kickstarter's awesome amazon_flex_pay gem.
• We collect multi-use tokens from customers with Amazon Payments - this let's us collect payment information without charging the customer until we are ready to ship
• Selfstarter doesn't come with any authentication, administration, mailers or analytics tools. We recommend adding a basic set of these so that you can message backers and manage orders.

Getting Started

Note: This assumes you have Ruby 1.9.2 or later installed properly and have a basic working knowledge of how to use RubyGems

First you'll need to fork and clone this repo

git clone https://github.com/lockitron/selfstarter.git

Let's get all our dependencies setup:

bundle install --without production

Now let's create the database:

rake db:migrate

Let's get it running:

rails s

Customizing

While it is just a skeleton, we did make it a little quicker to change around things like your product name, the colors, pricing, etc.

To change around the product name, tweet text, and more, open this file:

config/settings.yml

To change around the colors and fonts, open this file:

app/assets/stylesheets/variables.css.scss

To dive into the code, open this file:

app/controllers/preorder_controller.rb

Deploying to Production

We recommend using Heroku, and we even include a Procfile for you. All you need to do is run:

gem install heroku
heroku create
git push heroku master
heroku run rake db:migrate