Ten years of busk.co, and what we overcame

It’s been ten years since we first launched, so I thought it would be a nice trip down memory lane to see how we got here.

Enjoy!

In 2014, Lily and I decided to build busk.co.

All the data showed that a cashless society was rapidly incoming. Buskers would have to start accepting cashless tips, and there were no good options out there for street-level peer-to-peer payments. So, we thought we’d built a website to help them out.

When we told street performers about the idea…well, the response was a little rough.

Some buskers responded that cash would always rule, making digital tips unnecessary. They were the nice ones: “thanks for the offer, but I don’t think we’ll need it”.

Others proclaimed that busk.co heralded the death of street performance. To them, cashless payments went against what they viewed as a ‘busking ethos’.

There was very little trust in our idea.

Here are the first photos I have of original designs for the tipping platform, from all the way back in April 2014:

We should remember for a second what the internet was like back then. In the 1990s and early 2000s the internet, as promised, was supposed to democratise information, create equal opportunities, build communities and benefit us all with what was generously called a ‘sharing’ economy.

But by the 2010s that optimism had faded. A small number of venture capitalist-backed start ups had become some of the biggest companies on the planet by turning us—our minds, our desires, our personalities—into products to sell to advertisers. Vast data empires built by a handful of monopolies were finding novel ways of exploiting people for profit.

Paywalls, polarisation, digital addiction, the erosion of privacy...even ads were out of control. Profit-seeking had ruined the internet, and was now threatening the real world. Political commentators were even starting to wonder whether democracy itself could survive when the ‘marketplace of ideas’ was rife with bots, troll farms and algorithmically boosted disinformation.

We may have been a not-for-profit company, but we were still a company. Worse, we were a technology company. Even worse, we were a financial technology company, working out of a "business accelerator". Ugh.

I mention all of that because it wasn’t surprising, in that climate, that buskers would mistrust us.

Nor was it surprising that the artists who’d busked longest, who’d lived longest, and who’d seen buskers be exploited and undermined for the longest were the most mistrustful.

However, once we'd built a workable platform some early adopters did jump on board, and the press lapped it up. Journalists would walk past a busker using a QR code, and see it as a fun, quirky story.

Even so, between 2014 and 2019, only a handful of buskers used the platform. That number did keep growing, but for us to become popular two things had to happen:

Progress had been slow, but all three of these conditions occurred during covid.

While we spent our efforts trying to help buskers find emergency funding, several street performers (without us knowing) began using busk.co to hat their audience during online Zoom shows, sharing a link to their busk.co profile in their comments section in order to receive digital tips.

They liked the system because we didn't force tippers to sign up or enter their details before making a tip, which meant more people could tip and the tips were faster. It seemed that what worked on the streets also worked online.

Once lockdowns ended in 2021, buskers who’d been using us for their Zoom shows brought us outside with them. Cash was now considered a “disease vector”, people were carrying less than ever and buskers had learned our service worked.

Both during lockdowns and afterwards, buskers had taken the initiative. I remember about halfway through 2021 discovering there'd been a surge in payments on our platform—and I had no idea why.

So, we emailed a bunch of buskers asking for feedback. Their answers were clear: buskerdom had been facing a crisis, they needed a fix, and lucky for them (and lucky for us) we’d happened to create the right platform at the right time.

Amazingly, even my mum (who reads these emails, hi mum) now knew how to use a QR code. As, of course, did everyone else. QR code signs no longer needed an explanation, as long as there was a "TIP ME" message on them.

Also, the performance arts industries had discovered that the streets were the only covid-safe venues. The importance of street art had become evident. So, we found it a little easier to get grant funding. Grants paid for improvements on our platform. Improvements increased how much buskers got tipped.

And since 2022 started, we've been growing stupidly quickly.

We have never deviated from the ideals we were founded on:

In short: we decided to remain largely broke but able to sleep at night.

Now we have entered what I consider to be our “golden period”. The numbers are looking great, we’re helping more buskers every month and we don’t start each year wondering how we’re going to survive.

Best of all—at least for my mental health—we get a lot less negative feedback. Even our biggest detractors over the last ten years are now taking in cashless payments, either via busk.co or one of our competitors. Some still have a problem with us, but that group is less loud than they used to be, and our fans have gotten a lot louder.

In fact, I’m often deeply embarrassed by the positive things street performers say nowadays. Our current success was hugely accelerated by covid, and I find it tough to be proud of the fact that it took a global catastrophe that ended millions of lives for busk.co to thrive.

That said, we've always been, at our core, an emergency response. We have never been ‘futurists’ or ‘tech advocates’. In fact, it annoys me when people hear what I do and argue for the benefits of cash over cards. Yes, I agree. There is something nice about cash that is lost in digital payments.

But, digital payments are here now. Buskers need to survive. Rising rents and the cost of living crisis have just cemented how important it is to give everyone in your audience the chance to tip. I have no particular love of our tipping system. busk.co was invented just to help prevent buskers being wiped out by the digital revolution. That's enough for me to have devoted ten years to this platform, and it's why Lily first got involved, and why she is still guiding and advising me every week, and I almost never need to pay her for that service (one of the perks of marriage).

In short: the cashless crisis started us off, and now the covid crisis has proven our worth. Perhaps that’s not something to feel ashamed about.

And what of the next ten years? I think the future is bright. Our success gives us a little more freedom to be inventive. Instead of putting out fires and scrambling all the time we're choosing the best of many paths forwards.

We have a long list (currently around sixty items) of things we want to work on or improve, some large, some small. We aim to get grant funding for a couple of bigger projects. And we want to see how our Venmo features affect how well we do in the USA.

I have to say, it's kinda exciting finally working on "growth", rather than just working on "bugs" or "features" all the time.

Thank you to everyone who had faith in our work at the start, to everyone who gave us a go before we were popular, to everyone who’s still here after many years, and to all of you that have shared a kind word about us to your friends and colleagues.

Here’s to another decade of using the internet for good?

With a lot of love to you all,

Nick