Cosmos is a Pinterest alternative for creatives.

Cosmos - Crunchbase Company Profile & Funding

https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/cosmos-7570

About | Are.na

cosmos paywalling specific usernames rubbed me the wrong way. total money grab for literally no reason

I never had the feeling that Cosmos had “a lot of money”. The team is like, 3 people?

Arena is the real-world answer to whether design is art, which, no, because if it were there would a lot more artists making products, and Arena are a bunch of artists building a tech product

I don't think Arena is bootstrapped. Maybe they don't have big investors behind, but they've raised money in the past.

cosmos try to be the new are.na but with a lot of money (maybe investor's money, arena is bootstraped)

Apparently they raised $6M in 2022: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/cosmos-7570

Didn’t know, so that’s fair.

Although pretty far from being bootstrapped, a $6M seed going on two years doesn’t exactly scream “excessive and VC-horny team of moneybags” to me either, but maybe my calibration for that is off

They are very transparent about their operations. No VC money FWIW. 

> In 2018 we ran a crowdfunding campaign where 850 people invested on Are.na, ~75% of those who invested were already members of our platform. We rely on no other external funding.

https://www.are.na/about

It’s still far away from to the way Arena rolls. Which for the record I’m a big fan of. But it’s a very particular choice made by that team because of who they are, and what they want to make, and I think it’s ok for other teams to not feel that choice is right for them

Totally agreed! While the way Arena does things *feels* better to me, I’m not in a position to say that any one method of building a company is better than the other. This thread just got me curious for a quick google about differences in funding of Cosmos and Arena :)

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