There is one tried and tested method that hasn’t been mentioned here. And it’s the one that has worked for both @chrismccord and myself. If you can build something that attracts enough users to build demand for consulting and enterprise support, then enterprising agencies who want to beat the competition to the next big thing may scoop you up to work on it full or part time.

When Alembic brought me on Ash was still very new, but now a lot of our business is driven by being the foremost experts on Ash. We sell a lot of support services and project work on that basis (plenty other tech too, not every project uses Ash or LiveView etc.)

The benefit of this route is that ultimately your only goal is to enshrine as much real value into your tool as possible. The more valuable, the more adoption, the more a services industry will build up around it.

The difficulty is that it is a long road to get here. Ultimately succeeding in these things is 50% having novel ideas and useful new technological capabilities, and 50% sticking with your thing beyond all reason.

I would say to at least setup simple things like github funding, patreon etc.

While it will take a big amount of small donations to reach the level of a salary, I think even a few people donating will make your life easier.

Maybe you can ask @lpil about his experiences and overcoming hurdles when working on such ambitious project. He’s inside the BEAM ecosystem and did amazing job with the Gleam lang past few years. You can also check the Lustre framework which looks to me that has similar goals to Hologram but for Gleam.