I also started with GitHub sponsors after reading about Caleb's post about sponsorware in May 2020 and have managed to grow my sponsorships since then to more than $1k a month.
To those who are interested how I did it: I'm the author of Material for MkDocs [1], a popular solution for technical documentation. I created a private fork called "Material for MkDocs Insiders [2]" where all new features landed since then and tied those features to funding goals at $ 500, $ 1,000 etc. The promise is that the moment a funding goal is hit, the features are merged back into the original repo and released for general availability. It works reasonably well so far, better that I would have thought.
My Twitter following is rather small (700), but I'm posting a lot about Material for MkDocs and new features and try to engage the community. I guess if you have a large following like Caleb, you could up the amount in a few months, given that you have something on your hands that users want and solves a problem.
To those who are interested how I did it: I'm the author of Material for MkDocs [1], a popular solution for technical documentation. I created a private fork called "Material for MkDocs Insiders [2]" where all new features landed since then and tied those features to funding goals at $ 500, $ 1,000 etc. The promise is that the moment a funding goal is hit, the features are merged back into the original repo and released for general availability. It works reasonably well so far, better that I would have thought.
My Twitter following is rather small (700), but I'm posting a lot about Material for MkDocs and new features and try to engage the community. I guess if you have a large following like Caleb, you could up the amount in a few months, given that you have something on your hands that users want and solves a problem.
[1]: https://squidfunk.github.io/mkdocs-material/ [2]: https://squidfunk.github.io/mkdocs-material/insiders/