Fund Your Life and Work with Recurring Monthly Support
I’m Mark Winstein, founder and developer of the MakeMyNut platform.
In entrepreneur-speak, your “nut” is your monthly cost to live & pay the core recurring costs to build your dream business or project. These fundamental expenses are required for any new project, whether or not you you are seeking capital, grants, or early sales growth.
Founders often try to subsidize these basic costs by working jobs that don’t advance their vision, explode credit card debt, or pursue high-risk equity or debt financing. Making early errors funding your vision can burn you out, slow progress to a crawl, or defeat your dream altogether.
When I started my first ecological business in 1983, most of my time and energy was wasted doing meaningless part-time work. Eventually, the company made enough for me to quit those jobs, but so much time and momentum was lost right at the time when my energy was highest.
In 1990, I co-founded an environmental NGO in Washington. The first several years were really hard. There was literally a voice in my head continuously saying, “How are we going to get more money?”
But I learned something vital from becoming a grassroots fundraiser that is at the heart of Make My Nut. People are willing to pay money for visionary work. They don’t want a t-shirt or a backpack. They want you to succeed.
If you want to build a business or project, you are a visionary. Today, there are extensive and easily accessible groups of people who are interested in supporting visionaries.
And now, with the MakeMyNut platform, you can raise your own salary from these people for your vision, even before you have a viable product or service to sell.
I even coined a term for this: LAAS, or “Leadership as a Service”. If you are a leader, there are people who want to pay you for your leadership, even if they will never be customers for your core products or services.
An even bigger discovery!
As I became more skilled as a fundraiser in the NGO world, I learned that on the right day, and with the right pitch, an individual supporter has the capacity to write a check equal to 100x their annual contribution. I tried this, and it is true.
This fact has huge implications for your dream business or project. Suppose you want to raise $1 million for your project. You would want to first build a membership community that pays you $10,000 a year. That’s just $835 a month.
Even more importantly, in raising millions of dollars for very difficult projects, I could see that when you raise money for a project, there is a built-in conflict of interest between the needs of the project and the personal and family needs of the founder. This makes it difficult to honor your integrity with investors or donors.
With the MakeMyNut app, you can raise your salary first. This eliminates the built-in tug-of-war between your personal and project needs. Now you can sell your vision first, and your project second.
These are just some of the reasons why I built the MakeMyNut app. Now I am seeing so many other use cases. If you want to explore your project and vision further, feel free to contact me to get my personal feedback.
Total Flexibility
MakeMyNut is the only platform built for true monthly pay-what-you-want memberships. No tiers. No minimums. No workarounds.
You can start raising recurring payments immediate from your Project page on this site, and you can add the payment form to your own website with just two lines of HTML to create a fully custom approach.
Your supporters enter any amount they wish, up to $999,999 per month, and pay equal monthly amounts in any currency they prefer.
Your members stay engaged as long as they want. You get predictable recurring revenue that lets you focus on your work, while sending out sending out just one email update each month.
This works because instead of the endless content stream expected on other platforms, members you gain via the Make My Nut platform are paying you to create your project, not a constant flow of content.
Every major platform pushes your potential members into fixed tiers or one-off payments. Entrepreneurs, creators, nonprofits, coaches, indie developers, and community leaders repeatedly ask for monthly pay-what-you-want support. No one offered it.
Believe me, I have explored every possible alternative. The need for the MakeMyNut app was so obvious and so necessary for my students and my own projects that in 2025 I finally decided to build it myself.
Who This Is For
MakeMyNut serves anyone building something that needs sustainable community support:
- Entrepreneurs looking to start from scratch
- Creators and educators
- Nonprofit organizations and community groups
- Coaches, mentors, and spiritual leaders
- Indie developers and small project founders
- Anyone preparing for community-backed investment rounds
Why Pay-What-You-Want Works
Fixed pricing excludes people. Tiers fragment your community. PWYW removes barriers entirely.
With PWYW lower-capacity supporters contribute what they can. Higher-capacity supporters pay at levels that inspire them. Everyone participates without artificial limits.
The result: broader reach, higher retention, and sustainable monthly income you can actually plan around.
What’s more, these days, community supported funding rounds for major expenditures are becoming more ubiquitous the world over. But those only work if you have built a community first. Now is the time to start.
Why Monthly Matters
One-off contributions create chaos. Annual retention rates for one-time contributions averages 20–25%. You are constantly re-selling the same people over and over again.
Monthly recurring support changes everything. Retention rates jump to 80–90%. Your supporters stay engaged. Your revenue becomes predictable. You get the runway to build, refine, and grow.
Whether you’re developing a project, running programs, or preparing for a major capital raise, stable monthly income is fundamental to your success.
The Structural Advantage
MakeMyNut solves structural problems that can keep you from achieving your goals.
Founders can’t sustain capital raises without community. Communities can’t be built without stable income. Stable income doesn’t come from one-off donations.
Nonprofits can’t win grants without operational capacity. They can’t build capacity without unrestricted revenue. They can’t get unrestricted revenue from one-off gifts or restricted grants.
Monthly PWYW memberships break the failure cycle. You get the baseline monthly support you need to do everything else.
Simple = Powerful
Your supporters sign up, choose their monthly amount, and stay as long as your work matters to them. You get paid. They get access to your monthly updates and anything else you wish.
Other platforms require that your donors create password-protected accounts. This needless friction costs you money at checkout
You Own Your List
Other platforms make it nearly impossible to communicate with your supporters. MakeMyNut integrates directly with any email autoresponder, allowing you to run your own show.
Built by Someone Who Uses It
As MakeMyNut’s founder I get paid via the platform just like every other user. I tests every feature in real conditions before anyone else sees it, because I depend on the income to operate and grow the platform.
Keep What You Earn
MakeMyNut doesn’t collect any commissions. You keep what you earn. We only subtract the bare minimum fees charged by our payment processors.
Get Started
If you’ve been looking for a way to accept recurring support without forcing your community into boxes they don’t fit, this is it.
MakeMyNut gives you what you’ve been asking for—monthly pay-what-you-want memberships created by an experienced fundraiser who uses it himself!
About Me
I have been an ecology-motivated entrepreneur since 1983, starting several businesses, non-profits, and finance companies in this sector.
While the opportunities are vast in my chosen field, like so many others, it is way off the table for banks, angels, and venture capital investors. I have learned grassroots finance the hard way, and have seen far more failures with great projects launched by others than I’ve seen successes.
Since 2001, I’ve worked on solving the most basic financial issues for people working so hard to solve the challenges that matter to me most. In 2025, I realized the core issue is simply getting paid enough each month to work on your dream. I’ve done this the hard way most of my life. Now, your life as a pioneer can be a little easier with the MakeMyNut app.
I use the MakeMyNut platform to earn my salary so that I can provide free mentoring to people from any country and economic status who have a vision. If you are ready to do the work, I am here to guide you to success.
In all my years of working with others, one constant thread has been true:
Most founders can’t afford to live and grow their project at the same time. So they take dangerous financial risks, waste their energy hustling in gigs that add no value to their mission, or never even start. This more than anything else has motivated me to create MakeMyNut.
With the MakeMyNut platform plus free online and live training, you now have the tools you need to get paid literally from the very idea stage and onward. No more funding crises, just steady growth in your monthly income, and steady work on what matters to you the most.
Mark Winstein
Founder & Lead Developer
MakeMyNut.com
*Nut:
- A hard thing to crack.
- Monthly cost to live & build your dream business or project.