True Monthly Pay-What-You-Want Memberships
Hi,
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 whether or not any future capital or donation raising activities are successful.
Founders often try to subsidize these basic costs by working at jobs that have no relation to their vision. All that does is burn you out and slow down your progress to a crawl.
I did that when I started my first ecological business in 1983. Eventually, the company made enough for me to quit my various part-time jobs.
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 important from becoming a grassroots fundraiser. 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 huge 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 any viable product or service to sell.
I even coined a word 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 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.
Your supporters choose their own monthly amount, 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 what matters—your work.
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 mentoring students that 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.
Low-income supporters contribute what they can. High-capacity supporters give at meaningful levels. Everyone participates without artificial limits.
The result: broader reach, higher retention, and sustainable monthly income you can actually plan around.
Also, these days, community supported capital rounds 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 donations create chaos. Retention averages 20–25%. You start from zero every month.
Monthly recurring support changes everything. Retention jumps 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 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 cycle. You get the base 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 Using It
MakeMyNut’s founder Mark Winstein gets paid via the platform as his own member. He tests every feature in real conditions before anyone else sees it, because he depends on it just like every other member.
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.
In addition to running this platform, I provide free and deeply subsidized mentoring to leaders and founders around the world seeking to follow their own path. I use the MakeMyNut app to earn my salary so that I can serve 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 or waste their energy hustling in gigs that add no value to their mission. 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.