If I had to guess a reason to why it is not finding success, it would be a lack of marketing. I've only ever heard about Utopian here, I follow a lot of programmers and tech people on twitter and I've never seen them talking about Utopian once. Utopian twitter account is dead, no posts since April 6th and Twitter has the biggest tech community only comparable to Linkedin. How are they going to find external funding without marketing?
There's only one mention of their Indiegogo campaign on their Twitter account and it's from a retweet from a different account.
They need to pay someone to take care of their twitter account and interact with developers to let them know that they can earn from their open source contributions and to build a community outside of Steem as well! So much potential being wasted not being active on Twitter.
Sure, from the perspective of a normal crowdfunding campaign I'd agree.
But they are such an integral part of this platform, that alone should've helped to fill the goal and push them up in the indiegogo system for more eyes to see.
Is distributing upvotes the only thing this community is able to?
Well checking @utopian-io account, you can also see the lack of publicity they have given their own campaign, how are most of steemians, that are mostly non coders non tech focused people, that just post and interact on the chain supposed to learn about their campaign when you visit their profile everything seems to be running alright except for a pessimistic post talking about how they are going to go down without investment? I support Utopian 100% and want to see them succeed but as you said, If they are an integral part of the platform, why are they not advertising this harder?
You are right.
Not having heard of the campaign is a very valid reason, and if that's what the majority will reply it's kinda sad.
I used the tag #whales because I assume they're at least as informed as I am (so basically not at all, although I've seen it before it was pure luck that I had a look now).