Ask IH: Would anyone be interested in starting a tech cooperative?

Hey @louisswiss, thanks for the feedback!

• There's certainly better founders and better ideas, but even those companies fail sometimes. I think even the best founders will realize that startups are a gamble, and it's usually a good idea to hedge your bets.
• I understand, but I don't think I agree. I don't think startups live or die based on going the extra mile and putting in that extra 10%. I think that's actually a recipe for burning out and quitting early. It's ok to take breaks and work at a steady pace. You have to put in a lot of work, but it has to be consistent, and usually over a period of 5-10 years.
• The main idea is that extremely talented people can fail, and that even average engineers can build extremely successful products. Failure doesn't mean that someone is a bad engineer and they'll ruin the outcome of a successful product. VCs and angel investors also understand that you need to bet on a large number of startups.
• I've been thinking about this with my current project. I want to build some Terraform config that sets up a VPC, Kubernetes, Deis Workflow, Cockpit, Elasticsearch, Kibana, etc. I would open source that under my company name, so that anyone can set up their own infrastructure on AWS. I want to do that because it could bring a lot of attention to my company, and more developers might sign up to use the service. I wouldn't put it in the effort to manage infrastructure or give away AWS credits to random startups unless I had some stake in their success. As another example, the IndieHackers community and Stripe Atlas aren't charities. They encourage collaboration and sharing ideas, and they make it easier to build startups, but this directly leads to more revenue for Stripe. I don't know if that answers the question, but the main idea is just diversification to reduce risk.

That's a good question. After covering hosting, third-party services, marketing, accounting, legal, etc., then we would just distribute the profits equally. We'd also want the company to have a safe amount of cash on hand so we don't risk running out of money. We could also vote on buying a few websites and apps from flippa.com.

For some "big picture" ideas about money: The main goal is to cover all of the member's living expenses, so that we can afford to go full-time without worrying about contract work. After that, my goal is for all of the members to end up with at least $3M. If you invest that much in index funds, you'd have an annual income of $100k for the rest of your life. And somewhere in the middle, I would want to start shifting the focus towards non-profit work, and we can start donating money to some good causes.

Hi @andrewkslv! I just found this article about tech cooperatives, which is very informative: https://www.fastcompany.com/3021964/the-argument-for-worker-owned-tech-collectives

Note: I'm not interested in starting a coop for consulting in IT and web design. This coop will be more like a worker-owned startup accelerator for "lifestyle businesses".

Really good points, thanks for the feedback! I definitely wouldn't want to run the risk of people joining and then not doing anything. I'd only consider people who have a track record of launching products. And if someone wasn't pulling their weight, we'd probably vote to remove them from the company.

So the only thing you can really lose is your time

Yep, that's the reason why I want try a large number of ideas in parallel. For me, I'm doing part-time contract work while I work on my ideas, and I only work on things that can be profitable from day one. So I don't have any risk of running out of money, but I only have the energy and bandwidth to launch 2 or 3 projects per year. But I would rather be part of a group that's building 20 or 30 projects in a year, and own 10% of the winners. Otherwise it would take me 10 years to try that many ideas. So I guess risk is the wrong word, and it's just about increasing the probability of success.

At the very least, I've had a lot of good responses, from people like yourself! So it's been a great way to find potential cofounders, even if we end up with a more traditional startup.