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Andrew Pierno
Andrew Pierno

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Join a tech co-op?

NoCo
Hi all,

I'm working on a new concept around a tech co-op called NoCo.

Medium Post

If you're interested in joining our slack channel you can do so here, we have about 30 members so far.

slack channel

NoCo’s Mission: Increase member MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue) by building world-class products, services, and experiences.

NoCo (No Company) is a worker cooperative. But more importantly, it's a group that seeks to take control of their income and reduce the reliance on a single company thus reducing income risk and increasing the individual's income diversity.

Initially, we will likely focus on one or two projects at a time. We will be working out a lot of kinks in terms of ownership, contribution, working together, and the well-known issues that come with building any product.

So why join?

Benefits
Work on what you want to across different projects.
Use this space to learn and stretch yourself. Try a new coding language or don’t code at all and try branding. You can pick up a small task that sounds interesting, or take on something bigger and challenge yourself.
Not just developers. It takes a village to make something great. Let’s welcome marketers, sales, customer success and all of the other roles outside of engineering that make products great.
Generate multiple revenue streams for yourself. Diversify your income and create new revenue streams.
An “umbrella” to market under. If collectively NoCo becomes a brand each project on the margin will be easier to launch and make profitable over time. (More on this later).
You will have a good time, make new friends, and learn something new.
Goals
It should be faster to launch a product within NoCo than outside it.
We should re-use resources (code, marketing material, networks) as much as possible.
We should solve real problems.
We should be able to make use of an ‘elastic’ workforce, contracting and expanding as the project requires. (i.e. we start getting a lot of traction, being able to scale up developers or marketing temporarily to make use of the traction).
Challenges
There may be a moment when a project will make more sense as a regular corporation. This can be decided upon by voting.
Forking. Technically I think “forking” a company should be allowed, with the caveat that the contributions previous to that moment are counted in the new project. If two projects end up on a similar early trajectory but a different later trajectory, I think that’s healthy as long as the contributors are okay with it and signal that by voting.
How do we value arbitrary hours of work? Are hours the right metric?
TBD
bylaws
“active” membership
voting structure
NoCo legal structure
In business, there are two ways to make money. You can bundle, or you can unbundle. — Jim Barksdale Netscape CEO
We’re unbundling the company.

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