This is cool to see at the top of HN.

I'm nowhere near an expert but I can tell you why I decided to try starting a cooperative.

Unfortunately it's an LLC and I don't have cooperative bylaws yet because so far YAGNI holds because you've got to have load bearing revenue otherwise nobody is interested. Additionally Florida doesn't have a cooperative structure that's typical for the consulting service model as far as I am aware.

I tried reaching out to some national cooperative support orgs in DC but after a zoom intro call they generally just ignored me.

My approach was to stay small and not try to convince a bunch of investors but rather try guerilla marketing as a solo founder.

I've done a fair amount of cold calling, some personal networking. I've picked up a handful of clients but it's still growing slowly.

I get resumes constantly from talented folks interested in the model but I can't find enough clients to make that contracting model work.

It seems like the SMB market just doesn't have an appetite for these services. I'm currently trying to learn more about the enterprise marketing and sales process.(Most of my experience is at this scale, my erroneous assumption was that I could get some white papers in SMB for selling into the enterprise).

I'm also trying to develop a SaaS Product to solve a specific business need to hopefully drive enough revenue to be enticing for new members.

https://kinkoda.com The website is a little out of date I've stopped pursuing general IT Consulting services to focus on just developing software projects.

I know it's seems very naive and "vision over reality" to do a cooperative making the venture even more difficult. I think it's important that somebody figures out how to make it competitive.

I'd like to posit a couple of ideas on why they could be an effective market competitor.

There are existing small consultancies and companies with very talented individuals doing work in the economy and collecting on the demand for those services. There's lots to say about AI but let's pretend for the sake of a conversation that this is still tenable.

A cooperative offers the idea of more distributed responsibility, better work life balance, more of an incentive for collaboration and communication, and the opportunity to have a say in the leadership decisions necessary for long term success.

You have so many companies start out with VC (I'm aware we're on HN here), race to market, usually IPO after some success, and then the PE team marches in and cut to make things actually business viable to extract value.

You of course still have to raise capital but my intent was to be able to offer corporate bonds to do so without diluting member ownership.

Of course customers don't care about ethics they care about quality and price signaling, but I think coops have a competitive edge that members will be more committed to working on overhead costs and work quality if they have a share of the profits in the long run.

I know many customers, including here on HN that are exhausted with the rug pulling that occurs with software companies racing to their market cap.

I know many people in the market who refuse to commit more than the bare minimum to their job output because there's zero incentive for them to do so.

Additionally we see many examples where time to market isn't as important as "getting it right" with the product. Companies going private to make important sacrifices for the sake of vision, and small orgs with strong leaders producing awesome results because of the excellent culture and leadership values.

I'm not pitching anything to anyone on here just excited to talk about something I'm very passionate about.

Additionally I think the link here is something I've considered as well.

It's actually not impossible to create what is being proposed since it has been done elsewhere. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation

However it required a lot of collaboration, creating cooperative banks, and other supportive structures.

I've been wondering if something on the distributed web and potentially a framework for agents to help facilitate the coordination and business between orgs interested in this micro economy.

My thoughts were something on AtProto or similar to automate some of the discovery and lead communication process.

I'm mostly working on and thinking about these things in isolation so I'd love to connect with folks working on it as well.

Since we're talk Coops. If you're a coop I know of a team creating a Patreon competitor for individuals and coops. https://comradery.co/

What is Demand Coop and why tech workers should join one