How to finance coStarting?
Developing something without a clear monetization strategy in mind needs to be financed as well. How can we keep ramen-profitability to build this out further?
Today I talked to an old friend and former colleague of mine. We were catching up, and shared all the projects we were working on over the years.
We both are big fans of software projects with the potential to generate some side income or even passive income. Communities such as Hacker News, Indie Hackers, and Product Hunt are on our daily reading lists.
I have been inspired (like many others) by Pieter Levels' work, and think back to one of his popular posts "12 Startups in 12 Months".
We both agreed that we have struggled before with finishing our projects and actually shipping them, which are coincidentally two of the main points Pieter outlines in his original post as well. Seeming to not have learned enough, or not having gotten enough motivation from his work, and the work of makers who followed his footsteps, we realized we needed something more.
Or CoStarting, is the idea which we started to toss around. It would be helpful to have a community or group which would help us to actually launch our projects. A sort of accountability mechanism which would put artificial pressure on us to JUST LAUNCH IT
Too often have we found ourselves over-engineering the newest idea, working on it for months only to lose steam and the product never actually seeing the light of day. And worse, never actually having had the chance to get any feedback from actual users.
We quickly realized that what we wanted was not entirely dissimilar from something like Indie Hackers for example. A community which we could document the progress on our individual projects, gather feedback from the community and iterate quickly. But rather than still being a lonely cog in the relatively large indie maker gear box, we would prefer a more intimate approach where we commit to each other and hold each other accountable while building our projects in the open. On top of the encouragement and help we would provide each other, we thought that a framework which put additional pressure on us to launch would be beneficial. And what better way to do that, than to put some money on the line?
So, what if we could find a few people who all desire to build their own products, but are in need of a sort of self help group for the lonely entrepreneurs? We get everyone to commit hard dollars to the launch of a new project in a set timeframe.
The goal is for everyone to launch their own project in the given timeframe, if they succeed, they don't lose any money. If they don't launch, their stake will be distributed to the ones that launched Successfully. For Example:
Pretty simple, however, the core of the idea is motivation, encouragement and collective help to get everyone to launch, not the hope to make a quick buck off the others misery. So we talked about a shared equity pool, or commitment to share a dividend with each other once a project becomes profitable. That way everyone is aligned on the upside and are encouraged to help each other to make sure every project succeeds.
Besides the pressure and accountability mentioned above, we believe that this will have a similar format to a mastermind where we would be in constant contact through something like slack, meet regularly to help each others progress and benefit from an overlap in skills which will be complementary to each other. We are believers in the mentality that we are stronger together, and that tribal thinking can accelerate the individual but also the group.
Since we want to embrace openness and build in public mentality we also decided that such a process should be highly documented and published throughout the entre duration of the project. With all this, and our call running later into the night, we came up with a pilot project proposal we agreed to participate in.
In the true spirit of tending to over-engineer, we found ourselves quickly talking about the potential of this Startup Collective Community which helps individuals launch projects, and lost track of the point that we ourselves wanted to benefit from this. So we dialed back, and decided to just try it ourselves, just the two of us. So here is what we came up with as the very first "Cohort" Requirements.
We will put together a very simple website explaining what we are doing, showcasing the individual projects, and links to the blogs and/or YouTube channels, of each project. It will also give an outline of the cohort timeline / curriculum as mentioned briefly above.
Each project showcase would ideally have the following: