A look at Assembly, the community that founds companies | Hacker News Reader

A look at Assembly, the community that founds companies

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64 pointsryanb16 comments

The thing that I love about Assembly is that they're not afraid to take risks. There is a lot of unknowns about how this style of company might work and therefore a shitload of risk.

The potential upside is huge if this works but either way its interesting to watch.

`Assembly` used to be the name of a famous demo party. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assembly_%28demo_party%29

So I was a bit confused first.

How are maintenance and support revenue streams factored into this business model? I understand that revenue generated by the project/product is split among the partners, but I'm not sure how a (potentially) part-time core team is capable of building out and sustaining a basic 9-5 support team on an on-going basis.

Is this something that would require a potentially large amount of App Coins to be set aside at the beginning of a project (similar to how employee equity pools of 5-20% might be 'reserved' up front for retention)?

Perhaps for a wildly successful product full-time core team members would step up to the plate, presumably to be compensated with more App Coins from what is left of the dwindling 9.5M initial pool.

I read the FAQ and can't help but think I simply misread or didn't pick up on this aspect of Assembly.

Good questions.

Things like marketing, sales, maintenance, and support can be handled with the Assembly bounties. Over time I imagine we'll make bounties more easily map to these functions, but we've seen bounties work for each of them already. (For example, a bounty might say "Handle support on Monday from 9-5", and it would be rewarded with an appropriate amount of ownership in the product).

However, a team could also hire a contractor to handle support. When a product is making significant revenue the team can spend that revenue as they please, so if support is important to the business, hiring someone is a perfectly acceptable use of their revenue.

Is Assembly geared mostly toward software projects? Or stated another way, are there any physical product projects on (in?, under?) Assembly? The very first photo on the article shows an exploded view of hardware, but a quick perusal of the site seems to indicate that all the projects are software projects. Or maybe I'm missing something? Is there a separate category for hardware vs. software? Has any Assembly project raised funds from a Kickstarter (or alike) yet? Or is there a built in way to crowdfund in Assembly?

Hey (co-founder of Assembly)! We're focusing on software projects at the moment (there's a bunch of unique challenges in just software alone), but we definitely think there's room to expand.

We're working on a clear way for products to get funds into their accounts (like a Kickstarter).

Adding some sort of kickstarter functionality to this would be really interesting. Or making it possible to earn ownership points by investing money, though I imagine that might alter the purity of the community dynamic. Excited to see how it all comes together either way.

am I the only one who is confused by the way ownership works here? The article itself is more of a dreamy PR piece. However, looking at the website and the FAQ itself - I cannot really figure out how "app coins" work. Who creates them? I understand that they are distributed by bounties, but how many app coins exist? Who creates / mints them? How does the originator of the idea get his share? Would be great to understand this!

I signed up and started the process to create a project. Here's what it says in the "Coins & Ownership" section:

Coins are how Assembly tracks ownership. Every business starts out with 10,000,000 coins of which you can allocate 5% (500,000) initially.

Profits are paid out to partners monthly based upon their ownership.

Sharing ownership with other partners recognizes exisiting help and incentivizes future work.

Hey, Austin from Assembly here.

Here's an example of what an ownership breakdown might look like: https://assembly.com/helpful/partners

When a new product is created, 10,000,000 App Coins are created, and 500,000 of them are allocated by the idea creator (often just to her or himself). Going forward, each bit of work is put in a bounty. The community can offer their opinions of how much a bounty should be worth – and the impact of those opinions is weighted based on how much ownership a user has in the product.

Additionally, each product has a "tip contract" to reward idea creation and product management. The default is that 5% of each bounty goes to the creator of that bounty, and 5% of it is split amongst the Core Team (this could just be the original idea creator, or could be several people).

Anytime the Core Team awards a bounty, the corresponding number of coins is minted and distributed.

So, more concretely:

* I found a project

* I create a task and put a bounty on it of 10,000 coins

* awwstn does the task

* awwstn is awarded 9,000 coins

* I get 500 coins for being the sole member of the core team

* I get 500 coins for creating the task

At the end, I have 501,000 coins and awwstn has 9000. Is that right?

Edit: One more question. When my project starts earning revenue, assuming nothing else has changed, I get 98.24% of the revenue share and awwstn gets 1.76%? Do the unallocated coins figure into this?

> 10,000,000 App Coins are created, and 500,000 of them are allocated by the idea creator

What happens to the other 9,500,000 app coins? Who 'owns' them for purposes of profit distribution and opinion weight?

> Anytime the Core Team awards a bounty, the corresponding number of coins is minted and distributed.

I'm a little confused about the term 'minted' here. Are additional coins created, increasing the total past 10,000,000 coins, or are they subtracted from the 9,500,000 that were created but not allocated to/by the idea creator at product creation? If they are taken out of the 9,500,000 coins, what happens when there are no coins remaining?

> What happens to the other 9,500,000 app coins? Who 'owns' them for purposes of profit distribution and opinion weight?

Effectively the product's wallet owns them, but opinion weight is based entirely on your ownership of "vested" coins. If you may have 5% (to start) of the total coins, but you have 100% of actively votable coins.

And yep, minting there was confusing. Minting happens only at explicit event so everybody can control their dilution. When bounties are awarded their coins come from the products "unvested" coin pool.

My question is how do hosting and credentials work for sites built through Assembly? Who makes the $$$ outlay for a site? Does the project creator have to front and control things personally to begin with? Or is there some sort of arrangement where a particular company hosts in exchange an ownership stake and special status project members have rights to push changes through to 'live'?

People from assembly fronts the initial costs of running a company/product and take 25% of the profits every month once it's profitable.

Their FAQ is at https://assembly.com/help/basics

In most cases, Assembly will help cover costs of things like domains and hosting during development, and in cases where someone in the community spent money on a product, that will be tracked and reimbursed when the product starts to earn revenue.

Also to clarify something in the comment below this one, Assembly's fee is 10% of the royalties paid back to contributors. (so, 10% of profit, not 10% of revenue)

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