Show HN: Save your side project

These are good points, especially the comparison with the other marketplaces, along with more informed breakdown of what you guys offer.

I think the idea is novel (at least it is to me, I haven't seen another effort like it yet other than the open collective idea I mentioned earlier), and I think it's really interesting.

Maybe I can try and describe the nagging feeling better:

tldr - It feels like Assembly makes it easier for startups to be a machine with people-shaped cogs. I might also be completely wrong, and that is actually the better way to go (or the path that people will be happy to travel once they discover assembly)

It feels like assembly is deconstructing the startup model (which is probably good and bad, maybe mostly good):

   - (+/- technical) founder => person with idea

   - initial dev team => contributors

   - VC  => Assembly (w/ revenue share instead of equity)

But I think that something gets lost in that deconstruction. The founders become "just" people with ideas, and not people who grew, nurtured and fostered a company/entity. I realize they are the core team, but learning all the accounting, finances, legal, and operating costs bits are kind of valuable to a budding founder. I may even go as far as to say that a person with an idea != a founder specifically because of the transformation that happens from having to deal with all that administration (otherwise known as running a company).

Similarly for the dev team, they're invested... but I don't think they're as invested as they could be, or as part of the living breathing entity (figuratively) that is the company -- it's almost like being a freelancer/contract worker (more the disenfranchisement that might occur, I think, less the health benefits/other usual problems)

And while the marketplace itself (Assembly) takes on quite a fair bit of risk in hosting the sites and providing all those services for free... I can't help but feel like the profit they may make comes at the cost of stunting the growth of a founder and her/his development team.

If I could put it in a sentence, I might say that this system makes it easier to treat people as cogs.

On the flip side, this could be a completely inane over-reaction, I may be on the wrong side of a trend that is about to be huge, and streamline startup culture in a big way.

Yeah, and this is the bit that makes me think that I'm thinking about it wrong. It actually seems like a win-win-win-win for everyone involved (idea submitters, contributors, assembly, and the end user), but I can't shake that sinking feeling.

Hi @semiel. This is our vision and we're hopefully iterating towards a more perfect solution. We've thought intensely about the details but in reality, we're still learning from the community and constantly finding opportunities to improve. My email is matt@assembly.com if you ever want to share specific thoughts - they are helpful.

Yes I am wary of using it being based in a different country. To fully understand the legal implication will be more work than the help I am going to get on the project.

I think it would be much more useful to have a meetup-style site to find people locally to work with, then let them organise between themselves if they want to start a company etc.

On the other hand for a pure opensource, no profit, MIT-licence kind of thing Assembly would be OK. The problem is Assembly wouldn't make money out of that model.

It maybe something that GitHub or Apache could promote though.

The best thing I can suggest is get involved with one of the existing community products first. See how the community helps each other and determine if there is value for your product. This is the path that founders have done in the past before eventually migrating their side products to the Assembly community. You can always email us if you have specific questions about the process.

I don't want my comment to discourage you from exploring what Assembly has to offer.

They could very well take projects in varying stages of completion and provide services, and maybe the costs can be worked out or something.

Reaching out to them and asking how they handle your use case (someone with like 80% of a project done who really wants help for a final push + release), should be education for both parties.

Hi, I'm one of the creators of Brace Forms. I am really happy with the way formspree is working on assembly.

Want to send feedback? There's a form at the bottom of formspree.io and we've got people in the community that are now responding to those customer service inquiries.

Several have asked about the 10m delays. We switched email providers so we could improve our email deliverability and spam filtering. But the new provider is throttling us while they get a sense of our email traffic. I've been told that it should be back to normal soon. These are growing pains.

Frankly I'm pleasantly surprised to see the project gaining momentum. The alternative would have been to shut it down.

I find most of the projects to require mostly Ruby/Rails/JavaScript stack.I guess its high time to learn Ruby/Rails. I am a java developer.Was hardly able to find any project here.

Thanks! If you create a project, you'll find a rock-solid request queue and user-feedback implementation: https://www.dropbox.com/s/fz9c8bae97bqxi3/think200-queuing-d...

The app's about 85% done. I'm very open to how development can progress on this. That being said, I won't be offended if think200 doesn't fit Assembly's model.