Ask HN: How Do You Start a Dev Shop CoOp | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How Do You Start a Dev Shop CoOp

10 pointsgremlinsinc6 comments

I'm a very poor dev, I've been honing my skills for the last 4 years in Rails, Laravel, and MeteorJS, alas I'm currently stuck in a less than ideal day job paying $16.00 per hour for server support.

What I'd like to do is team up with Rails and Meteor Devs maybe 2 of each. Start out part-time build a couple 'demo' or small startup idea apps. Perhaps pick some of the best projects on Assembly.com to clone, or build for our portfolio -- if they are profitable build them out as their own startup, if not use them to market dev services.

As founder, I'd like of course some bonus for the idea, but I'm not greedy, the other founders as well would get more than future employees in terms of company ownership. It would mostly be based on an every hour worked = 1 share and 1 vote on the board. So obviously those with the company longer and putting in more hours get more in bonuses and shares. Salary would be even and equal for everyone in the company, with bonuses based on # of shares, and other factors.

So, first off anyone care to join? Secondly, how would you go about recruiting or finding the founders to something like this?

Don't.

I say this because everyone on the "team" will have competing priorities and either the CoOp clients will suffer or the CoOp product will languish and never get the attention it needs. I can say this from direct experience working with a team that was all "independent" but were taking a draw to work on CoOp projects (we didn't call it a CoOp but that is what it was). We were constantly juggling priorities more so than if those same team members were full time. Making a deadline was nearly impossible because people each had their own competing priorities. Managing client expectations was nearly impossible because you couldn't predict what anyones schedules were, and frankly I don't feel they were being honest with me or really even themselves. Mind you I don't feel any of the people were evil or bad people or I would never have worked with them, but we all have priorities and needs that we will serve first. And if your priority is putting food on the table for the family then you might be more inclined to work for $125/hr with a direct client rather then a CoOp client were you personally might only take in $85/hr (the rest going to support sales & management efforts of the CoOp etc) or where you are working on a product and there is no revenue yet.

CoOps to me are not effective for a development team or as a consulting group. You either have dedication from the group or you don't, and splitting their attention never seems to be effective. The idea that someone will spend 2 weeks out of a month on CoOp work and 2 Weeks on personal Client. Or 2 days a week on CoOp and 3 on Client or whatever split someone tells themselves is only good until the first client call or broken code that needs fixed now. Then stuff just changes.

As for your personal situation, good for you to recognize and be honest with yourself about your abilities. But I have to think with 4 years of experience either you are better than you are saying in which case you are under valued; or you aren't getting larger concepts and need mentoring and/or training. Or maybe development just isn't for you. But no matter which it is, you have to be realistic that joining a CoOp or trying to consult requires solid skills, time management and in general a network that you can use to help get work.

I interpreted the "poor developer" part of the OP to be a statement of financial outlook, not from a development ability standpoint - especially when in the same line he mentions that he's "stuck getting paid 16/hr" at the moment.

But otherwise good advice!

Thank you. Yea I guess I may have misinterpreted the "poor developer" comment.

Thanks again.

This idea has seen some possibilities with a recent article on HN about a few co-ops popping up around the SF/CA area (at-large).

Most of the other guys here seem to think of the co-op as a:

structure where multiple independent freelancers work on a project in a unified manner

This isn't what it should be. A co-op should be something in between a coding sweat-shop and the freelance world.

Profits are always shared but the work is more "secure".

Structuring it is a bit more difficult and I personally would look to the lawyer/big-4-accounting/consulting style structure, where there are: associates, junior partners and senior partners (it can be less formal, but there should always be a few guys in charge)

It would also be better to be more equitable with the profit-sharing compared to how those guys do it, but your "rain-maker" who pulls in the million dollar contracts should obviously be earning a lot more than the guy coding out simple backends in Meteor.

I've considered this myself deeply, but the logistics of building out such a company/co-op (it has to be remote as well, IMO) would mean that the "founders" would eventually end up taking big salaries to compensate for all the initial effort they put to build the company (which would still be less than equity-rewards that a regular startup would see).

Co-ops can be dangerous because they lead to a lot of politics. It is actually one of the reasons that John Mackey, founder of Whole Foods, has cited for not making Whole Foods a co-op. I'm also a little worried about the 1 hour = 1 vote. Of the Co-ops I am involved with, they don't do that. You pay your annual dues, you have your vote. (They get into more complicated things like voting on boards and such, but you don't earn more votes for helping out.) Also it seems hard to enforce unless you have people punching time clocks.

Really, other than your title, it seems like you might just be looking to build a small business, maybe with a few employees who have relatively equal say in matters.

The maximum value of an idea is $20. I've read it on the internet so it must be true:

https://sivers.org/multiply

Ideas that turn out to be worth a different amount of equity are a symptom of a doomed endeavor.

Good luck.

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