Great idea but you may want to rethink the name. PowWowNow is a well know (at least in the U.K.) conference call provider. May prove a big issue for you since you're in a similar field. Looking forward to the weekly updates.
<i>"The contradiction is that growth isn’t the only thing we want. We want to build a company that promotes remote work. We want to try new ways to motivate employees that don’t revolve around stock options with unknown value. And we want the ability to not grow when circumstances call for it."</i><p>Then use the model outlined in <a href="https://qbix.com/blog" rel="nofollow">https://qbix.com/blog</a> right now :)<p>Perhaps thinking of people as employees is outdated. Let's face it, these days the typical company or corporation doesn't care about its employees nearly as much as the product they produce. That's why your grandfather was a company man who worked 40 years with one firm, and today people flit from place to place.<p>It's also why people make less than they did then. Automation and outsourcing has reduced demand for human labor. Today (Real GDP / Population) is 10x more than in 1950s - so each person is 10x more productive on average - yet back then one regular man could pay for an entire household in the suburbs. Today both parents work, stick their kids in glorified daycare (public school) and still can barely make ends meet.<p>Perhaps the compensation model should be more project based.<p>Perhaps we should have single payer basic healthcare, food etc. unconditionally for everyone.<p>People live lives.
Companies build products.
You might have to fight John McAfee for the name ;)<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowWow_(chat_program)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowWow_(chat_program)</a>
I'm not sure why a Slack group is a bad idea. I'm in a half dozen or so, and every time I open Slack I see the icons for all these services. I am <i>much</i> more likely to visit the website of one of my Slack groups than I am, say, one of the Facebook groups I'm in. I'm not even in Slack every day while I spend an embarrassing amount of time on Facebook.
An alternative title for the post could be "I'm going to compete with two of the most dominant tech companies in the world and blog about it."<p>I've heard that Slack isn't really interested in supporting paid Slack communities in a meaningful way (all of the money is in enterprise chat). So I could see a company that's truly focused winning that battle. Facebook on the other hand seems pretty invested in private groups.<p>Naturally, I wish John the best of luck. Building a company is hard in and of itself, he's choosing to take on a particularly difficult version of that challenge. I hope he doesn't plan to bootstrap a community chat application.
Would you mind detailing the process of actually <i>starting</i> the company, ie incorporation? What are the costs involved, recurring or otherwise? Did you hire a lawyer, or use a service like LegalZoom?