I'm a front-end dev with several freelancer friends who, all together, represent most of the talent you would need to start a full-service digital agency (back-end devs, designers, writers, and account executives.)<p>Like most freelance networks, we regularly reach out to each other for work/advice outside our specialty (I do dev work for designers, writer friends help me out, etc.)<p>I'd love to propose (and so far the few I've talked to are receptive to the idea) combining our freelance practices and starting a consultancy or web shop.<p>I believe very strongly that a co-op would be the most equitable system of organizing the company and, even with the potential downfalls of distributed management, am committed to making a flat system work.<p>Does anyone have advice for actually doing so? Or a software, web-based, or general creative services example of one in action? There are a few local co-ops I regularly patron (Wheatsville, Black Star, and Public School), but I'm having trouble finding an analogue in web development.<p>Thanks in advance HN!
Well, overall I would warn against it, although I get why it sounds appealing. The reasons are multi-fold and I'd happily share more personal details on why via email, but the main reason why I say no is that you wind up missing a lot of dates and are constantly resetting expectations (this isn't abnormal in Software but it gets far worse).<p>Effectively you compete for the every team members time to get things done as no-one is 100% committed to the co-op. e.g. developer X gets a project from the co-op for 40 hours of work, he commits to do it by Jan 9th, 2015 say, but he also takes another project outside the co-op that has a delivery date of 12/30/2014. He winds up getting hung up on his first project and so you start resetting expectations for the client. But multiply that by 3-4 people doing the same thing, and what you will find is that keeping clients happy is a royal pain in the ass. And it gets worse when rates come in to play, e.g. the private gig now tells the developer he'll pay $1000 on top of his hourly rate to get Z done by 1/5, etc. So now the co-op starts suffering because people are over committing, even though they are well intentioned.
Yes. It's very unlikely to work. There will be far more overhead than you imagine, egos are far more important than you realize, and the payoff seems far larger than it will actually be.
Maybe you could do time based instead of job based? Everyone commits 5 hours a week to help other people on their projects for a pre-determined rate? You'd have to figure out who gets priority for people's times.