Day 58: The Indie Collective

As mentioned in several of my posts, I’m currently spending 10 weeks at a hacker residency in NYC. The explicit purpose of this program is to find co-founders to start a venture-backed startup with, and success here means raising a big round from top-tier investors. Given that I’m much more interested in bootstrapping than raising money, I’m kind of an odd duck here.

I’ve been thinking about how one could create a program like this but for bootstrappers and indie makers, because there are many things that I love about this environment. Having a community of other talented folks is great for gaining inspiration and quickly getting useful feedback. It’s been valuable to have people here try out both Hide Feed and Intention and hear their thoughts in real-time. For example, feedback from one of the fellows here, Waj, inspired me to redesign Intention to use active time instead of wall time. In this house, I can instantly poll smart people I trust instead of relying solely on my personal intuition. It’s like constantly running user tests with the benefit that people use your product over a prolonged period of time rather than once.

The financial structure of Hacker Fellowship is pretty typical of incubators and accelerators: Each fellow receives $X in exchange for Y% of their company.

This creates a financial incentive for the people running the program to help out the participating companies because they hold an equity stake, but notably, it doesn’t incentivize people in the cohort to help others in the group.

In the beginning of the residency, another fellow named Evan talked about how it’d make a lot of sense for members in programs like this to share equity with each other. It’d provide extra incentive for people to help each other out because it’s now about the success of the cohort rather than just your own individual success. That’s a fantastic idea, and I’d like to incorporate that into something that I’ve been thinking of as “The Indie Collective”.

Being an indie maker provides a ton of benefits like being able to work on your own terms and the ability to find success in micro niches, but a major downside is that you might not have a group of supportive peers like you would working a normal job. Especially when starting out, it can be difficult to give or receive help because (1) you’re busy struggling to survive because you have to do everything yourself and (2) so is everyone else. But what if you could have the support of a team or co-founders while still working independently?

That’s the idea behind The Indie Collective. Imagine a small group of indie makers, each working on their own thing, who benefit from the success of the whole collective, not just their own business. Each member of the collective would receive a cut of the income of all the other members.

For example, let’s say that there are four members: Alice, Bob, Carol, and Dave. Each member dedicates 10% of their revenue to the collective, which is then distributed to all the members. So if Alice makes $1000 in a given month, $100 would go towards the collective and each person would receive $25. This way, members benefit from the success of other members of the collective and are rewarded for helping each other out. If you take a big risk and have a difficult month, no worries — as long as the collective does well, you’ll still have food on the table. If someone’s business starts taking off, awesome — everyone in the collective benefits!

I don’t have plans after the 10-week residency, and I’m actually pretty keen on trying to see if I can make something like this work. I imagine it’d work best as a co-living situation among a tiny group to create the strong sense of community and trust that’d be required for something like this.

Right now, this is just an inkling of an idea, but just putting this out there!