Problem

People with ideas often want to work with other people, but there is currently no structured way to do this without forming a legal business entity, which is expensive, time-consuming, intimidating, and forces the entrepreneur to make a bunch of decisions she may not be ready to make.
Entrepreneurs don't have a lot of cash but need the ability to compensate people who contribute to their projects. They need a mechanism that allows contributors to come and go (equity is bad for this)

Problem and solution details by market segment

You can find lists of competitors within each segment

Research

Interviews & Surveys

Sunshine Labs has conducted 74 interviews with entrepreneurs, game developers, and potential contributors to projects, which provided evidence for our thesis that 1) the difficulty of forming appropriate formal relationships between collaborators is a meaningful obstacle to starting businesses, and 2) that many skilled professionals are interested in contributing to early-stage, high-risk projects.

Survey results support our assumptions. More than 50% of entrepreneur respondents said that “reading legal documents” and “deciding whether and how much equity to give” caused them significant anxiety (4 or greater on a 1-5 scale). More than 80% of contributor respondents said they would contribute to interesting projects in their free time, even if they may never receive payment.

Many channels for matching projects to contributors already exist.

Websites like Indie Hackers and a large number of Reddit and Discord channels have active communities for matching people to projects. We plan to target a handful of promising projects in those communities, assist our existing customers in recruiting from those communities, and ideally form partnerships with the moderators of those communities.

For selection of channels, please see Existing Channels

Solution

We created a platform called Cooperativ, and an Ethereum-based financial tool called Contributor Credits. Together, they let creators and entrepreneurs who want to work with collaborators establish clear relationships around a project, and share the economics and control of that project, without having to hire an attorney, navigate legal contracts, or incorporate. It's easy as setting up a Google Workspace or Slack account.

Click into the products below for more detail

Untitled Database

Limited revenue, so why this is the right strategic choice?

The goal of this product is to capture new businesses, en mass, far before any incorporation, governance or equity management products.