Post #1416398

@floatybirb Me and two others started @bunkcomputer and we're still doing it! It is I think stressful to talk about publicly, because (in the US) you either take out loans up front to start, which is horrifying, or put in your own money and work without pay until it's profitable, which is differently horrifying and is what we're doing. Along the way we've had many people tell us "you shouldn't work without pay, find a way to pay yourselves as soon as you can." And we were just like...how? No one had a compelling answer other than "business loans", which was a hard pass for us. I'm sure that some people take grants, some people structure their project as both a worker cooperative and a non-profit and then look for larger non-profit grants, some people fund-raise from their communities. We did not like those options. So I would say the challenge is getting started, because where does the money come from? It's either the bank, your pocket, or your community, and they all feel differently bad. Because what if it doesn't work out? What we're doing is local alternatives to big tech, both public services and B2B. How did it go? It's going good I think! The "getting clients" part is daunting for us, because we're all mostly computer touchers and sales is so very social. Did it pull in enough money to pay the bills? Not yet. What were the conflicts in organizing it? The three current members started this coop because we were all really values and vision-aligned, so we've not had any major conflicts yet. Do you still work there? Yes! What were the major challenges? Money, insurance, finding coop-competent legal support, finding the time to work on the coop while working other jobs, and honestly the complex pricing schemes of some open-core software. Was anything surprising about the process of it all? I think I'm too far in it to be able to answer this effectively right now. Maybe the most surprising part is seeing that you really can just do stuff, like incorporate a business and start a coop and start running computing infrastructure for people :)