6 ms·

Show HN: Assembly – Help build a product, get a share of it

70 points by vvoyer 12y ago

J_Darnley 12y ago
Something I can browse without allowing javascript. I am pleasantly surprised.
marbemac 12y ago
Cool idea, but at this point it doesn't seem like a reasonable option for new developers coming into projects. For example, I picked Coderwall, which is the 2nd project listed on the discover page. There are 11 tasks right now, with a total coin bounty of about 25k. Looking at the ownership, there are about 14.3 million coins allocated, owned primarily by one guy. SO, if I clear out ALL of the tasks for Coderwall, I will receive coins worth ~0.0017% of the project. If 100% of the stated $30k revenue is distributed to coin holders (which it won't be.. gotta pay for servers, etc), I will receive about $50/month for clearing out all of their tasks.. I understand that revenue might grow, but that's a very small amount nonetheless. Maybe I'm missing something? Is that about how it works?
- bitsweet 12y ago
  Disclosure: I work on Assembly Thanks marbemac! Thats mostly true but there are a couple things to note: * That math is based last month's earnings. If next month the earnings go up or expenses go down, the payouts would increase. Here is the break down of September: https://assembly.com/coderwall/posts/september-finances https://assembly.com/coderwall/posts/september-finances * The proceeds are paid out every month for the life of Coderwall. Several contributors earned over $500-1,000+ for previous contributions even though they didn't contribute much this last month. * Everyone can participate in determining the value of bounty, if you feel its too low, you can bump it up and additionally discuss it the thread. * There are a lot of products that don't earn as much stable revenue and therefore bounty values are more aligned with risks and opportunities.
- goldfeld 12y ago
  I'd consider 11 tasks for at least $50/mo. for the foreseeable future an interesting investment, at the least.
- alhenaworks 12y ago
  I think the dynamics you touched upon are specific to coderwall, their revenue model, their leadership, and their choice of stack(not that any of it is bad, it has just created the situation you described), and you can't judge every startup/product/team on assembly through the same lens. Only a few of the products on assembly are profitable at this time, the majority of things are in idea stage, and I think those projects are the ones where one can get the most value for their work. Of course there is the risk that the product is never completed or turns a profit, but that's all startups. I'm all in on assembly, my current startups on there are: http://assembly.com/startl http://assembly.com/startl http://assembly.com/bootswap http://assembly.com/bootswap http://assembly.com/chatbotify-me http://assembly.com/chatbotify-me http://assembly.com/authorsimple http://assembly.com/authorsimple http://assembly.com/brytn http://assembly.com/brytn products I did not start but am active on: http://assembly.com/cliq http://assembly.com/cliq http://assembly.com/dawn http://assembly.com/dawn http://assembly.com/okvaper http://assembly.com/okvaper Startup ideas laying around I plan to put up there once I've got the ball rolling on my current ones: http://transtartup.blogspot.com http://transtartup.blogspot.com Assembly will prove valuable if people create value for the ideas put there on the risk that it will pay off, and the smaller the team when the dev gets in, the bigger of an impact and stake they can have/be rewarded.
jawns 12y ago
Interesting idea. This is kind of like Quirky (https://www.quirky.com https://www.quirky.com), but instead of collaborative production of consumer products, it's creating software. I read through the "Our Story" page, but I still couldn't figure out whether Assembly is organized as a true cooperative (100% member-owned). I see a "Shared Ownership" bullet point, but there's nothing explicit about it being a co-op.
keeptrying 12y ago
So CoderWall is their first product and I did a little fishing and 1 guy is doing all the coding as I suspected ... https://github.com/assemblymade/coderwall/pulse/monthly https://github.com/assemblymade/coderwall/pulse/monthly And in this case the guy gets a much smaller piece of the pie than a founder would. Too Little incentive for the kind of people you need in a startup.
- bitsweet 12y ago
  Just a heads up, Helpful was actually the first Assembly product. (https://github.com/asm-helpful/helpful-web/pulse/monthly https://github.com/asm-helpful/helpful-web/pulse/monthly) Its a community effort so some people have more time then others in a month and products on Assembly each have their own ebb and flow. It does look like just3ws did alot in October but those are probably mostly merge commits (just3ws is on the Core Team). All the partners still shared in last month's proceeds for their previous contributions though. Disclosure: I work on Assembly
  - keeptrying 12y ago
    I meant assembly product that people used and had some traction.
  - keeptrying 12y ago
    I'm sure if you shake the data a little more you'll see that a very small minority do most of the work. This has always been true - in corporations, in teams within corporations and in startups. I think you should evolve your product to reflect and incentivize this rather than fight it. Give the core guys the most equity - figure out a good way to calculate who those people are. Its a problem that mankind has been trying to solve forever. Instead of focussing on community, focus on creating a system that is secure for someone to start working immediately with the core-team. With deep git integration you could have somethign worthwhile there.
    - busterarm 12y ago
      How do you deal with people who make it difficult for others to work on the project to increase their own share? This is typical behavior of ladder-climbers in companies already. Is community not part of the answer to that problem?
cmapes 12y ago
I'm curious how this works with the legal landscape of US regulation. I'm 99.9% sure the law would consider this equity compensation in exchange for labor performed, since this is being positioned as "getting a share" of the company. The only difference between standard "sweat equity in exchange for labor" agreements and this is that there are "coins" that represent a certain percentage of ownership instead of a standard contractual agreement bearing stock certificates. That opens up a whole can of worms in terms of questions: - Can the project owner further dilute the "coins" of the project, by increasing the total coin count? (Can prior work be diluted, thus lowering earning for prior work?) - What kind of financial reporting requirements to companies have that work through assembly? Sarbanes oxley compliance? How do you know that they're reporting accurate earnings and not short-changing developers? - Are these just "amorphous projects with a DBA" aka an informal partnership or are they all required to be corporations or LLC's? - How about implicit liability? If someone were to do an amount of work equal to 10-20% of a company's ownership equity, and the company did something illegal, wouldn't the developer have implicit ownership since he was profit sharing with the company? Would this open the developer to potential liability? (disclaimer: not an attorney, and it's been a while since I looked at related laws, but I remember reading some surprising case law that implied this a while back.) - Possibly most importantly: How does this work with the SEC and IRS regulatory landscape? How is this viewed by the SEC? The SEC requires that any exchange of securities be subjected to extreme regulations (you must take your company public to sell shares to public investors). When I raised money for my angel round, I had to seek SEC Rule 506(d) exemption just to provide shares to my initial investor base and to sweat equity to myself and my founder. Most SEC exemption types carry additional reporting requirements for companies that have "non-qualifed" stockholders. This means monthly financial reporting that is SOX compliant by a CPA among other things IIRC. For the record, "qualified investors" have a net worth of $1mm+ or access to internal information that allows them to make knowledgeable investing (or in this case, investment of the developer's labor). These developers won't qualify simply by developing software for the company, as they need to have access to executive-level information. In addition, SEC exemptions need to be filed by the actual companies in question. Those exemptions have a window of time during which they're valid. Different exemptions have different maximum non-qualified investor counts before the company must go public. That may mean that there's a maximum amount of different developers that can develop and receive sweat equity on a project before it reaches a ceiling, depending on interpretation of the law. Finally, how does this affect the developer's taxable income? If he were to receive these equity shares (whether called "coins" or not), the IRS is going to deem these coins as having some sort of a value, just like stocks do. There's a lot of case law here, and typically it's going to work out to be (company valuation / ownership percentage = effective income amount). The IRS doesn't simply have you pay on dividends received from your equity, it has you pay the value of the equity as income as well, so how about with these coins? The IRS will see this as an asset received for labor, so how will this affect the taxable income of the developer? Do you require the companies on assembly to post a credible, running, monthly valuation by a 3rd party investment bank for taxation purposes? How do you handle the possibility of phantom taxation? I apologize if this seems negative, I think the idea is (potentially) pretty sweet. I just hope you and your founding team talked with some good attorneys before building out this business. As a startup CEO myself, there's a lot of basic regulatory issues that I see with it which would have prevented it from passing the initial "idea vetting" process.
hcarvalhoalves 12y ago
OT: I wonder how one gets a domain like this?
- userbinator 12y ago
  I'd guess the same way one gets any other domain - by purchasing it. The choice of name isn't bad but at first I was confused for a moment and thought it was about something at the demoparty of the same name: http://www.assembly.org/ http://www.assembly.org/
crazychrome 12y ago
I couldn't even finish watching the intro video. it's boring! And I guess it's another trap to suck up my fb/twitter/github/trello contacts/info so that I can do forum/email/IM/project management/crowdfunding/flirting with my own contacts all in one place under another name/concept. - "Work together" is not a selling point. I just want to make things, I'm not interested in yet-another-social-network. - "Community" is not a selling point. There are no such thing as community, there are individual men and women. - "Focus on what you like" is a lie. I bet all I can do on this platform is communication, nothing more. - "Keep your share", oversell?
stephenhandley 12y ago
"all products on Assembly are licensed under AGPL, and by agreeing to our terms of service you also are granting non-exclusive rights to Assembly to monetize this IP on behalf of the community (and you)."
zealon 12y ago
What about foreign contributors? What laws and rules apply to us?

70 points by vvoyer 12y ago

Something I can browse without allowing javascript. I am pleasantly surprised.

Cool idea, but at this point it doesn't seem like a reasonable option for new developers coming into projects. For example, I picked Coderwall, which is the 2nd project listed on the discover page. There are 11 tasks right now, with a total coin bounty of about 25k. Looking at the ownership, there are about 14.3 million coins allocated, owned primarily by one guy. SO, if I clear out ALL of the tasks for Coderwall, I will receive coins worth ~0.0017% of the project. If 100% of the stated $30k revenue is distributed to coin holders (which it won't be.. gotta pay for servers, etc), I will receive about $50/month for clearing out all of their tasks.. I understand that revenue might grow, but that's a very small amount nonetheless. Maybe I'm missing something? Is that about how it works?

bitsweet 12y ago
Disclosure: I work on Assembly Thanks marbemac! Thats mostly true but there are a couple things to note: * That math is based last month's earnings. If next month the earnings go up or expenses go down, the payouts would increase. Here is the break down of September: https://assembly.com/coderwall/posts/september-finances https://assembly.com/coderwall/posts/september-finances * The proceeds are paid out every month for the life of Coderwall. Several contributors earned over $500-1,000+ for previous contributions even though they didn't contribute much this last month. * Everyone can participate in determining the value of bounty, if you feel its too low, you can bump it up and additionally discuss it the thread. * There are a lot of products that don't earn as much stable revenue and therefore bounty values are more aligned with risks and opportunities.
goldfeld 12y ago
I'd consider 11 tasks for at least $50/mo. for the foreseeable future an interesting investment, at the least.
alhenaworks 12y ago
I think the dynamics you touched upon are specific to coderwall, their revenue model, their leadership, and their choice of stack(not that any of it is bad, it has just created the situation you described), and you can't judge every startup/product/team on assembly through the same lens. Only a few of the products on assembly are profitable at this time, the majority of things are in idea stage, and I think those projects are the ones where one can get the most value for their work. Of course there is the risk that the product is never completed or turns a profit, but that's all startups. I'm all in on assembly, my current startups on there are: http://assembly.com/startl http://assembly.com/startl http://assembly.com/bootswap http://assembly.com/bootswap http://assembly.com/chatbotify-me http://assembly.com/chatbotify-me http://assembly.com/authorsimple http://assembly.com/authorsimple http://assembly.com/brytn http://assembly.com/brytn products I did not start but am active on: http://assembly.com/cliq http://assembly.com/cliq http://assembly.com/dawn http://assembly.com/dawn http://assembly.com/okvaper http://assembly.com/okvaper Startup ideas laying around I plan to put up there once I've got the ball rolling on my current ones: http://transtartup.blogspot.com http://transtartup.blogspot.com Assembly will prove valuable if people create value for the ideas put there on the risk that it will pay off, and the smaller the team when the dev gets in, the bigger of an impact and stake they can have/be rewarded.

jawns 12y ago

Interesting idea. This is kind of like Quirky (https://www.quirky.com https://www.quirky.com), but instead of collaborative production of consumer products, it's creating software. I read through the "Our Story" page, but I still couldn't figure out whether Assembly is organized as a true cooperative (100% member-owned). I see a "Shared Ownership" bullet point, but there's nothing explicit about it being a co-op.

keeptrying 12y ago

So CoderWall is their first product and I did a little fishing and 1 guy is doing all the coding as I suspected ... https://github.com/assemblymade/coderwall/pulse/monthly https://github.com/assemblymade/coderwall/pulse/monthly And in this case the guy gets a much smaller piece of the pie than a founder would. Too Little incentive for the kind of people you need in a startup.

bitsweet 12y ago
Just a heads up, Helpful was actually the first Assembly product. (https://github.com/asm-helpful/helpful-web/pulse/monthly https://github.com/asm-helpful/helpful-web/pulse/monthly) Its a community effort so some people have more time then others in a month and products on Assembly each have their own ebb and flow. It does look like just3ws did alot in October but those are probably mostly merge commits (just3ws is on the Core Team). All the partners still shared in last month's proceeds for their previous contributions though. Disclosure: I work on Assembly
- keeptrying 12y ago
  I meant assembly product that people used and had some traction.
- keeptrying 12y ago
  I'm sure if you shake the data a little more you'll see that a very small minority do most of the work. This has always been true - in corporations, in teams within corporations and in startups. I think you should evolve your product to reflect and incentivize this rather than fight it. Give the core guys the most equity - figure out a good way to calculate who those people are. Its a problem that mankind has been trying to solve forever. Instead of focussing on community, focus on creating a system that is secure for someone to start working immediately with the core-team. With deep git integration you could have somethign worthwhile there.
  - busterarm 12y ago
    How do you deal with people who make it difficult for others to work on the project to increase their own share? This is typical behavior of ladder-climbers in companies already. Is community not part of the answer to that problem?

cmapes 12y ago

I'm curious how this works with the legal landscape of US regulation. I'm 99.9% sure the law would consider this equity compensation in exchange for labor performed, since this is being positioned as "getting a share" of the company. The only difference between standard "sweat equity in exchange for labor" agreements and this is that there are "coins" that represent a certain percentage of ownership instead of a standard contractual agreement bearing stock certificates. That opens up a whole can of worms in terms of questions: - Can the project owner further dilute the "coins" of the project, by increasing the total coin count? (Can prior work be diluted, thus lowering earning for prior work?) - What kind of financial reporting requirements to companies have that work through assembly? Sarbanes oxley compliance? How do you know that they're reporting accurate earnings and not short-changing developers? - Are these just "amorphous projects with a DBA" aka an informal partnership or are they all required to be corporations or LLC's? - How about implicit liability? If someone were to do an amount of work equal to 10-20% of a company's ownership equity, and the company did something illegal, wouldn't the developer have implicit ownership since he was profit sharing with the company? Would this open the developer to potential liability? (disclaimer: not an attorney, and it's been a while since I looked at related laws, but I remember reading some surprising case law that implied this a while back.) - Possibly most importantly: How does this work with the SEC and IRS regulatory landscape? How is this viewed by the SEC? The SEC requires that any exchange of securities be subjected to extreme regulations (you must take your company public to sell shares to public investors). When I raised money for my angel round, I had to seek SEC Rule 506(d) exemption just to provide shares to my initial investor base and to sweat equity to myself and my founder. Most SEC exemption types carry additional reporting requirements for companies that have "non-qualifed" stockholders. This means monthly financial reporting that is SOX compliant by a CPA among other things IIRC. For the record, "qualified investors" have a net worth of $1mm+ or access to internal information that allows them to make knowledgeable investing (or in this case, investment of the developer's labor). These developers won't qualify simply by developing software for the company, as they need to have access to executive-level information. In addition, SEC exemptions need to be filed by the actual companies in question. Those exemptions have a window of time during which they're valid. Different exemptions have different maximum non-qualified investor counts before the company must go public. That may mean that there's a maximum amount of different developers that can develop and receive sweat equity on a project before it reaches a ceiling, depending on interpretation of the law. Finally, how does this affect the developer's taxable income? If he were to receive these equity shares (whether called "coins" or not), the IRS is going to deem these coins as having some sort of a value, just like stocks do. There's a lot of case law here, and typically it's going to work out to be (company valuation / ownership percentage = effective income amount). The IRS doesn't simply have you pay on dividends received from your equity, it has you pay the value of the equity as income as well, so how about with these coins? The IRS will see this as an asset received for labor, so how will this affect the taxable income of the developer? Do you require the companies on assembly to post a credible, running, monthly valuation by a 3rd party investment bank for taxation purposes? How do you handle the possibility of phantom taxation? I apologize if this seems negative, I think the idea is (potentially) pretty sweet. I just hope you and your founding team talked with some good attorneys before building out this business. As a startup CEO myself, there's a lot of basic regulatory issues that I see with it which would have prevented it from passing the initial "idea vetting" process.

hcarvalhoalves 12y ago

OT: I wonder how one gets a domain like this?

userbinator 12y ago
I'd guess the same way one gets any other domain - by purchasing it. The choice of name isn't bad but at first I was confused for a moment and thought it was about something at the demoparty of the same name: http://www.assembly.org/ http://www.assembly.org/

crazychrome 12y ago

I couldn't even finish watching the intro video. it's boring! And I guess it's another trap to suck up my fb/twitter/github/trello contacts/info so that I can do forum/email/IM/project management/crowdfunding/flirting with my own contacts all in one place under another name/concept. - "Work together" is not a selling point. I just want to make things, I'm not interested in yet-another-social-network. - "Community" is not a selling point. There are no such thing as community, there are individual men and women. - "Focus on what you like" is a lie. I bet all I can do on this platform is communication, nothing more. - "Keep your share", oversell?

stephenhandley 12y ago

"all products on Assembly are licensed under AGPL, and by agreeing to our terms of service you also are granting non-exclusive rights to Assembly to monetize this IP on behalf of the community (and you)."

zealon 12y ago

What about foreign contributors? What laws and rules apply to us?