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Sharing revenue with contributors to your business?

I want my business to be 51% owned by me and 49% owned by the community, with contributors from the community receiving a share of revenue based on their contributions.

The product is a web development platform (SaaS) based on a new open source framework.

Does anyone know a platform or setup (ideally not too complicated) that would allow me to pull this off?

David Miranda
@panphora

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Whoah this would be so cool! I've actually been thinking about something similar for the past few months... but haven't gone forward because I have no idea how to. So basically, I'm no help :)

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David Miranda
@panphora

That's awesome, maybe we should talk :)

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I think this more of a legal problem then a technical problem (shares ownership/payoffs). Check for profit sharing agreements.

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David Miranda
@panphora

@jernejpregelj I think it's both. I need a community site to manage the feature development, vote on engagement, and assign rewards. The profit sharing agreement is definitely part of this, but without the community platform, it's a hard task to pull off manually.

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Closest to what you're describing are DAOs (Decentralized autonomous organization) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decentr…

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Like @jernejpregelj pointed out there's multiple facets to this.

There's the legal part (equity, revenue/profit sharing, etc) and the logistical/community part.

As for the legal part I recommend talking to financial advisor. I recommend implementing something like this incrementally. Start at a place where you own all equity, but make a public promise to work towards the 51-49 split. Be open, share your numbers, etc. And formalise things over time as profits increase along with community participation. You don't really know what things should look like, until you're actually experiencing the model.

As for the logistical part, I don't think there's a product for this as it's a pretty unique approach. But again, I think you can just start out incrementally. Since it's a developer-oriented product I think it's fine to start with a GitHub Repo and clever usage of issues and labels. As you run into limitations you can start looking for other solutions, or building your own. But like the legal aspect, you probably don't really know what you'll need until you're in the thick of it. So just start simple and incrementally improve on things.

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