Techie Seeking Cofounders for Platform Coop

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tl;dr - I’m a techie interested in starting a platform coop in Europe, that develops and hosts an open digital platform for coops. I’m here looking for cofounders.

Hello folks!

My name is Matan. I’m new here, and also new to the coop world. I’m Dutch, but live in France and have lived in several countries in Europe.

I’m an experienced software product engineer, which means I’ve worked on every step of the process of designing, building and deploying apps. You can read about me on my website.

My hypothesis is that coops could benefit from a specialized ERP-like platform.

For those who don’t know, ERPs are digital systems that manage most or all business operations, like invoicing, payroll, inventory, etc. Larger companies usually have customized ERP systems, tailored to their specific needs. As far as I can tell, there is no ERP designed from the ground up for coops.

I believe that with the right infrastructure, cooperatives could become a major force for positive change in this challenging century.

sketch of my plan

Eventually, I’d like to support the end-to-end process of launching, scaling up and federating coops into networks. So my current thoughts:

  • Seek funding via a loan from a finance / banking coop
  • Build a fully remote coop based in Europe
  • Focus on the European coop market first
  • Build a simpler, standardized SaaS product for smaller coops
  • Build customized, custom solutions for larger coops
  • Incrementally build out federation features using activity pub

Obviously this is still quite vague, and I need the expertise of someone with more knowledge about the needs and painpoints coops have to improve the plan.

the cofounder(s) I’m looking for

I’m looking for cofounders with entrepreneurial grit, adaptive startup mentality and coop values. Specifically, I need people with real-world experience in one or more of the following skills:

  • deep experience and knowledge of coops and their needs
  • experience working with ERP systems and enterprise software projects
  • knowledge of finance and administration of businesses (ideally coops)
  • experience with sales, especially sales to coops
  • a deep and wide network of contact in European coops

Interested? Reply here or by email (see my website for contact details).

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I know a ERP isn’t the same as a POS but I guess you have come across CORE-POS: The Cooperative Point of Sale System?

Have you had any thoughts on licensing? Would you consider using a Co-operative Software License?

Do you know we have a older and bigger tech co-op forum? Your post would probably also be worth posting there as there isn’t a total overlap of users.

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I know a ERP isn’t the same as a POS but I guess you have come across CORE-POS: The Cooperative Point of Sale System?

I didn’t hear about this, but very cool to see! I may reach out.

Have you had any thoughts on licensing? Would you consider using a Co-operative Software License?

I haven’t really heard of this. I’m personally not inclined to have a license which is endorsed by the Open Source Initiative. My guess is that extreme copyleft licenses that limit use by the type of organization would not count as truly open source in that sense.

Philosophically speaking, if some business wants to use this platform - which is designed from the ground up to support democratic workplaces - should I really care if they are not a coop on paper? I would rather they use it!

So I guess I would be lean towards AGPL / MPL since its conducive to to sharing improvements to the software itself but would allow people to easily mix with other stuff that is more radically licenses (e.g. coop licenses).

Do you know we have a older and bigger tech co-op forum? Your post would probably also be worth posting there as there isn’t a total overlap of users.

Thank you for this, I will post there too!

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Correct.

Good call, AGPL sound best for your project.

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It might be worth talking with members of Autonomic Co-operative:

As they have done a lot of work on co-operative infrastructure already:

:smiley:

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I’m interested in understanding more about your hypothesis. What are the unique qualities of cooperatives that mean they need a coop-specific ERP tool? aka what is the problem that your product seeks to solve?

I know that some years back there was a group of developers focussed around the Faircoin project that did some work using Odoo. May be of some relevance, but it was a while ago.

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@Graham totally valid question, and one I am exploring as well. I want to be honest that this is all very speculative: I lack direct experience* with coops and and I’m in very early stages of research. I’ve mainly been using Claude, and have:

  • Prompted it to research online and provide references
  • Asked it to focus on coops in Europe
  • Asked it to focus on challenges directly and indirectly related to IT / ERPs

If you wish to go deeper, I made the resulting report public; but the challenges that seemed most compelling to me in terms of justifying the need to specialized software:

  1. Integrated governance - governance software like Loomio, but its not integrated with various operational applications in use. Since collective decision making is one of the key aspects of coops, it seems like a fundamental gap.
  2. Specialized accounting - it seems most financial tools are designed for normal SMEs and don’t account for cooperative specific concepts.
  3. Federated networks - in Europe there many coops organized in federated structures (regional / national / European / international levels) which is not directly accounted for by existing software.
  4. Tailored compliance - regulatory burden is cited as a major challenge for European companies in general. Cooperatives have the added challenge of being a less recognized legal structure, especially across borders.
  5. Access to finance - cooperatives face more difficulties acquiring finance because they cannot sell equity, and are not catered to by mainstream financial institutions.

I think there is also a deeper cultural challenge: it seems many coops are behind on tech adoption. My hypothesis here is that the type of person who likes coops is - on average - less into tech than the average SME worker. And SME software is - on average - delivering a much worse UX than typical consumer apps. If I am right, an exceptional level of UX would be needed to make this kind of platform usable by coops.

I want to be clear that I realize this is a lot of stuff to take on; I don’t plan to do it all at once, and I believe one could find a viable incremental path that delivers something valuable in each step.

* This is why I really wanna find a cofounder with expertise in coops before proceeding. I care more about serving coops than I care about making a custom ERP or anything in particular (love the problem not the solution).

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@BillySmith thanks for the link, I might reach out!

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