Cooperativ is a product of Sunshine Labs Inc.

Value Proposition

It should be easy to share ownership and control of projects**.**

• It should be possible for a creator on a platform like Patreon or Teachable to build and compensate a team without registering a company.
• It should be possible to set up a temporary business, for a temporary collaboration, in 30 minutes.
• It should be easy for people who have never met in person to build a business across borders.

But it's not.

We are fixing that.

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. Here is how it works:

Cooperativ vs. The Old Way

1. Create the business

❌ The old way → Registering an official business: You form a legal business entity, which is expensive, time-consuming, creates a tax burden, and forces you to make important decisions you may not be ready to make.

✅ Our way → You create an account with a simple profile describing your business, and connect it directly to a creator platform or other income stream.

2. Add team members

❌ The old way → Drafting consulting agreement: ****You figure out how to navigate Legal Zoom, or Clerky, or Seed Legal, or you ask a lawyer-friend for a contract template. What you get back looks like it was written in 1859 and is meant for businesses that are farther along than yours. Your friend thinks it’s weird that you are asking her to sign a contract. - OR - operate without, or with a flimsy agreement.

✅ Our way → You configure an invitation, add select one or two of the payment methods, and click send. Your collaborator reviews and accepts.

3. Compensate team members

❌ The old way → Prematurely negotiating equity: You try to work out equity or revenue share agreements with your collaborators on your own without the guidance of an experienced advisor. This is uncomfortable and time consuming and requires a level of expertise that most who are in the early stage of development do not have.

✅ Our way → You configure revenue share tokens for you and your co-creators, then create a class of Contributor Credits to give the other contributors rights to the first dollars that your project earns.

4. Share Success (and expectations)

❌ The old way → Ruined relationships with friends: Your friend built your website but otherwise isn't involved in your company. You and him end never specified his stake, and end up at very different assumptions about what he gets. The two of you become not-friends.

✅ Our way: You pay your friend 20,000 credits. He expects to get $20,000. Your business starts to become successful. He is very pleased to receive $20,000 (or, if stays with the company, he eventually trades in his credits for equity).

Cooperativ vs. Typical DAO

Note: Cooperativ will be a DAO builder, and users will be able to create any kind of DAO. The difference between Cooperativ and alternatives is both its features at launch and its focus on letting organizations anchor into traditional law.

"The average person starts a business to sell things, not to experiment with decentralized governance."

Our insight: Blockchain applications have not seen mass-market adoption because they only offer value when the user moves their whole operation on-chain. Our hybrid approach addresses that problem.

Comparison

Notes specific to Contributor Credits

1. Can be presented as "when X happens, I owe you Y." This clarity is critical to most users (It's easy to forget that many employees don't even understand how their stock options work. That's only acceptable because they are also being paid a salary.). Another way to say this is that CCs offer a guaranteed liquidity following a pre-defined measure of success. This is not true for social tokens.
2. All CC holders have standing to enforce the CC contract, which means a contributor in a jurisdiction with a strong court system helps protect contributors in jurisdictions with weak court systems
3. When compared with both traditional equity and with social tokens, Contributor Credits are is lower risk because the liquidity point is much nearer.
4. Social tokens replicate the problem equity creates when managing early-stage projects: People who just do a month or two of work shouldn't have indefinite rights to profits. By denying them these rights, projects can actually afford to pay them more, sooner. For example, a sound engineer who works on a game may want access to 50% of the first dollars that come in, not 5% of all the dollars the game earns.

Live Contributor Credit Contracts⛓

Untitled Database