Principles of #upside, v1

A vague idea, that turned into a Slack channel, that maybe is ready to be more than that.

The idea is to have a group of people that easily form projects together without too much haggling. It’s called Upside, because that’s the thing that makes it work — everything we do together has to have upside for all participants.

My idea for this is pretty extreme — what if the entire company was formed and built through shared upside of individual components?

This idea is nascent, but not theoretical. It’s how Better Programming, Better Marketing, the Better Programming Job Board, Moneyball and Habit Coach Certification were built, launched and are currently run. That’s five significant products in 18 months, three of which are profitable already.

I don’t completely understand even how to explain this to a general audience, but it feels like we’re far enough into this idea that I should at least try to get the principles of it written down.

1. Optimize for launching. It’s a zero to one strategy. A launched idea that you share ownership of is more valuable to you than an unlaunched idea that you could in theory build and own yourself. Practice beats theory here, because in practice, you probably will never launch this idea without help.
2. Equal share of profit or ownership. Haggling over percentages prevents projects from starting. Equal sharing gives everyone enough interest to have a…