A: The basic idea here is to build a site to take advantage of the great domain name. By going on FairSoftware and listing your site, you should be able to find a technical co-founder who can program your site or develop content for what is currently a parked domain.

Let’s assume it works out pretty well and the combination of the domain name plus the site content becomes successful. An acquirer comes along and offers you one million dollars.

Sweet. But who pockets the money?

You both agreed to the Software Bill of Rights. You are still the sole owner of the domain name, but your technical co-founder is the copyright holder of the site program and content.

You could sell just the domain name and keep the million dollars for yourself. But to do that, you’d have to shut down the site first, since you’d lose any rights to your co-founder’s code and content. Then you’d have to rebuild everything from scratch. Probably not a good idea.

Or you could convert your FairSoftware startup into a corporation (this is explicitly allowed in section 3.1 of the Software Bill of Rights), share for share, and then have that corporation be acquired for the million dollars. So both you and your co-founder would share the money, according to the original split you decided when you created your FairSoftware startup.

If you consider that without your co-founder, you would never have received the offer, I think it’s the right way to go.

It’s such a cool project, we had to find out more from Robin and Owen Spottiswoode, the two co-founders.

Alain: Tell us about your product and maybe where the idea came from, or why you think this is important

Robin: The idea came from research I was doing for a presentation on Digital Rights Management whilst I was at university. I was simultaneously fascinated and appalled at the way the music industry operated. I was fascinated at the audacity of an industry for whom it was common practice to keep its most important commodity – artists – in a legal stranglehold and appalled that this was the way artists continue to be treated. I came to realise that it was the industry itself that was the root of the problem, and became determined to change it for the better.

Owen: Aucadia.com is all about bringing music fans and artists closer together, and finding a fairer way to distribute music and share its profits. We’re trying to build a community where artists are given the freedom to record their best music, and fans are able to get involved in the bands they love, and share in their success.

Robin: We wanted to get away from the idea that record labels dictate everything – from the price of the music to which songs are recorded and released. We want to give this power back to the artist and fans, the people that matter.

Owen: The idea behind Aucadia.com is that fans buy and sell ‘shares’ in the bands they like, at prices determined by them. Shareholders can download an artist’s entire back-catalogue and get access to exclusive gigs/shows and opportunities. The price of a ‘share’ will rise and fall depending on how popular and successful an artist is, so by supporting a band early in their career you can have a stake in their future success.

Robin: The emphasis is definitely on collaboration – we encourage fans to get involved by putting on gigs/shows and helping out the artist in any way possible. We want to break down barriers between artists and their fans in a way that will benefit both sides.

Alain: This is great. It’s also so close to our own values here at FairSoftware. What stage are you at (do you have code, specs, etc.)?

Robin: I’m coding the site as we speak. The specs are all there, it’s just a matter of getting all the functionality working the way we want. It sounds like a boring task, but it’s actually a lot of fun! I’m setting up a complete trading market, where artists’ share prices are dictated by trading between fans and will soon be able to pull all sorts of graphs from the data. It’s not like anything I’ve done before, which is what makes it so interesting (if a bit daunting). I’ll need to tie up a few loose ends before some more testing and debugging, and then there will be a closed alpha release before Christmas.

Owen: Once we’re happy the system is working we’ll jump straight into a public beta with ‘play money’. Each user who signs up will get some funds to build a portfolio with, so that they can start trading straight away. This will be a great way for people to get their feet wet without having to take the plunge and invest their own money straight away. This will also give artists the opportunity to test the service and see how it works.

Alain: What help do you need now?

Robin: We need able-bodied PHP programmers to help with general coding/debugging along with testers, lots of testers. Any PHP programmers that have experience in CakePHP would be a huge bonus, but it’s not a necessity, as Cake is similar to many other frameworks. If you want to get involved, please please please check out our page on FairSoftware or email me. It goes without saying, if you help out you’ll get shares through FairSoftware and be able to share in Aucadia’s success.

Owen: We’ll also be looking to raise our profile in the music world as we get closer to launch, so anyone who would be able offer insights into the industry would prove a valuable team member.

Robin: But the site is all about collaboration, so anyone with an interest in music and new media should definitely get in touch.

Alain: Tell us about yourselves, your backgrounds

Owen: We’re both really into music – we’ve played in a band together for several years – which is what got us both interested in this project. Robin has been doing web development for a while, whilst I work in the media, so there is a natural division of labour: he gets his hands dirty with the nuts and bolts of coding the site, whilst I’m tasked with planning our business development.

Robin: I divide my time between coding websites and bowing/plucking/hammering a musical instrument. This project encompasses the things we are both interested in, which is what makes it so exciting for us.

Alain: What else will you need to succeed, or is there anything else that would make a difference for you?

Owen: Our business model should start generating money from launch, but it gets more successful the more people use the site, so we would consider outside investment if it allowed us to fast-track our marketing strategy and get the word out more quickly.

Robin: We need good people who are passionate about the future of music to get involved. The bigger the pool of ideas, the better the outcome will be. Currently we are trying to encourage interest in the project, to give like-minded people the chance to get involved at this early stage and share in any success. Aucadia.com is going to be a marriage of the social and music web in a way that will be self-sufficient, allowing complete freedom The community will be a key aspect to this, so we are looking for people to help manage and promote the community from the outset.

Owen: And we will have someone else to blame if it all goes horribly wrong.

Robin: *laughs* Yes, that too.

You can follow the progress of the project on twitter: @aucadia.

If you are interested in helping with development, click here.

That’s what we just made really simple now on FairSoftware with our new feedback widget. Once you setup your idea and enter a description, the community can give you instant feedback on three key elements:

Here are some examples:

• Is there a market for bugcollect, a web site that collects logging and crash reporting information (early feedback from community seems to indicate so)?
• Can a Facebook game of power and political intrigue make money?
• Is an iPhone app that lets you create an emoticon from the built-in camera useful?

We figured that these three criteria are the most important to help improve your idea:

• You need to express your idea clearly, so people you’ll be pitching to (co-founders, business partners, potential customers), understand what you are trying to build
• Your product must be useful, otherwise no one will care. Are you solving a real need? Make sure you are not confusing a technology with a need.
• Even if you do great with the first two questions, you don’t have a business unless it can generate money. Some ideas are great and very useful, but you simply can’t build a business around them. They may be better suited for an open source approach, as a side project. Better to know before you invest too much energy.

Just visit any of the public projects to provide feedback. You’ll be doing a service to the startup community. New navigation buttons let you go from one idea to the next with one click.

And when you want to give more detailed feedback to the founders, there is a discussion thread attached to each project idea. Who knows, you may even join the project and become a co-founder if you think it’s a great idea.

Many of you asked us for a more flexible way to add co-founders early on and offer more flexibility on the allocation of shares, since you haven’t always found all your co-founders by the time you have your initial idea.

Therefore, creating a Fair Project is now split in two parts. First, you setup your project, with a very simple one-page form. At that stage, all you really need is a name and some idea of what you want to build.

You can leave your project in that stage for as long as you want. You an start adding co-founders from friends you know, advertise your project to the rest of our community, and also crowdsource your idea by gathering feedback.

During that setup phase, you can freely add or remove co-founders and modify the share allocation as many times as you want until you are happy with the results.

Invite Co-Founder

Edit Shares Split

Once you have settled on a founding team, you activate the project. That’s when each co-founder has to agree to the deal by approving the Software Bill of Rights. From then on, co-founders can start contributing, write code, and so on. Everyone is protected legally. As before, you can grow your project and bring more contributors on board.

We hope this improvement will make it even easier than before to start working on apps, even if you haven’t found a team yet.

As always, feel free to send us feedback and requests for more improvements.

Below is our story.

The Original Idea

It’s been almost three years since I visited my friend Christophe in Paris for a casual chat that eventually lead to FairSoftware as you see it today.

We were discussing how hard it was to do a software project alone. With no resources, no product and no income, how did everyone else manage to pull it through?

I live in Silicon Valley, the capital of startups. Here, we start startups by giving equity and stock options to the early employees and co-founders. That got us thinking: can we move this model online and make it accessible to everyone?

What was meant to be a brief chat turned into an exciting 10-hour discussion on the potential of the idea.

Execution

Turning that idea into a product that is actually useful took us two years. The idea is simple. Implementing it is way more complex than you’d think. Implementing it so that it feels simple despite all the complexity under the hood, that’s what we worked hard to achieve.

We believe that there are many entrepreneurs out there who don’t have the access or fortune of Larry and Sergey, but have ideas worth pursuing. Our vision is to export entrepreneurship and make it accessible to everyone. Working solo is a fool’s errand. Assembling a team used to require significant investment. No more.

Now It’s Your Turn

This blog is dedicated to exploring the Fair business model with you, listen to your feedback, learn from your ideas and experiences. Together we can make Fair businesses the best place to be!

Where do you see Fair businesses expanding? What features would you like us to add? Do you have ideas for a Fair business? Tell us.

Welcome,

Alain and all the FairSoftware team.