Show HN: Searchable directory of 22k+ products from worker-owned co-ops

If many of the worker-owned co-ops would prevent access to relevant customer data to prevent individual workers from developing relations with customer without the co-op in the middle, then that's something that could potentially be addressed by other co-ops in that you could deliberately structure it such that the co-op is either optionally or deliberately a platform for fostering worker/customer interactions rather than co-op/customer interactions.

Because if the co-op exists for the sake of the co-op while splitting profit with the workers, that is different from a co-op that exists solely to maximally aid the individual workers.

Kind of like the back/front of house tip debate. Should chefs be payed as tipped salaries? Should we all get regular wages and evenly split tips? Even in front of house, if Sarah is consistently pulling twice my average tips, it's not really fair to her (or technically her customers) that we split tips because the customers were so taken by her service that they wanted to assist her whereas I'm just some random person from their point of view and contributed nothing to her customers from her point of view. The analogy is that the company wants to split the tips because it benefits them by allowing them to more easily retain employees in situations where they feel it's worth keeping the ones that aren't getting big tips because their performance is "good enough" and they don't want the spend on hiring to replace - the benefit is too the company and the 'worse' wait staff, not the one who's actually responsible for the value add.

Right now our main revenue is through subcontracting, and admittedly we haven't pulled a fresh gig in a couple months, mostly because most of us are working a gig which limits our ability to BD - a limitation we've been kicking around how to resolve for ages.

We want to come up with some alternative revenue streams that aren't directly selling our labor. I soft launched one recently (a mock interview thing that I'm not quite ready to link completely publicly) but I'm also really interested in ideas other people have.

My goal for the co-op has been to make it a greater than sum of parts actualizer for each of our potentials. So far it's been pretty good on that front but for me the big win is gonna be if we can get a revenue generating project out.

Anyway, rambling. Feel free to reply with questions or email me (email is better since I'm trying to stay off HN due to internet comment addiction). https://508.dev/join has more info on joining.

Random fun fact: all our internal SaaS is FOSS and self hosted! Excluding discord. Matrix didn't work well for us.

I was going to say, I think youtube/spotify et al have been doing this for years, just slap ads on it.