Cooperation Among Co-ops in Cincinnati

Andy Bowling of comp.coop talks about his worker co-op, and shares some of the work being done by Co-op Cincy, including a profit-sharing program that seeks to ease the pay-disparities between worker co-ops operating in different industries.

Transcript

Andy Bowling: Especially when you look at a place like Cincinnati, and I think we're a great example of this, right? It's more of a white collar industry, right, like you were saying, like software engineers relative to most workers get paid extremely well, right? And on the other side of things, you've got these essential industries both for workers and their communities, right? There's a home cleaning co-op that is absolutely wonderful, Cincy Cleaning Co-op. There's Our Harvest, the farm. And so a lot of what we do, right, is, you know, the co-op network as a whole gets stronger if we lift each other up, right? And so that's where the profit sharing comes from. In terms of a little bit more nuts and bolts..so Co-op Cincy, the organization itself is a nonprofit. For years, that's all it was was a bunch of co-ops supported by Co-op Cincy with this profit sharing agreement. But actually last year - and I can't really take any credit for this you know, we came on 99% through the process and just get to reap the rewards of it - but we actually started a for-profit..like a proper co-op of co-ops, Mondragon style.

Josh Davis: So everybody agrees to put in a certain percentage of their net, and then it gets redistributed to everybody on like the basis of hours worked or how does that..?

Andy Bowling: It's not a pure profit share in that way. So half of the profit goes to Co-op Cincy, the nonprofit, and speaking from experience, you get that back as a multiple in terms of support and grant access. But the other half of that 10%, so 5%, goes to this co-ops of coops. We're really in our first full year of it, so it'll be interesting to see where that money goes. We're looking at real estate acquisitions to get office space so that, you know, eliminate one..you know, landlords are highly risky for small businesses and their viability. But also things like group health care coverage. Why are each of us paying for one-tenth of a lawyer when 10 of us can pay for one lawyer? Things like shared services purchasing.

Josh Davis: I am here with Andy Bowling, and he is going to tell us about his worker cooperative. I'll just let you take it away from there, Andy.

Andy Bowling: Sure. I'm Andy. I'm a software engineer and co-founder of Comp.coop. We started in early 2024, so we're just over a year old. And our goal in one sentence is we aim to bring world-class tech to worker-led organizations. So that means nearly 100% of our clients are co-ops, ESOPs, co-op developers, trade unions. You know, folks who..we ask the question, if this client succeeds, are workers and their communities better off? That's really the one sentence summary, and then in terms of what that actually means because tech is an endlessly large space, we really focus in on software, and we offer a really wide range of services. On the high end, we came from a background of tech startups, of big tech, of consulting, and building these really global scale platforms. If you think of in the co-op space, things like the Drivers Co-op is sort of the North Star example of a large platform co-op. But we meet the space where it's at. Our most popular package is what we call our solidarity starter package. It's usually for new or rebranding co-ops, ones who just went through incubation, and you essentially get a beautiful, simple website, a custom social media strategy that helps you achieve success on social media with a minimal amount of work. We set you up with basic cybersecurity. Just everything that we say the lower tech, 90 - 95% of businesses need to be successful in their first two to four years. And then everything in between. Your QuickBooks doesn't talk to your Airtable, we do that..you want a CRM set up. That's a little bit of an overview. I never knew never know whether to do the two minute version or the two hour version of the company overview.

Josh Davis: So there was a lot of stuff on there. I've got a couple of questions for you. One, who are some of your clients that you're working with there?

Andy Bowling: So custom tech takes a long time to get off the ground. One thing I'm really happy I read before we started this is for an established firm that does custom tech, the sales cycle is six to nine months long. That means from the time you talk to someone to when they agree to work with you. We started..we really started taking it seriously in January of '24. We got our first client in June, and now we have 19 clients, 17 of whom are co-ops or co-op developers and it's everything from..I'll start with our largest example, we work with Works Printing. I always say if you've been in the co-op or non-profit space for enough years, you have a couple of their items. They do print on demand merch, but they are a union print shop, they're a worker cooperative themselves. They do larger projects, like they do the merch for Elizabeth Warren, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, but then they also are really focused on smaller nonprofits, co-ops, trade unions, and left-leaning politicians. We've done a lot of work for them in terms of modernizing their tech, helping them open up new lines of business, lowering their operational costs, sort of being in a sense a large part of their tech department. Then we also have a lot of..to go to the other extreme, brand new co-ops, folks who maybe you haven't even heard of yet that are still in incubation, still silent. One that I'll highlight that's in Co-op Cincy that is doing really well now in their first full year of operation, they're called Old Growth Cooperative. They do regenerative landscaping, so sustainable landscaping, and they're founded by folks who have been around the co-op scene for a lot of years in Cincinnati. For them, it was a lot simpler. It's a beautiful website. You can see them at oldgrowth.coop. And a social media strategy, web security. These guys are busy, they're landscaping ideally all the time, and so we want to make the tech part of the business, which isn't why they're doing it, as easy as possible. I'd say those are two extreme examples.

Josh Davis: I saw on your website, you've got listed as one of your services offered, startup assistance. I wondered if that was beyond just the basic technical stuff to get off the ground or if you guys were doing some other kind of startup consulting or advising.

Andy Bowling: We are definitely...if you talk to me in three months, I might say yes, we do everything. We're really looking at that of like..you know, we're working backwards from the question of like what does it take to grow the movement? What does it take to really encourage worker ownership from our angle of expertise, which is generally digital. So one thing we started doing in the second half of last year is we partnered with co-op developers in Ohio, and then also in Colorado, and we're talking with a few others this year, to take their incubation classes..so you know a lot of these folks have 12- or 16-week...Co-op Cincy calls it Co-op U..where you work through a 200-page workbook. And we've started coming in about two thirds of the way through that. Once you have your customers figured out, once you have your sales strategy - and it is a decent amount of tech - we basically give like a 30- to 45-minute education presentation, the first half of which is done by my teammate Anna, who's a marketing expert. She'll talk about, you know.."have a logo that can look good in tiny formats, that can look good on black paper, on white paper." Just sort of basics around how to create a brand that is authentic, but also practical. Finding your voice, people are practicing their customer pitches, how do you take that into marketing materials. Then I come in and do my little thing about, here's how you build a successful website, here's how you think about tech investments. We are looking more into broader business consulting, but it's still in the works.

Josh Davis: If you decide to go that direction..Cooperation Works, their course for developers is highly recommended by everyone. It sounds like you're doing, right now, that kind of startup assistance in conjunction with Co-Op Cincy as part of your program, right?

Andy Bowling: Yeah. They ran, along with three other co-op developers in Ohio, Co-op Dayton, Co-op Columbus, and Cleveland Owns, they ran a statewide Co-op U last year, a digital one. It was somewhere around a dozen co-ops, and so we helped all of them out.

Josh Davis: Another thing I saw on your website, on your creation story with the three of you starting - it sounds like you've got quite a few people on board now, working there. I was wondering, is it still just the three you as worker-owners or have you onboarded more people onto the ownership track?

Andy Bowling: Great question. I'll give sort of a two-part answer here. The first is for us as a pure organization, we're looking at a fourth person but currently we're still three worker owners. But one thing I'm really excited for..we're actually getting everyone together on Friday for the first time, but we've been working on this for 15 months..is, you know, we've met dozens and dozens of values-aligned tech professionals in the last year at conferences, through networking, through friends, through the community. And we've identified a dozen across four other co-ops that we think meet this combination of being really, really good at what they do, having a sort of unique skill set that complements the rest of the group, and are values-aligned and understand co-op economics. And so we now..and we've run this on jobs with two clients successfully already, where we come in and say, "Hey, think of us as one big engineering and product department." That's everything from paid social media advertising, that's Cotty Collective up in Toledo; there's Limeleaf Worker Collective in Albany, who do a lot of low-level go and rust and network engineering stuff; we've got Polycot Associates out..actually they're spread all over..who do a lot of large scale web development; and then Solidarity Co-op - solid.coop is their website, they do a lot of functional programming and backend development. So we do have projects where we can present ourselves as a very large team that's tightly connected. But for us as a legal entity, we're three worker owners, soon to be four.

Josh Davis: You're only a year old..I guess I didn't really realize how new you were and you got a lot of clients within that year, but there are a lot of worker co-ops where the probationary period for new employees is a year plus and sometimes longer than that, so that's great. I don't know what else to ask you about Comp.coop, so what should I be asking you? Ask yourself a question, if you have another one that you wished I would ask, and then answer it for me.

Andy Bowling: I think the biggest thing that we're really starting to crack, one thing we've really looked at is, particularly in the United States, why to this point these very large-scale, industry-wide, high-tech cooperative efforts haven't really hit their revenue goals. The famous one is the Drivers Co-op, for Uber drivers owning their own app. There's also a really exciting one, Subvert, that's coming up. That is a musician- and musician label-owned alternative to Bandcamp. The Artist is co-op for Etsy. There's a lot of these popping up and their business models, what we've seen volunteering at these co-ops, having some of them as clients, or just studying them and talking to their founders, is it really feels like in the last five to ten years - and again, I'm saying this as someone who's relatively new to the space, this is folks I'm talking to that I'm learning this from, but we've really kind of cracked the business side of it pretty well. The economics of it, how you organize, how the legal entities work, how decision making works, I feel like has really come a long way. But when you talk to the folks who have led from the tech side of this, even four or five years ago, it really seemed like the tech side of the scene was very disconnected. These teams would come together for a project, and if you think about...being a software engineer, the world we've grown up in in the last 20, 30 years is with venture-capital funny money right? Where these venture capitalists...I always say, the only company I've ever worked for that is bigger now than when I worked there is my dad's small manufacturing company up in Akron. Every other one, from four-person startups to 180,000-person behemoths are smaller than when I worked there. And that's because these guys don't really care about sustainability, solid business principles. They won a lottery ticket.

Josh Davis: Which is why you can't just take their business model and try to make it a co-op. Because they have soft bank, and they have people with billions of dollars of dumb money that they'll throw down this black hole. We don't have that.

Andy Bowling: You're exactly right, and so we, from day one - and this was even six months before we started the company, so like mid-23 - we really started thinking about like how do we crack that. One of the things we're looking at is how did Mondragon crack it right? Biggest co-op success story, one of the biggest ones in the world, and...

Josh Davis: Have your own bank.

Andy Bowling: That's exactly it. So the way that they...their problem back in the 1960s was they had all these great ideas, but they didn't have that early-stage business coaching and they didn't have startup capital right? And the bank solved, in a lot of ways, both of those problems. And if you think about what these big platform co-op efforts or these high tech co-up efforts are raising money for, often times a great majority of it is for tech labor. So if we can come in here and say, "Hey, we will engage in that risk sharing, we'll take some risk with you. We believe that this business, long term, is viable." It's essentially labor debt that we need to go into, and we've really looked at that. We've already, just by thinking that way, have been able to quote 10 to 20% off the sticker price for high-end software development, which is good but we kind of want to go further. We really want to get something that's affordable to these movements that don't have a billion bucks behind them.

Josh Davis: Minsun Ji, who you probably know..she just wrote an article in Nonprofit Quarterly about their experience so far with the Denver iteration of the Drivers Co-op idea. The one number that stuck out to me was the half a million dollars that they had spent developing the app, which is..in the worker co-op world, not in the tech world, but in the worker co-op world, half a million dollars is a massive amount of money.

Andy Bowling: So much money.

Josh Davis: And as you say, most of that money is just going to highly-skilled tech workers. So some of us get kind of concerned about that, that there's going to be a bunch of money raised to do co-op stuff but then it's going to end up going to people who are basically freelancers who are already making six figure salaries other places. Then if the co-op doesn't work out, the low-income people who were supposed to benefit didn't benefit, and people who always benefit, benefit once again. So the people on your end of things being willing to share some of that risk is great. I've been a big advocate of us needing, as a co-op movement, to do more risk sharing because it's very easy to encourage somebody else to start a worker co-op, or a business of any kind, but once you've done that yourself you understand there's a lot of risk involved. And even though worker co-ops have a much better survival rate than other businesses, but it's not a no-risk proposition. So asking people who are already working in low-income jobs - driving cabs or doing home health care or house cleaning, stuff like that - to also take on this kind of risk and it is all on their own..I think is a little much, so that's great that you guys are doing that. Like I said, those are all the questions I can think of for now. I did want to spend some time talking with you a little bit about your experience with Co-op Cincy. Just give us a little background on the group, as you know it, and what your interactions have been with them.

Andy Bowling: Absolutely. Co-op Cincy has been absolutely amazing. I always credit the labor that goes into a thing as the biggest factor in its success but short of that Co-op Cincy has been the number one difference between success and failure for us. We're a distributed team. I'm based in northern Kentucky. I can walk to Cincinnati from my house but one of my co-founders was in Brooklyn, so in the New York Tri-State, and another was on the Florida-Georgia line outside of Tallahassee. So we really had not just different metros but we had eight or nine different states where we reasonably could have called home. We met a lot of folks, we looked around, and what we found with Co-op Cincy is they really balance the theoretical - what does this movement need to look like in 10, 20, 40 years - with, how do we survive until tomorrow. Those are really my favorite folks to work with in the space. They were founded - I'll mess up the history here - but about 15 years ago with a historic partnership with Mondragon and the United Steelworkers Union, just to really try and replicate the Mondragon model in a way that made sense in the United States. And now in 2025, there are about 15 active co-ops in the network, doing everything from farming to landscaping, like I mentioned, to solar energy, massage therapy, and we're pretty tightly integrated. We do profit sharing throughout the network, we get together once a month for a happy hour, we have fundraising events each year, we provide discounted services to each other in the spirit of inter-cooperation. Actually, the wall behind me was insulated by Sustainergy who does residential solar and home insulation. The level of reputation that they've built as leaders in the space, the level of just..you can come to them with any problem, and they'll say, "Okay, here's five people who have thought about this for years, and here's what you can learn from them, and we'll connect you to them." It's just been unreal to describe the support they've given us.

Josh Davis: That's great to hear. One of the things you just said that really surprised me and I want you to expand on some more is the profit sharing aspect. You said that the co-ops in the network are doing profit sharing. What does that look like in practice?

Andy Bowling: Especially when you look at a place like Cincinnati, and I think we're a great example of this, it's more of a white collar industry. Like you were saying, software engineers, relative to most workers, get paid extremely well. On the other side of things, you've got these essential industries both for workers and their communities - there's a home cleaning co-op that is absolutely wonderful, Cincy Cleaning Co-op, there's Our Harvest, the farm - so a lot of what we do is, the co-op network as a whole gets stronger if we lift each other up. So that's where the profit sharing comes from. In terms of a little bit more nuts and bolts, Co-op Cincy, the organization itself, is a nonprofit and for years that's all it was was a bunch of co-ups supported by Co-op Cincy with this profit sharing agreement. Actually last year, and I can't really take any credit for this - we came on 99% through the process and just get to reap the rewards of it - but we actually started a for-profit, like a proper co-op of co-ops, Mondragon style.

Josh Davis: Is it, everybody agrees to put in a certain percentage of their net, and then it gets redistributed to everybody on like the basis of hours worked?

Andy Bowling: It's not a pure profit share in that way. Half of the profit goes to Co-op Cincy, the nonprofit. Speaking from experience, you get that back as a multiple in terms of support and grant access. But the other half of that 10%, so 5%, goes to this co-op of co-ops. And we're really in our first full year of it, so it'll be interesting to see where that money goes. We're looking at real estate acquisitions to get office space so that, eliminate one..landlords are highly risky for small businesses and their viability. But also things like group healthcare coverage. Why are each of us paying for one-tenth of a lawyer when 10 of us can pay for one lawyer? Things like shared-services purchasing. Where we're going to go with that is still to be seen, but it's exciting. All those structures are in place now for it.

Josh Davis: That's great. Have you guys considered like or do you already have maybe a revolving loan fund for the co-ops made as part of your profit sharing? Have you thought about doing that with part of that?

Andy Bowling: I know Co-op Cincy is part of and I believe Kristin Barker, the co-director of Co-op Cincy, is on the board for Seed Commons. So I know that they have a lot of those same principles of non-extractive capital infusions. I know different co-ops in the network have leaned into that network. But that's definitely..one exciting thing that's quite related to that is a big..correctly..an obsession in the space right now is the silver tsunami. All of these small businesses owned by baby boomers who are retiring and we want them to go worker-owned. A lot of what we're looking at is if workers want to buy out a business, there's really two limitations. There's immediate capital, and there's expertise - management expertise specifically. One thing we're looking at is could we acquire these businesses to give the owner a faster way to get capital and then just sell it back to the workers at cost, to basically provide that super low interest loan functionally and then also management training. If they need a finance person for a year, provide a finance person for a year. So that is in the works but it's still a pretty new initiative.

Josh Davis: You're not the first people to have that basic idea. The silver tsunami, I've been in the movement, as it were, for about 10 - 11 years, and I think the whole time I've be here people have been talking about the silver tsunami, the silver tsunami. The longer time goes on, it keeps being true. But on the profit share..it's a that kind of co-op holding company idea, I think is definitely one that could have some legs because that's certainly an issue for a number of people. I've run into it myself, we're talking about turning this privately owned thing into...cooperativizing it, and then there's a health issue that comes up and things need to get settled real quickly now and we don't have time to do all that. It would be great to have something along those lines. I would just say, and from long experience now with a lot of very experienced co-op developers, and talking to people who've done a lot of conversions - it's the educating the workers about how to run the business and how to work together to do that, that is the lion's share. If you've already got a profitable business, a lot that stuff is, fortunately..the business-y side of it has already been figured out largely, hopefully, but there's all that education work that goes on. So that's good. Hopefully you guys can figure something out with that. The other thing that is..just because we have a good relationship with VAC, the Valley Alliance of Worker Cooperatives, and that's one of the big things that their alliance has done that's been very helpful for the members is the inter-cooperative loan fund where they all contribute to a revolving loan fund and then it's there for emergencies and stuff that we can't get necessarily. The shared capital or Seed Commons funds or often just in conjunction with those as well. Another source of financing for larger stuff. Do you know..maybe you already mentioned it but do you know about how many members are in Co-op Cincy?

Andy Bowling: In terms of active co-ops, I think there are 15, maybe 16 of us now. And in terms of total members, I know it's well into the hundreds. Oh man, I'm a little embarrassed. I don't know the exact number.

Josh Davis: I'm actually looking on the website now.

Andy Bowling: I think it's between 200 and 500, if I had to guess.

Josh Davis: 15 - 16 co-ops, that's about what we'd expect. And doing trainings for 1,300 people a year. That's great. Anything else exciting that Co-op Cincy has been up to that you'd like to talk about or share?

Andy Bowling: Oh man, so many things..how to choose. I'll plug one thing that I'm really excited about. They've partnered with the other co-op networks in Ohio and are working on..well, they have it scheduled..an Ohio statewide co-op tour. It's a bus tour that's gonna be three days in early June. I think it's June 5th through 7th. I could be off by a day there but essentially it starts up in Cleveland, so we'll tour some of the Cleveland-owned supported cooperatives. There's also Evergreen Cooperatives..is a very large, hundreds of worker-owners, cooperative network up in Cleveland. Start up there, maybe go through the Ohio Employee Ownership Center in Kent, Ohio, just outside of Akron, down to Co-op Columbus and then to Co-op Dayton. They've got a lot going on there. Then it ends back in Cincinnati for our annual Co-Op Fest, which is out on Our Harvest Farm. There's fresh food and all the co-ops will have a table there. Everyone else has a table there. I'm just really looking forward to that. Yeah, I just love hanging with co-op people. It's always a good time.

Josh Davis: Have you guys..do you have much interaction with the folks from Cleveland and the co-ops there?

Andy Bowling: Yeah, yeah, we actually..like comp.coop, personally, we're very, very tight with especially the folks up at Cleveland Owns, they do a lot of incredible work, not just in the co op space but they're a little bit I would say even more broad thinking, they're doing things like pushing for community solar laws in Ohio, right, which is a way for people who don't own a giant rooftop to get access to the benefits of solar via shared purchasing. They do a lot with, you know, community support and also do, you know, support some co-ops as well. Yeah, we're..we love those guys and I'm from outside of Cleveland. So, you know personal connection there as well.

Josh Davis: Nice. Yeah, okay, well, I am out of questions. Anytime anybody brings up Uber and Mondragon, I have like rants I can go off on for an hour on both of those. But I've already done it on many other occasions, so I'm not gonna subject you to them. And they're probably not even relevant. But yeah, so it's..yeah, I don't know. Once again, I'm kind of..I'm at the end of my questions for you but I feel like you probably have more to share but if you don't..just we can wrap it up. But if you've got something else that you'd like to talk about or some, I don't know, maybe something that you've noticed a lot of, if there's something that you notice co-ops are often lacking on in your particular field of expertise. Like I know here we've had some security issues due to social media like we got our Facebook account hacked. I don't know. Is there any advice you can share, general advice that you know from your training and stuff with people that might be helpful?

Andy Bowling: Yeah, yeah, I think something that..and this I would say generally applies, I've seen this at brand new theoretical, small business manufacturing co ops and also like, you know, high tech 100 person ones is..you know with tech, there's sort of this joke in the industry that junior engineers think of tech as this positive thing. You build tech and it's valuable, it adds value, whereas senior engineers look at it as a cost center. I think that is really something I'd tell everyone that we talk to is to..you talk to people about paying taxes, for example. That's something you have to do as a business. If you want to exist and make revenue, you have to file your taxes. You don't have to have a website, but it's almost always a good idea. And the reason it's a good idea is because it's an investment in your business. Thinking of it that way is generally how I tell people to approach all tech things. If you're a food composting company and you're going to buy a truck that can pick up the composting bins and dump them and allows you to pick up twice as many bins and grow your business, you should evaluate tech investments the same way. How is it going to help you run away from the pains of your business? Reduce operational costs, reduce labor costs so that you can focus on more interesting things. How is it going to help you grow? I think just looking at it that way instead of just tech being this scary thing that you have to throw x number of thousand dollars at a year has been a really helpful framework for us, you know, just consulting with, again, all levels of clients.

Josh Davis: Yeah, okay. Well, yeah, that's good. It sparks for me because we've, you know, started using over the years a lot of these kind of I guess software as a service. B2B SaaS or whatever they call it.

Josh Davis: Yes, so you know StreamYard that we're using now to record this as a service that we pay for monthly. We use Trint, transcription..like automated transcription service that makes it possible for us to do a lot more transcriptions than we would otherwise. But that's also is a monthly fee. Um, you know, our zoom account. You know, all this kind of stuff. And our Mail Chimp. Now Mail Chimp we got off of for a newsletter because they jacked the price up considerably at the same time they implemented a bunch of AI stuff we weren't real comfortable with and so we did find a worker co-op - Autonomic - to work with and get us on to our own kind of self-hosted email system and actually get Google and Yahoo to deliver our emails and all that which has saved us..well, will save us money. There's, you know, the setup, you know, took a little bit but the monthly rate going forward is a lot better and we're in full control of it. So I'm wondering, do you..how do you feel about like the open source software? Do you guys recommend using any of that? I know one thing that we've done at GEO is recently gone from using..well, I don't even want to say what we're using for bookkeeping before but we've started using New Cache, GNU cache. It's the QuickBooks replacement I think made for Linux but apparently you can get it on Windows and Apple too. So just wondering if you guys, you know, use any of that software or recommend it or anything like that.

Andy Bowling: Yeah, absolutely. So the way I think about things like that with tech is you want to do as much as you can while keeping the mission successful, right? So, for example, I'm not going to go out and rip the fiber lines out and build my own democratically-run fiber lines because that's not a feasible problem for me to personally solve. But so we look at what are these layers that are the best bang for your buck in terms of taking them ethical. And I guess two thoughts. One sort of general concept is, you know, when you're first starting out, the most common thing to do is run your entire business in a spreadsheet, right? You run it in Google Sheets or Excel, and that's great. That's really..that's most..I always say, if you want me to ask one..

Josh Davis: I feel like we're being called out right now, but all right, go on, go on..

Andy Bowling: As a consultant, if you ask me like, I have to ask one non financial question to a business to determine if they're profitable, I would say, "have you broken Excel by putting too many rows in it?" And if the answer is yes, you're doing everything right. But one thing I say is when you grow out of that phase, really look at putting your data somewhere where you have the cost control. So one example, you know, a lot of folks use, you know, things like HubSpot or Zoho to manage their marketing communications. Or MailChimp, right? Some of those services have databases that they offer as well. And I always say, you know, the source of truth for your data - move it to a server that you control. Move it to an open-source tool. Move it to a tool where you can't have like you described with Mailchimp - oh, one day they tripled the price. Because data in particular, the deeper you get into your tech stack, you've got the user interface, you've got the API. The database is the deepest part and it is the hardest, the stickiest thing in your stack. So as you grow, the best way to cost control, the best way to plan for the future is to focus on the data first. And then more specifically..or with open source..yeah, open source definitely protects you, right? If MailChimp were open source and they 10x the price on you, you had another option where you could just self-host it, right? And that still has some cost and some overhead, but it would have been a lot less disruptive than what you had to go to, right? So now being on an open source solution or being on something that you own, you're just protected more, right? And I've got a lot of thoughts on open source. But I guess one other one I'll say is, you know, open source is a critic..oh, go ahead, sorry.

Josh Davis: Oh, I was just gonna say..I mean, it's kind of a yes and no thing is what I wanted to get you..because on the like with the mail, specifically the email, you know, is great, you know, that we had control over everything, we knew that we weren't being used for training AI or what not..

Speaker 3 Right.

Josh Davis: But then Google and Yahoo made some changes that all of a sudden our emails weren't being delivered and we had to go mix a bunch of DNS changes and all this stuff and it took a long time. And we talked to several experts who were all like, "you're doing everything right and we don't know why it's still not going through." And it really seemed to me like Google and Yahoo want anybody doing mass mailing. They don't want you self-hosting, they want you using MailChimp kind of thing. So I feel like there's these kind of trade-offs that you do just kind of have to take into account. You know, it's like, okay, you know, you might have to spend some more time and money doing, you know, technical stuff on your website if you want to get away from MailChimp and kind of, you know, balance it out. So I don't know what the right solution is. I'm not a purist by any means but I definitely try to stick to the open source as much as possible.

Andy Bowling: Right, yeah, we all have a very similar like point B and it's just a, you know, matter of how do we get from the point A's each of us are at. I will say, yeah, like, just one kind of thought we've had bubble up recently is, you know, looking at the feasibility of getting rid of these, you know, we call them digital landlords, right? It is very much a business problem, right? For example, something like, you know, going back to a driver's co-op, right, like that's a B2C product, you need a critical mass of users, I very much believe it can succeed, right, like I think they're doing everything right. But it is, you know, tougher than say..I'll give a different example. And I won't say which industry but one of the industries we consult in there is this B2B product that sits right in the middle of their operations. It takes money in and it puts work orders out, right? The construction industry has a program like that, massage therapy, composting, all these industries have programs. And those I feel like are personally a lot more rife for... I'm going to use the word disruption here, but I mean to take them democratic, right? And a lot of the reason there, right, is that they're really expensive these products, right? They're, you know, some folks..some of these guys are paying two - three thousand bucks a month for these things in the middle of their tech stack. You get 10 - 15 of those people on board with an alternative that they are going to own, right? Like that's a much easier math problem for me than taking, you, know, DoorDash and taking it community owned, right? Or taking, you know, these larger B2C products. I think they're all worth pushing. And I think, you know, your guess is as good as my guess is as anyone, right, where we're going to find this success. But that's something we've been thinking about a lot recently is, you know..

Josh Davis: Yeah, I think that's really smart because personally my take on it from kind of following financial press on Uber specifically and Lyft is that there isn't actually a feasible business model there and the proof is in the pudding, they've burned billions of dollars and way more than their bloated executive salaries are accounting for. So, you know, I..Yeah, I'm very skeptical of that, you know, the B2C models but that..what you were talking about with the more bespoke software that's specifically tailored to an industry that's like, yeah, you're not going to be selling this to everybody. Everybody's not going to be putting this app on their iPhone. But everybody in this industry is going to take..is going to adopt your software because, you know, you're charging 100 bucks a month for a support service instead of 3000 or whatever. Or you're giving the software away for free. And offering a la carte services or whatever, yeah.

Andy Bowling: Yeah, that that's exactly it right? Especially with that..the industry specific thing is really important too because, you know, I think like you would use the..I don't know if you said Quickbooks but, you know, bookkeeping as an example. That is one I'm really excited for the open source alternatives like the one you mentioned, but I think that for looking at it from our team like..it would be tough for us to build that because of just how many features, right? The more industries you support, you need to support a hundred different payment models. You need to support, you know, 10 different types of accounting theories, right? Whereas if you just look at, you know, one very narrow industry, uh, massage therapy, for example, right? Kind of 95% of that work is very, very similar to each other, right? And so you might be able to get by with five or six core features instead of a hundred, right?

Josh Davis: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I definitely..I do think people underestimate the difficulty of recreating some of the, you know, the corporate apps and corporate, you know, software, proprietary software, because..yeah, it's one of the problems that we've had in trying to adopt some open source stuff in our own organization is that things..they need to be basically a clone of what everybody uses which is why LibreOffice I think is a good one because..I haven't used Microsoft Word in so long, I wouldn't even know, I guess, at this point. But I remember it being like, "oh, this is exactly the same as what I'm used to..is exactly same as Word, everything's in the same place, it's just open source." So when you get programs that don't..aren't as feature-rich or just work in a different way I think that's, you know, that can be a big turnoff. And yeah, QuickBooks has been a..and that's..I feel like that's as a real thorn in the side of a lot of businesses because it seems like you kind of have to get it but they also want you to be online most of the time, right? I think they charge a bunch more for the like self-hosted or whatever..like just have it on your computer like you used to have everything. Like some of us still do. Yeah.

Andy Bowling: Yeah, QuickBooks and Squarespace and Wix I think are the ones that the website programs and the accounting software are the one's that..every business uses it, you know, not every but you know what I mean. Like most of the clients we've ever consulted for use both of those. And it's, you know..we're taking on the website side of it as a thing because we kind of saw, you know, that is a solvable problem in 2025. But I'm very excited for when we can crack QuickBooks, crack all of these other sort of horizontals that sit in the middle of everyone's businesses.

Josh Davis: Yeah. Yeah. It'd be good to get that. I mean cause we definitely like we're feeling the results of our legacy tech decisions from way back in the day when we decided that Drupal was the way to go for our website because it was open source and it was very powerful and at the time, you know, I think there used to be more Drupal developers than there are now maybe. But, you know, it's kind of, you know, we made that decision for some, you know, good reasons and the, you know, whatever..it aligned with our values. But now, you know, sometimes we look back on it and like..uhh, maybe we should have just gone with something a little more mainstream, you know, or a little easier. Um, but, um, you know..we are where were at. But anyway, if you want to get some Drupal developers there are definitely..I know there are some of us with Drupal sites out there that are like hard up for help.

Andy Bowling: Actually, one of the four other co-ops that I mentioned, Polycot, they are wonderful Drupal developers. I'll give them a plug here as well. Yeah, they do. That is though kind of a more niche skill set, but I will say, you know... There were a lot more worse decisions you could have made in terms of being vendor-locked or having specialists. A lot of stuff that was really popular 10 years ago is just costing companies, just bleeding money now. Whereas Drupal and PHP are still extremely relevant, modern technologies and open source obviously protects you from a lot of the stuff.

Josh Davis: Yeah. Great. Well, it's been wonderful talking, Andy. Best of luck with all your stuff at comp.coop and with Coop Cincy. If there's ever anything you want to talk about in the future, or some other people that you're working with there that would like to talk about their Coop, make sure to send them our way for sure.

Absolutely. Yeah, this has been great. It's been so nice meeting you.

Josh Davis: Yeah. All right. Well, we will call it an interview. Hit like and subscribe, leave a comment, ask Andy a question in the comments and I'll make sure he gets it.