

Ask HN: FairSoftware--Good way to find a cofounder? - ABrandt

I've recently came across a startup at fairsoftware.net.  This site markets itself as an easy way for people to start and grow their online business.  You can create a "project" and track its revenue, and then list jobs available for other users to contribute.  I can see this as a decent way for say, a hacker, to get in touch with a businessman and make things happen.  What do you think?
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aristus
Match.com -- good way to fund a husband? Well... some people say yes.

I personally would never be so desperate as to give this company a chunk of
revenue in exchange for matching me with a business guy. If you truly do not
know _anyone_ with whom you want to start a company, move. Really. Moving
costs less than giving these jokers 9.9% of every sale.

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cperciva
To be fair, for that 9.9% they cover payment processing fees and do some
income tax paperwork. I'm not sure that what they do is worth 9.9%, but it's
not as if they're taking the money and doing nothing for it.

~~~
aristus
Even Amazon takes only 7%, with a _lot_ of services on top. Give them the
benefit of the doubt, and they still want 2.9% of gross revenue(!) for being
essentially a jobs board locked-in to a specific payments processor.

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alain94040
I am one of the founders of <http://fairsoftware.net> (sorry for the late
answer, you had to post this question just on President's weekend).

The processing fee we charge is irrelevant to whether we are a good place to
find co-founders. Actually, you could use FairSoftware, find people, use our
Software Bill of Rights to start your business, and never pay us a cent.

You only pay the processing fee if you use our payment backend. If your
project consists of two people, then by all means, work out a deal by
yourselves. But if you are trying to build something with a larger community
of contributors, and having transparent sharing brings value and trust to your
contributors, then you'll find out that our fees are reasonable.

And as someone pointed out, we don't actually charge much at all for
ourselves, we mostly pass other people's fees (PayPal) to you so we don't lose
money. We are working on lowering the total fees, and it has to do with ACH
and treating non-US contributors differently than US contributors, but we will
eventually, in order to save money for you.

There are scenarios where we are way cheaper than any alternative. If you are
a couple of students with very little money to invest, we give you a legal
structure, some amount of protection and privacy from your end users, for
literally no money down.

