Introduction

In 2024, the collaborator economy is defining the future of work. Standing on the shoulders of the gig or creator economy, the collaborator economy challenges the traditional view that full-time freelancing is an isolated pursuit. People who are able to work online and provide professional services are realizing that they don’t have to do it alone. In a world where a skill can be outsourced to any corner of the world, digital cooperatives are forming to give people who work online a new competitive advantage, whether they are a developer, lawyer, graphic designer, or photographer (just to name a few in-demand skills). ‍

Freelancing has established itself as a viable pathway to earning a living – in the US alone, there were 59 million freelancers who earned $1.2 trillion in 2020. However, freelance workers are also notoriously taken advantage of, lacking the power or financial resources to protect their work and enforce timely pay. For example, 58 percent of freelancers reported that they have not been paid by clients at least once. 

‍But what about freelancing at agencies? Agencies have more incentives to compete than cooperate with freelancers over the long term. An agency generates value from having asymmetric information, skills or professional connections. A freelancer will partner with an agency to complement each other’s knowledge, skills or networks in the short term. However, over a long term view, there is less incentive for the two to cooperate. Over time, an agency will poach talent, client relationships, or have the same knowledge as the freelancer, which reduces the impetus to collaborate. When an agency has the same knowledge, same skillset, or same client relationships as the freelancer, their collaboration turns into competition.

Digital cooperatives, by comparison, overcome these barriers to collaborate by aligning the long term incentives of its members. Members of a cooperatives (or “co-ops”) define a set of shared goals to accomplish together, establish a community treasury to fund those goals, a social currency to recognize contributions, and community-driven initiatives to fulfill their own needs. 

Cooperatives are not new – they’re rooted in the principles and best practices from successful co-ops over the last four centuries. From a group of French cheese makers who formed one of the first consumer cooperatives around 1750, to Korean American cooperatives that pool community funds to fuel entrepreneurship in the 1980s, we’ve learned that cooperatives learn faster, grow faster, allocate capital more efficiently, and are better attuned to the needs of their community than independent freelancers or hierarchical agencies. 

We will explore five key areas where digital cooperatives give its members a competitive advantage. Let’s dive in.

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Your member is your customer; your customer is your member

The community member is also the customer that the collective serves. This is one of the ways that cooperatives have an advantage over companies, because the organization can more clearly empathize with their customer’s problems and attune to the specific needs of the community. 

REI, an outdoor outfitter based in Seattle, WA, is a 100% member-owned consumer co-op that treats their customers as members. 23 million members receive discounts, perks (such as extended return windows), and get to feel good about contributing to non-profits. Past the list of perks, an REI membership is being a part of a community – a profitable one at that, booking over $3.85 billion in revenue in 2022. 

Myosin.xyz’s Community Guild is made up of community managers (CM’s, we’ll call them) who connect with and nurture online communities through Discord and other social media apps. They deeply understand the need to automate tasks and productize their community management work. How do you productize a community concierge? 

Listening to the needs of Myosin members with community management experience, the product guild built Mylo to cover the gaps in tooling that no other company saw as an opportunity. Mylo is everyone’s favorite chatter, a programmable personality that a CM can tailor to the needs of their community. Mylo is on 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and responds instantly to a message across time zones and cultures. It is designed to encourage daily conversation in an online chat room, offer research results, draft briefs and proposals – just like a co-worker would at the office. ‍

Through further product development, the Myosin Forge team enhanced Mylo for two other companies. Kryptomon leveraged Mylo to deploy 6 different cartoon personalities based on which NFT a person held. For a luxury hospitality brand, Mylo is a digital travel concierge who recommends vacation itineraries based on a traveler’s tastes, preferences, and dates of travel. What started as a community initiative to improve Myosin’s Discord engagement is now a product under development to drive engagement with the adaptability that good community managers possess. Myosin Forge wouldn’t have been able to iterate this quickly if they didn’t have community managers to workshop with in the first place.

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More effective in allocating capital

Since cooperatives are member-owned and -operated organizations, capital is allocated more efficiently to serve the needs of their community. These investments stay within the network: the economic returns that are generated compound over time for both the organization as well as the individual member. There are many thriving examples of this as early as the 1600s in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean as well as the1990s in the United States. 

In the 1980s, Korean émigrés who moved to the United States formed cooperatives that served the social and economic needs of the community. They would form a "keh," a club in which members contribute money each month, then wait for their turn to be the recipient of the group pot. The order of payout is determined by group consensus. The group, for example, might agree that a person who has an urgent need to start a business might take precedence over someone wishing to pay a future need (e.g. pay a college tuition bill). This age-old financial model adapted from their homeland is responsible for igniting one of the most spectacular growth spurts in small business creation of any American ethnic group this century. In 1990, the U.S. Census found 44,000 Korean Americans in the Greater Washington DC area. They own more than 4,000 businesses in the area. Statistics suggest that Koreans own 54 percent of the dry cleaners in the District of Columbia. Their success is reminiscent of Cubans in Miami and Greeks in New York City.

The vast majority of co-op members would have otherwise been unable to become a business owner, due to lack of access to capital and a support network. This concept is not new and has been proven to work for centuries. Myosin.xyz is using web3 technology to power the community’s treasury and social currency. The governance guild allocates capital for product development more effectively than traditional investors because of three reasons:

1. Building for immediate needs: our members have asymmetric information on where the gaps in tooling are and which problems are most painful for web3 marketers

2. Building for the long term: Myosin’s ability to build products using its own cash flow means that it is able to build products organically without any rush to scale a product for the sake of short term growth

3. Building on consumer insights: Myosin is in constant conversation globally among its members, giving members up-to-date information on how people are adapting to a rapidly changing industry

   
   

One example of these advantages at work is how we pivoted away from building an on-chain Demand Side Platform (DSP) to build Blackbeard. Through our network, we learned that web3 marketers struggled with running ads for their products on paid social, paid search, and programmatic channels. As a result of Meta, Twitter, and Google banning ads promoting web3 products, marketers needed more online publishers and placements to run ads for web3 products. Marketers were not concerned about on-chain attribution as much as they cared about finding ways to reach new audiences. ‍

Based on this insight, we reallocated our resources to build Blackbeard, an NFT scavenger hunt tool. By enabling anyone to publish an NFT scavenger hunt, we powered a new way for brands to reach web3 audiences attending conferences, events and meetups around the world. Our tactical knowledge of what our customers were willing to pay for guided our product development.

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More resilient than traditional companies

Cooperative businesses have lower failure rates compared to traditional corporations and small businesses. About 10% of cooperatives fail after the first year while 80% of traditional businesses fail in the same time frame. After five years, 90% of cooperatives are still in business, while only 3 – 5% of traditional businesses are still operating.‍

We are launching new offerings that build resilience into our network. During this crypto cycle, our members noticed more demand for developer relations expertise from blockchain protocols and tools. Four of our members who have experience in developer relations created a bespoke offering to attract web3 developers to build on protocols and platforms. This group pooled their collective knowledge of how to run the best developer relations program and tapped the Myosin network to generate new business opportunities, recruit new members, and assemble a group of key opinion leaders in the web3 developer community for clients to leverage. Through these types of new offerings, Myosin is able to build resilience into the network.

The structure of a co-op is inherently more stable and resistant to issues that plague a business with its suppliers. Since the people making the decision about the organization are members of the community in which it participates, there is long term alignment of incentives.  Secondly, they are less likely to make an impulsive decision that could potentially harm the company. Third, the diversity of perspectives, experiences and opinions ensures that they will explore every business option thoroughly. Members decide to do whatever is in the best interest of the community, thus securing its future.

Community is your moat

“Doing work as an individual freelancer, you can be very alone. At VectorDAO, together we socialize the gains and losses. Together we share best practices. Together we share deal flow. VectorDAO allows people to be independent, together.” - Jon Yang, co-founder of VectorDAO

According to an interview with Jon Yan, co-founder of VectorDAO, projects give designers the opportunity to take an asymmetric bet with a client they believe in. Because the upside can be enormous, we see that designers who would typically not be available for even $300/hour are interested in participating in a project. In their first year of business, they’ve completed 40 projects, have grown to about 90 members and have diversified their community treasury for the DAO and its members.

We have found through experimentation that new initiatives that lean into the existing strengths of our community, gain traction more quickly than initiatives that do not leverage our community. 

For an example of how we leverage our community, look no further than Myosin House. We tapped the collective knowledge of the Myosin network to pull off four events at crypto conferences all over the world. We organized a 4-day event in Breckenridge, Colorado after ETH Denver, a 3-day event in Austin, Texas during Coindesk Consensus, and most recently produced a week of experiences in Seoul during Korea Blockchain Week. Most of the seats were by invitation, which has kept the quality of our curated events top notch. We created pathways to forge meaningful relationships and build trust through shared cultural experiences - like a playoff baseball game in Seoul, Korea, a scavenger hunt aboard a yacht sailing around Manhattan, or a private sonic dining experience in Breckenridge. These events not only help us expand our network, but also fortify our community as the moat against our competition.

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Sharing knowledge globally means faster growth

For hierarchically structured companies, knowledge sharing can be challenging. Because there is only room for a few at the top of the pyramid, employees who gate-keep information or connections gain political power within the organization. Political power accrues to people who have a lot of information that others want to know but do not have access to. That power is then used to jostle for position for the very few seats at top of the organization.‍

By comparison, cooperative organizations have an incentive to share knowledge and business contacts. Because there is enough room for everyone to succeed, knowledge is shared openly within the membership. The collective brain power of the cooperative gives each member of that organization a competitive advantage versus freelancing alone.

We launched our gaming guild Myo.gg during Korea Blockchain Week, where eight of our members attended the conference. Each member attended different events and focused on specific specialties within the gaming industry. Some of our members met with Riot Games and other game publishers at web3 tooling events to gather knowledge about how they are thinking about web3. Another member attended dinners with NFT Alpha callers. Two members attended a Pudgy Penguins meetup to connect with their head of community. Collectively that week, our crew connected with over 700 new contacts. This was within 8 weeks from concept to launch.

Any one of our members could have created a gaming offering on their own, but it would have been a significantly larger undertaking to build the knowledge and contacts needed to do so outside of Myosin. By pooling together our knowledge, Myo.gg has deeper gaming experience and insights. By pooling together our professional network, Myo.gg has a competitive advantage out of the gate. 

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Conclusion

Over the last four centuries, cooperatives have chartered a path where member-owned organizations translated into good business. Co-ops have existed for generations across societies across the world in Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean. ‍

In a world of solopreneurship and full-time freelancing, digital cooperatives like Myosin.xyz are defining the Future of Work. Lawyers, accountants, recruiters, developers, and other knowledge workers who are able to work online are forming these digital communities more and more. When a member contributes to a community, the community generates economic value more efficiently than any one member could on their own.  

Digital cooperatives give their members a competitive edge in the Free World, and Myosin is one of many examples that we will see for skilled marketers. Myosin is a marketing network made up of people, products, playbooks and places to gather. Our mission at Myosin.xyz is to nurture a community of the 150 best marketers in the world to create a valuable digital ecosystem that was previously impossible 

And we are just getting started.

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