Comradery Worker Cooperative
Founders: Ty Underwood, Majed Elass, John Dorsey, Cade Underwood
Industry: Arts, Creatives, Co-ops
Website: www.comradery.co
In one sentence, how would you describe your cooperative?
Comradery is a democratically controlled Platform Cooperative for independent artists and cooperatives to sell subscriptions to supporters of their work.
What is the mission of your cooperative and what do you hope to achieve?
Comradery’s mission is to reclaim power from digital platforms and put it back in the hands of organizers, artists and cooperatives. We do this by building a democratic, cooperative platform that allows individuals and cooperatives to share their work and raise money from their supporters. By pooling our resources and joining together, we are building sustainable income for creators by raising tens of thousands of dollars per month from supporters. Even better, tech monopolies don’t get to profit by skimming off the top of these subscriptions. We hope to create a network of individuals and cooperatives that builds genuine worker power against the tech monopolies that control the web and the creative industry. We also hope to build radical education and mutual aid systems that push our organizing efforts outward to grow cooperative, union, and other organizing efforts across creative industries.
What are the types of member classes in your cooperative?
We have only one member class: ‘Creators’, which are all equal member-owners of the cooperative.
What are the benefits for individuals/businesses who become members of your coop?
We believe that co-ops thrive when they deeply engage in organizing new cooperatives and mutual aid. Co-ops that are forced to stand on their own are subject to all of the downsides of market capitalism without any of the upsides of collective power building with other organizations. For years, small independent creators online have been atomized and exploited by big tech platforms. The purpose of Comradery is to create an upward lifting network effect among member individuals and cooperative businesses. At a basic level, the primary benefit is that members can solicit monthly subscription payments with extremely low fees from their supporters and customers. They can also distribute digital content via email such as videos, newsletters, podcasts, etc. Beyond this, Comradery offers a deep network of cooperative experts who help organize new cooperatives and cooperative projects, create and share resources, and provide mutual aid to individuals and cooperatives in the constantly growing network. Members of Comradery are pooling resources and building power to create a system outside of centralized tech capital to reap the rewards of digital distribution.
How do you keep things fun and exciting for your members while still running a business?
Comradery always has a focus on organizing new cooperatives and finding new individuals and groups to join the organization. All members contribute to the organization through service hours, and for many members those service hours include hosting welcome calls and education calls with new members. We work to create a very face-to-face organization even though we are distributed globally and to create human connection in systems that are traditionally very alienating. This has so far added an extra element of fun and excitement that has been our best way to drive member engagement. We are looking forward to doing more in this area in the future.
What challenges have you faced in running your cooperative, and how have you addressed them?
We have a unique ‘slow and steady’ growth strategy with extremely low technical and cost overhead. This is necessary because the high risk of tech startups is incompatible with our mission for sustainability. However building this platform with part-time and volunteer work from members and founders obviously has drawbacks. We have persevered through carefully managing grant funds to pay for outside help for tech, legal, and financial services, and through engaging qualified members to take on critical tasks. As you might expect, folks joining an organization like this often have experience running and building other organizations so it is often a natural fit! As we move into beta and grow, we continue to bootstrap production but now have a firm set of deliverables and a reasonable growth runway for us to be cashflow-positive and sustainable for the long term. By remaining debt-free, venture capital-free and independent, we have taken on other risks but have avoided catastrophic problems that plague some of our colleagues in similar organizations.
What makes your cooperative stand out in terms of services/products?
There are two sides to this question. We should look at how we stand out compared to major tech platforms like Patreon and Substack, and how we stand out compared to similar cooperative efforts like Ampled or Cohost. Compared to the most similar major tech platform Patreon, we offer a project structure that is much more useful for co-operative organizations. Any user can administer multiple projects, and any project can have multiple users administering it. This way cooperatives can have multiple contributors, and each user can have multiple solo and co-operative projects simultaneously. This structure decouples each project from an individual identity and towards a more fluid and collaborative structure. Our focus on long-term organizational sustainability also means that we have had a 100% success rate in no dropped payments in over 2 years, which is a better track record than Patreon has had, even though it is a massive organization. In addition to this, we have far lower fees than a competitor like Patreon due to our low overhead and volunteer-driven structure. When comparing our organization to other co-operative orgs that offer similar features, we are comparable to projects (that have now sunsetted) like Ampled, and in some ways projects like Cohost. We deeply respect both of these projects and their structure, however we have a different philosophy for how we operate institutionally due to our organization’s unique circumstances. We have a “slow and steady” approach with minimal cash burn and extremely low cost overheads where we are conservative with adding new features and bringing in new member-owners. While this has had some downsides compared to fast feature development or open signups, this has given us a much more stable long-term outlook and helped us build a technical and financial base without debt and without too much technical complexity. We see this long-term stability strategy as a core USP and a major draw for members who want a long-term partner for their monthly subscription businesses.
If your cooperative had a theme song, what would it be?
“Which Side Are You On” by Florence Reece and popularized by Pete Seeger, probably with extra verses written for our current moment.
How is your coop helping to “Build a Better World?”
Both individually and as a movement, cooperatives die when they stop organizing and start to only look inward at their own business. Unfortunately, for many cooperatives, forming the organization is the last true organizing action they take, when it should be the first. Like unions, worker co-ops are part of the working class and must always be pushing outward and upward and organizing as a network to include more workers and improve their material conditions. Comradery is one way that co-ops can network and continue that fight to push to organize new cooperatives while growing their businesses. The dues that members pay to Comradery help others in a massive global network of cooperatives. We see Comradery as one of a multi-pronged effort to globally uplift the working class through organizing.
Each month in 2025 we will spotlight a different cooperative as part of our celebration and support for the UN’s International Year of Cooperatives.
