Stage one of three
What we built here
Every one of these started as a problem in the shop that we could not buy our way out of. They are on this page because the plan only works if other people can take them, so all of it is documented and none of it is a secret.
The one everything else came out of
Worker Direction
Worker Direction is how this shop is run: democracy, participation, good faith and a living wage ahead of everything else, drawing on the seven Cooperative Principles. It is not software and it is not for sale. It is a way of working, written down in enough detail that somebody else can run it without asking us anything.
In practice it is casual voting, forums where proposals get argued over, paid work teams, bounties, and the shop paying for study you then teach back. It is also the on-ramp: a cooperative asks people to be owners, and being an owner is a skill almost nobody is taught.
Worker cooperatives are over a century old and we invented none of the idea. What is unusual is a small business converting into one on purpose, in public, and publishing the method while it is still going wrong in places. Beanchain is building toward a cooperative rather than claiming to be one already: the word arrives with the first members.
Software
Three things we needed and could not buy
Each one is out in the world now, used by businesses that have never heard of us and have no interest in becoming a cooperative. That is the test we care about. A tool that only works for believers is not a tool, it is a membership badge.
Solution Seeking System
A framework for democratic problem solving, leadership and communication.
Free, and that includes the complete guide, the worksheets and seven annotated example conversations. A paid tier covers unlimited practice with the AI guide.
solutionseeking.com
Two people who both meant well, stuck, with nothing available between a quiet word and a written warning.
A protocol rather than a rulebook. Understand yourself first, then understand the other person, then go looking for a solution together. It runs our one to ones, the way feedback gets given, and the formal sessions we hold when something needs resolving. David and Shannon did not design it in the abstract: it started as the way the two of them had learned to talk to each other, and the rest was working out how to teach it.
Handbook
Operations software for small businesses.
$30 a month per handbook, plus $5 a month for each person on it. Fifteen day trial, no card.
handbook.company
Everything a new person was supposed to know, spread across a binder, three chat threads and one manager who happened to remember.
Training, standard operating procedures, recipes, checklists and inventory in one place, with an assistant that proposes changes and then waits for a human to approve them. It exists to make a small business easier to run, and it is also the quiet part of this plan. A business that has written down how it works is a business that can be handed to the people who run it. A business where only the owner knows how anything happens cannot be handed to anybody, whatever the owner intends. Handbook does not lecture anyone about democracy. It just makes shared decisions possible, which is the only kind of nudge that survives contact with a Tuesday.
PIF Board
Buy a meal for someone who needs one, from a local business.
Donors pay for the meals, and the money goes to local businesses.
Runs as a project of the Foundation for Innovation in Society, a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit (EIN 33-2320329). Donations are tax-deductible to the extent allowed by law.
pifboard.com
The corkboard worked. It only worked if you were standing in front of it, and somebody had to keep a stack of receipts straight.
Somebody pays for a meal in advance. A local business provides it. Whoever needs it collects it, with nothing to prove and no conversation about whether they deserve it. The absence of that conversation is the whole design, because plenty of help comes with a queue, a form, or a moment where you say out loud that you cannot afford lunch, and this does not. Moving it off the wall meant a donor in another city could buy a meal here, and a business three streets over could hand one out.
Not software, and the most used thing we make
Unhoused Help
Printed guides to shelter, food, medical care and 24 hour crisis lines for Mesa, Tempe and Chandler, given away here and posted as web pages with numbers that dial on one tap. Every entry is checked against the printed sheet, because a wrong number costs somebody a walk across town, or a night.
The web version is arranged for somebody reading outdoors, on a phone, possibly on a nearly dead battery, in 110 degree heat. No hero image and no photographs. Crisis lines first. If you run a business in another city and want the same thing for your area, ask us and we will make it.
How the next ones get made
Cooperative Incubation
Every work team in this shop is a cooperative that has not happened yet. A group forms around real work and gets paid for it, learns to govern itself while the stakes are small, and then leaves as its own cooperative entity: independent, self-governing, and free to serve Beanchain, the wider network, and anybody else who needs what it does.
That is how a network gets grown rather than announced. A coalition of small businesses only out-competes a corporation if the shared services are real, and services do not appear because a diagram asks for them. They get built one team at a time, somewhere small enough that getting it wrong is survivable, and then they go and stand on their own.
Ending poverty in America takes thousands of cooperatives, not a handful. These are the first two, and none of them is a company yet.
Beanchain Marketing Cooperative
The internal marketing work team, becoming a cooperative in its own right and taking on work from outside. Furthest along, because the team already exists and is already paid.
Solution Seeking Company
A cooperative to develop and maintain the tools for leadership, communication and system design, serving Beanchain and organisations with no connection to it.
Please use it, and help us build the rest
All of it is free to take and none of it is gated or conditional on agreeing with us. Run Pay It Forward at your own place through PIF Board, put the communication protocol into a business that will never be a cooperative, print the unhoused guide with your own logo on it. We are not precious about credit. A tool sitting on our shelf is a tool nobody has tested, and these only get good by being used.
And we need the help. Tell us what broke, what confused you, what you had to work around and what is missing entirely. An hour from somebody actually running one of these is worth more than a month of us thinking about it in a coffee shop. If you want to build a piece of it with us, better still. Say so and we will find you something real to do.