Yancey Strickler

The people most like me were my biggest competition.

It left me constantly on edge and burnt out and alone.

Eventually, I got so frustrated, I started a new project to help creative people release work together.

It's called MetaLabel.

And one of the first releases was by myself and 10 other writers who'd all independently written about the same subject.

So I reached out to these people who I didn't know, and I proposed a way that we would work together.

We would publish our pieces together in a book, and the initial sales would go back to paying the cost of making it.

After that, 70 percent of the profits would be split equally among us, and 30 percent would go into a shared treasury that we could use for a future project if things went well.

Everyone agreed, and we became the Dark Forest Collective.

And now, a year later, we've sold 2,000 copies of this book.

More than $70,000 has automatically flowed through our arrangement.

And just now, we published our second book by another author, even better than the first.

And our little collective is going to make six figures, which is wild.

But then I realized it was kind of silly to be so legally YOLO about this, and so I should create some sort of structure to represent what we were doing.

And I was surprised to find there wasn't an obvious fit.

We could be an LLC, but that just puts a shield over the project.

It doesn't help you grow the pie or share it.

We could be a C corporation, but then you're taxed twice and you have all sorts of overhead.

You could be a nonprofit and then be wrapped in red tape.

So I started thinking, what if you could create a new structure for a project like ours?