Plausible 2.0

December 15, 2014, by Landon Fuller

Seven years ago, we founded Plausible Labs as a worker-owned cooperative with the aim of building a company focused on sustainability, operating for the benefit of its owner-employees, and standing as a vibrant example of an alternative to the venture capital model in Silicon Valley.

I’m incredibly happy to announce that starting next year, for the first time in the co-operative’s history, our entire team will be focused on self-directed, self-funded product development. I look forward to sharing more about what we’re working on over the coming months, and the results of our labors over the coming years.

This has been a long road — founded with a $10,000 personal loan, we’ve neither borrowed money nor received investment since. The success of the co-operative has instead been entirely the product of the hard work of our employee-owners; including our current team of Terri Kramer, Chris Campbell, Mike Ash, and Rebecca Bratburd — all of whom I could not be more proud to work with. Relying heavily on consulting work, it took enormous dedication and stamina on everyone’s part to continue to invest our income, where we could, in our long-term goal of becoming a full-time product company.

We’ve accomplished a great deal to be proud of: early projects such as PLJukebox, a re-implementation of Apple’s Cover Flow that helped fund our initial growth, our consulting work on products such as comiXology’s mobile Comics applications, and on our ongoing stewardship of open source projects like PLCrashReporter, a library that powers most of the crash reporting services available for Apple’s platforms today.

Now we’ll demonstrate what Plausible Labs can do with time, resources, and a singular focus.