Longer description of your proposed project

Spartacus.app is a social tech platform I'm building for creating and organizing campaigns for collective action, with built-in mechanisms to solve coordination problems on various scales.

In short, it's a tool for organizers to safely find allies and band together when:

• Average individual efforts would make little to no impact, but a large enough group effort would guarantee success through increased leverage / bargaining power.

• Early-stage organizing could be risky due to social/economic intimidation and/or retaliation.

• There's a status quo equilibrium where no single individual is incentivized to act first, but many would be willing to act if joined by [X] number of others.

For example, Spartacus could help workers gather momentum for organizing a union without overtly endangering the initial participants.

Hasn't this been done before? / Why is this different?

Yes and no. Before Groupon found commercial success pre-selling coupons for local businesses, they had raised millions for a general-purpose collective action platform called "The Point." They couldn't monetize and, through trial and error, found the niche that became Groupon.

There have also been smaller projects, some associated with the rationalist community, that aspire to use assurance contracts to solve coordination problems. (See https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7koSvinoHSy6KBLqy/update-2-to-dominant-assurance-contract-platform-ensuredone,https://ensuredone.com/projects,https://www.collaction.org/).These have yet to gain much traction.

Assurance contracts, as a functional concept, are already well-validated. However, unlike platforms such as Kickstarter, Groupon, GoFundMe, etc., which use them for essentially raising money, Spartacus emphasizes coordinating groups of people of specific sizes to take specific actions for which either the site itself or particular members of the group are integral to the success of the initiative. The platform's design underscores minimizing the risk (from potentially catastrophic to marginal) and courage requirements (from heroic to average) for individual actors, especially the first movers, and maximizing the expected value of the collective goal. (See https://spartacus.app/#usecases).

Technical Challenges:

• Create public or private campaigns.

• User ID Verification, anti-bot mechanisms, and data privacy/protection architecture.

• Anonymity/Pseudonymity settings.

• Flexible Assurance Contract rule settings and success conditions.

• Contingency fees and financial staking for "skin in the game" filters (and potential revenue streams).

Project Status:

Spartacus is being built as a web app. An MVP has already been created using Airtable and other low-code tools. Live demos of the MVP are up and running. I'm currently initiating an outreach campaign to recruit early adopters. A natively coded app with additional functionality and flexibility is planned for V 1.0

Near-term Roadmap:

December: MVP demos, discovery, identify potential case study participants

January: Manage active campaigns on MVP platform, feedback and iteration

February/March: Publish case studies, begin work on V 1.0

March/April: Launch V 1.0

Describe why you think you're qualified to work on this

Education:

I have a B.S. in Economics and Political Science from SUNY Purchase, where I first became fascinated with game theory, behavioral economics, and social dilemmas. Upon graduation, I got a job at Lehman Brothers as a junior analyst in late 2007. Yup.

Professional Qualifications:

I’ve been a business development lead and product manager for software and hardware startups for over 14 years. I’ve consulted with multiple seed-stage companies on revenue strategies, monetization models, product-market fit, and market research. I was Employee #1 and Sales Director for a VR HealthTech startup called Vivid Vision (www.seevividly.com), where we helped deliver immersive vision therapy to thousands of patients with eye disorders like amblyopia and strabismus.

I’ve “worn a lot of hats” and experienced every aspect of the tech startup journey, but always at other people’s companies, helping achieve other people’s visions. I have more than enough experience to lead this project, but I will, of course, require technical help along the way, which I can tap through a robust network.

Personal Motives:

I was a fervent political activist (mainly in the anti-war movement during the G.W. Bush administration and later, Occupy). I became disillusioned with activist culture when I realized how many of my fellow marchers and protesters were primarily motivated by seeking community, belonging, and cathartic self-expression rather than practical strategies for change. I saw firsthand that pragmatism needed a different approach to compete with the more popular draw of cathartic emotion and rousing rhetoric. Also, as certain political dogmas began to solidify in the mid-2010s, the rigor of discourse and debate I thought was necessary was increasingly untenable.

Living in San Francisco between 2011-2020, I simultaneously stumbled across your blog through my political commentary consumption and recommendations from a growing group of nerdy friends, some of whom liked this concept called “Rationalism”. It immediately appealed to me, and some of your greatest hits (especially “Meditations on Moloch”) significantly influenced my thinking.

Personal Commitment:

Building this tool has been an aspiration of mine for a couple of years. It began as a side project in late 2021, and while I made progress in fits and starts, it floundered due to personal bandwidth limitations stemming from the demands of my full-time job. I left that job in October, where I was making a mid-six figure salary, to work on Spartacus full time as its' founder, with the full attention and dedication it deserves.

I’m a frequent attendee of the Los Angeles Rationalist meetup and am a member of the extended online and offline RAT and EA communities.

I can provide plenty of references on request (no Big Names, though).

Other ways I can learn about you

https://twitter.com/AppSpartacus

https://www.linkedin.com/in/jordanbraunstein1/

https://spartacusapp.substack.com/

Former SSC commenter "Emblem14"

How much money do you need?

I have given myself about a year’s worth of “Ramen” runway based on savings I’ve earmarked for this project. Additional funding at this stage would accelerate progress and extend that runway.

10-50K

<10K After validating the current MVP, I would hire a DevShop to build a simple V 1.0 of the Spartacus platform.

10-20K Above, but would be able to contract with freelancers for a more prolonged engagement with more iteration and/or add more complicated feature requests for V 1.0

20-50K I would recruit a full-time developer, potentially a cofounder, to be the technical lead for the project. All of the above would be concurrent with testing various revenue models to achieve quick self-sustainability.

Links to any supporting documents or information

spartacus.app, https://spartacusdemo.carrd.co/#

Estimate your probability of succeeding if you get the amount of money you asked for

If I'm able to raise enough money to either hire a small team of freelancers or a dedicated technical resource, the probability of the project achieving at least an official V 1.0 launch and being available as a fully functional tool for real-world use cases is 90% (accounting for some as yet unforeseeable technical obstacles).

The probability of success, as measured by the project becoming either a large grant-funded nonprofit, a crowd-funded concern, or a VC-backable company with a viable business model, revenue, and growth, I'd put at 65%. Although I'm confident there are several feasible monetization strategies, it's premature to set a high confidence level until I can test and validate with real users.