What if you didn't just build a product, but deliberately engineered a revolution?

Everyone talks about the game changer, the next big thing, the revolution. Afterwards they call it luck: right place, right time.

I wanted to see what happens if you skip the luck. Not just build a product, but engineer a revolution, on purpose.

So I wrote the spec first. Not the code. If you want to engineer a revolution, you need requirements, like any other software. Here is mine:

1. It can’t be undercut. Whatever the corporations charge, the price has to be lower. So the price is zero. No commission, no fees. Checkmate: to compete, they would have to pay people to use their products.

2. It can’t have a middleman. Middlemen are what take the cut. So it’s peer-to-peer: no server, no middleman at all. You keep 100% of what you earn.

3. It has to spread by itself. I have no ad budget and no audience. So the incentive has to do the marketing: a driver or any other freelancer who keeps 100% of every job has a reason to tell every colleague and every customer.

4. It has to be easy to try. Open the link, no signup. The app creates your keypair on first start.

5. It can’t depend on me. I’m not trying to get rich from it. If I ever want to earn money on the platform, I can be a driver or freelancer, just like everyone else. And I’m setting up a foundation, so it keeps going after me and belongs to the public forever.

Acceptance test: $1 billion in collective savings to workers in the first year. Not revenue, savings: money that would otherwise have gone to platforms.

I’m not going to pretend it passed. It’s brand new, so the globe is still empty. But the code runs, the spec holds, and the first 100 humans decide what goes on it.

Live, free, no signup:
https://cloudatlasos.org

It launches on Product Hunt on November 18.

If you wrote a spec for a revolution, what would be requirement number one?