Welcome to Pudding — our collection of plain-English guides for members and curious visitors.
Each article explains one piece of the cooperative in conversational language. No academic citations. No corporate buzzwords. Just how things work and why they matter.
The Pudding Somewhere in your closet there’s a binder. Maybe it’s a folder on your laptop. Maybe it’s a Discord channel with three years of session recaps that only your players ever read. It contains the best story you’ve ever told — and you told it collaboratively, across dozens of sessions, with five other people who each brought a character you could never have invented alone. It’s a novel. You just don’t know it yet. ...
The Pudding There’s a test that every platform feature on Liana Banyan must pass before it ships. It’s not a unit test. It’s not a performance benchmark. It’s a question: Would you accept your own deal? The Founder calls it the Montana Principle, and it comes from a newspaper route. When you’re thirteen years old and you deliver newspapers in Montana, you learn something about deals very quickly. The newspaper company pays you a fraction of a cent per paper. You wake up at four in the morning. You ride your bike in weather that wants to kill you. And the deal is: if a customer doesn’t pay, you eat the cost. Not the newspaper company. You. The thirteen-year-old. ...
The Pudding You’ve been on the platform for eleven months. You’ve run a Storefront. You’ve contributed to two campaigns. You’ve logged service hours through your Guild. And across all of that, you’ve accumulated Marks — the effort-differential currency that tracks what you gave beyond what you were required to give. Now the calendar turns. One year since your first Mark was issued. And something unlocks. This is the Birthright. The one-year redemption window for accumulated Marks. Not a payday. Not a cashout. A transformation — the moment when accumulated effort becomes tangible platform benefit. ...
The Pudding Every morning at six o’clock, a new maze appears. Not a literal maze — though the interface looks like one. An algorithmic puzzle tailored to one of the ten spices in the platform’s skill taxonomy. Monday might be a Garlic maze: a financial scenario where you have to route a cooperative budget through six constraints and find the allocation that satisfies all of them. Tuesday might be Cumin: an engineering challenge where a database schema has three contradictions and you have to identify them before a timer runs out. ...
The Pudding You own an island. Not a real one — a HexIsle. A hexagonal tile on the platform’s digital land system. It’s yours. You bought it for Credits, or you earned it through tier progression, or it was allocated to your Guild when the Guild registered. However you got it, it’s yours now. The question is: how do you want to run it? HexIsle has four ownership models. Not suggestions. Models — with distinct governance structures, economic rules, and decision-making processes. You choose one when you claim your island. You can change it later, but the change requires a formal governance action, not a casual toggle. Because the way you govern your space determines what you can build on it, who can build with you, and how the value flows. ...
The Pudding Twenty percent. That’s the number that makes people flinch. When they hear that the cooperative takes twenty percent of every transaction, the reflex is immediate: “That’s a lot. That’s too much. I could keep that.” And you could. On a platform that offers nothing and charges nothing, you keep a hundred percent of your revenue. You also find your own customers, build your own website, handle your own payments, resolve your own disputes, write your own legal agreements, market your own products, and spend your evenings doing bookkeeping instead of building. ...
The Pudding In a library somewhere — years ago, before any of this existed — a man found an old book. Not a famous book. Not a valuable book. A drink cookbook from the 1800s. Recipes for punch, for cordials, for things people don’t make anymore. The kind of book that ends up in a donation bin because nobody knows what to do with it. He didn’t know what to do with it either. But he copied it down anyway. ...
The Pudding You want it first. Not because it’s better first. Not because you need it first. You want it first because you’re the kind of person who wants things first, and you’re willing to pay for the privilege. Good. The cooperative needs your impatience. Wave Pricing is the system that turns early adoption urgency into production funding — without a single dollar of external capital, without a loan, without selling a piece of the corporation to anyone. It works because impatient people and patient people both exist, and they value the same product differently based on when they can have it. ...
The Pudding You’ve been right before. About restaurants. About music. About which project in your Guild would actually work and which one was going to collapse under its own ambition. You’ve got taste — that inarticulate pattern-matching ability that says “this one, not that one” before your rational brain can explain why. Most platforms ignore that. BandWagon doesn’t. BandWagon is the system that turns demonstrated judgment into authority. Not authority over people — authority over allocation. The better your track record of predicting what succeeds, the larger your budget for backing what comes next. ...
The Pudding You write something good. A real document — careful research, original thinking, hours of work. You send it out. And half the people who need to read it never finish page one. Not because it’s bad. Because it’s not written for them. A developer sees a business strategy deck and checks out after slide three. A board member sees a technical specification and skips to the executive summary. An academic sees marketing copy and dismisses it as lightweight. A creator sees a forty-page white paper and thinks “I’ll get to it later,” which means never. ...