Camplight: Innovating with a Cooperative Model

This blog post is part of 50+ case studies of self-managing organizations we created for the 2024 inaugural ZeroDX awards. These organizations embody the principles of RenDanHeYi in their work structures:

• Zero Distance to customer: Decision what to build is based on insights from the marketplace

• Autonomy: Small teams with full decision-making autonomy enable speed in execution

• Shared Rewards: Everyone in the micro-enterprise participates in its financial success.

Introducing Camplight

Founded in 2012, Camplight is a worker-owned cooperative based in Bulgaria. With a team of 18 co-owners and 50–70 project-based employees, Camplight emphasizes collaboration, transparency, and social impact. Specializing in software services and venture-building, the cooperative is a testament to how progressive workplace practices can fuel innovation and create lasting value for clients and employees alike.

Camplight operates under RenDanHeYi principles, blending autonomy, customer-centricity, and shared ownership. Its venture-building initiatives, like the successful launch of Team-GPT, exemplify its commitment to innovation and agile practices.

Organizational Structure

Camplight has replaced traditional hierarchies with a dynamic, cooperative structure that fosters transparency, fairness, and shared responsibility.

Camplight thrives on a dynamic role system, where members can create, merge, or split roles based on context. Co-owners set their own salaries through a transparent process involving peer feedback, ensuring fairness and alignment with their contributions. Each decision is taken via voting where each co-owner has the right to one vote regardless of their time of joining the business.

This structure fosters a culture of trust and continuous improvement, with regular retrospectives to refine practices.

Customer Centricity and Autonomy

Camplight’s customer-centric approach prioritizes projects with significant social impact, including collaborations with private hospitals, educational institutions, and fintech companies.

Employees work on projects autonomously, ensuring that client needs are met effectively and innovatively. The company’s value-driven pricing model emphasizes the value delivered to clients rather than hourly billing, enhancing client satisfaction and loyalty.

This approach along with the radical transparency in their relations with partners (the way clients are called in the company) allows Camplight to build strong, long-term relationships, some of which have been around almost since the inception of the cooperative​​.

Achievements and Venture-building

Camplight has consistently demonstrated excellence through numerous notable achievements with the businesses it supports. Their products have been recognized as the #1 Product of the Day on Product Hunt and consistently ranked as market leaders in various categories throughout 2023. Additionally, their solutions have been adopted by Fortune 500 companies, showcasing the high regard and trust placed in their innovative capabilities.

Camplight's influence extends further with significant milestones, including helping clients secure acquisitions worth $450M USD and obtain seed funding amounting to $11M. Furthermore, the companies they collaborate with operate over $3B+ in transaction volume, emphasizing the substantial economic impact and value delivered through their partnership.

Customer centricity is particularly evident in the venture-building initiatives of the cooperative. For example, Camplight became a technical co-founder of Team-GPT — an intuitive GPT chat that represents a shared workspace where everyone can share knowledge, collaborate, and master AI together. It comes with online courses, saved prompts, templates, adoption reports, etc. Harnessing a "built-in public" strategy, Camplight developed the MVP within 7 days for ideation and 24k users were actively using the tool within less than 9 months.

Internal Culture and Employee Engagement

Camplight’s culture is built on inclusivity, transparency, and ongoing personal and professional development.

The company operates without traditional project management, relying instead on an ownership mindset where each team member tracks their tasks and time. This promotes accountability and ensures that all team members are aware of each other's contributions.

Additionally, Camplight provides structured professional development opportunities, including workshops, courses, mentorship programs, and conferences.

Salaries are based on the value added to client projects, with bonuses or salary increases reflecting individual contributions.

The cooperative also practices full transparency in its pricing model and through active involvement in decision-making, employees feel empowered and integral to the company's success.

Partnerships and Community Involvement

Camplight is a founding member of Patio, a global community of tech cooperatives.

Patio connects 1,500 people from 25 countries, structured in circles following sociocracy principles. This network allows Camplight to collaborate with other like-minded organizations, share resources, and outsource projects, expanding their impact and reach. Members of the community benefit from shared deals, with a percentage of closed deals via referrals going back to the community.

This model fosters a supportive ecosystem that amplifies the cooperative's mission globally​.

Conclusion

Camplight stands out as a forward-thinking cooperative that integrates state-of-the-art technologies with a strong commitment to social impact and employee empowerment.

Through its flat organizational structure, customer-centric approach, and active community involvement, Camplight continues to set new standards in the software industry.