1 · You walk in. No application, no waiting line.
Ten minutes on your phone: pick your trade, name your shop, choose its look — the door is right here. The price is already painted on the wall: $2,000, flat, every trade. A real person reads every new shop the day it opens. If your barn doesn't pencil — wrong season, wrong county, goal too steep for your crew — we'll tell you that instead of taking your money. We'd rather raise thirty barns that stand than a hundred that don't.
2 · Your barn page opens the second you walk in. It costs $0.
No toll, no deposit, no catch — you never pay to ask your own people for help. Your pool page goes live with your sign on it and you share it that minute. Want the crew to see you're first in? Put your own board on it — optional, same rules as everybody. The ledger hangs in public before anybody's asked for a dollar — our $1,800 build fee, the state's $100 filing fee, the card company's ~$51. That's the whole $2,000, and nothing hides in it.
3 · Board by board, in the open. Your people raise it.
Your barn page gets its own link and you share it — family, church, the guys at work, the group chat that never shuts up. Boards go on in planks:
Every backer's first name gets painted on the crew wall of your website, permanent. Grandma's twenty-five dollars becomes a plank with her name on it. Every board is a real payment the day it's given — made to Hoosier Online, never to you — and it's spent the same day on the next gate of your barn. Boards aren't refundable, and every giver reads that in writing, above the pay button, before a dime moves.
4 · We build while the money climbs.
You don't wait for 100% to see your business. The barn goes up in front of your crew's eyes — which, you'll find, is exactly what gets a stalled campaign moving again. Six gates, and each one is built and handed over within 24 hours of the money crossing it, on a clock that runs in public:
5 · Launch week. Then it's yours — actually yours.
Google listing live, first posts written, yard signs out, the fat stack of cards in your hand with OWNER under your name. And here's the part that matters:
- The LLC is yours. Your name on the state record, not ours.
- The domain is yours. The phone number is yours. Registered to you. If you ever leave us, they go with you.
- You never touched the money — that's the point. Every board was paid to Hoosier Online and turned into the barn in public, so nobody in your crew ever had to hand cash to a relative and hope.
- After your included year: $39/month keeps the lights on — website, booking, phone line, small changes. Cancel anytime and keep everything with your name on it.
What a campaign looks like
A made-up example so you can picture yours.
Dakota's Mow & Plow — Anderson
"I've mowed since I was twelve. I'm done doing it for somebody else's sign on the trailer. Help me put mine on it."
31 backers · biggest plank: one cupola (Uncle Ray) · smallest: nine boards
Fair questions
Is this a loan?
No. Nothing is owed back to anybody. A barn raising is a gift with a thank-you — same as it's been for two hundred years. Backers get their name on your crew wall and first crack at being your customer, not a debt to collect.
Do backers own a piece of my business?
No. No shares, no equity, no cut of your money, ever. The business is 100% yours. Anyone who offers you funding in exchange for a piece of your company is running a different play than we are.
What if I don't hit my goal?
Then it stops where it stopped — and everything your people already paid for still stands: your name, your logo, maybe your website. Boards aren't refundable, and we say so plainly before anybody gives. Nothing sits in a pot; every dollar is spent building the next piece the day it lands.
What do you get out of it?
Two things, posted on the honest page: our $1,800 build fee — printed on the tag, inside the $2,000, not on top of it — and $39/month after your included year. That's both. There is no third.
Will you tell me how much I'll make?
No — and be careful with anybody who will. We don't know how hard you'll work, and neither do they. What we'll tell you is what the barn costs, to the penny, and what's standing when it's raised.
Why do I need you at all?
You don't, technically — the state will happily hand you the forms. What we are is the difference between "I've been meaning to start" and standing at your launch week three weeks after your barn raises: the paperwork prepped right, the website live, the phone answering, the cards in your hand. You bring the crew and the work ethic. We bring everything else.
What about licenses — salon, firearms, food?
They're real and we treat them that way. Every trade that needs one says so on its card, the cost is in your ledger, and we prep and walk the paperwork with you — plainly, step by step. We're not lawyers and we don't pretend to be; we're the neighbor who's filled the forms out before.