Foundation Authors
MaxGood.work is an AI-powered coaching platform. Business owners create Avatars that align, support and develop their staff 24/7, built on Foundation Content licensed from named experts and on the owner’s own expertise. The licensed half of that is Foundation Content™, and the people whose work it is are our Foundation Authors™.
An Author licenses selected works — we call them Titles — to the platform. We process each Title into Chunks: coherent passages of roughly 500 to 2,000 words. When a staff member asks an Avatar a question, the Avatar retrieves the passages that answer it. Nobody reads the whole Title. The person receives the passage that answers them, at the moment they asked, credited to the Author who wrote it.
What the Foundations cover
Foundation Content today spans sales, sales management, customer service, leadership, change management, high-performance teams, Lean, Scrum, product development, coaching, stress and time management. It is organized by the problem a person actually brings to an Avatar — a difficult customer conversation, a first management role, a team that has stopped telling the truth in meetings — rather than by any single school of practice.
The library grows by subject and by region. We are particularly interested in regionally recognized experts working in languages and cultures beyond our current coverage, because the guidance a staff member needs in São Paulo is not always the guidance that works in Toronto.
Licensed, never taken
Every Title on the platform is there under an agreement with its Author, at an agreed exclusivity level that carries a share of the revenue the work earns. We do not scrape, crawl or ingest an expert’s published work without permission. That an author’s book, blog, talk or course is publicly available is not consent to build a product on it.
This is a deliberate cost. There is a faster way to fill a platform with expertise, and we have chosen not to take it. Authors are named and credited wherever their work appears — attribution is a feature of the product, not a footnote in a contract. The Author’s reputation travels with their work, which is the point of licensing it rather than absorbing it.
Meet the Authors
How the model works for Authors
MaxGood.work is a publishing house, and the Content Licensing Agreement is a publishing contract. Works are Titles, the licence is royalty-bearing, payment is a revenue share weighted by exclusivity, Authors keep ownership, and both parties commit to publicity. What makes it AI-first is the unit: we publish the Chunk and deliver it at the moment of need, to one person, in their situation. Royalties accrue per retrieval rather than per copy sold.
The signed Agreement always controls. What follows is orientation, not terms.
- Ownership stays with the Author. We receive a licence to reproduce, host, index, transform, summarize and make Titles and Chunks available through the platform. We own platform-generated derivatives such as indexes and metadata, and never the Author’s original expression inside a Chunk.
- Four exclusivity categories set the Value Weight. Public (weight 1), Semi-Public (2), Exclusive (4) and Perpetual Exclusive (twice the next-highest weight, currently 8). The category follows the work’s actual availability in the world, not a preference. It downgrades automatically as a work becomes more publicly available; upgrading requires a written amendment.
- Royalty. Each quarter an Author receives their share of a 5% pool of Eligible Avatar Subscription Revenue, proportional to their weighted usage measured against all Authors’ weighted usage. Payments issue once the balance reaches CAD $250; below that, it rolls forward. No usage in a period means no royalty for that period, and we would rather say so now than explain it later.
- Transparency and audit. Quarterly statements by email, plus the Author Dashboard at author.maxgood.work, where an Author sees their licensed Titles, the weight tier of each, and the usage and revenue their work earns. An Author may commission an independent CPA review once a year; an underpayment over 5% is corrected and the audit fees reimbursed.
- Co-promotion, both ways. The Author publishes a public, indexable page linking to MaxGood.work within 30 days. We publish an Author listing page linked from our home page, a blog article and a LinkedIn article, each carrying the Author’s contact information.
- Editorial control, with limits. We control formatting, chunking and presentation, acting reasonably and preserving the substance and professional integrity of the work. We may change Value Weights on 30 days’ notice, and an Author may opt out by withdrawing affected non-perpetual Titles. Perpetual Exclusive Content carries a floor: it must always be weighted at least twice the next-highest weight.
- Exit. One-year auto-renewing terms, and either party may terminate on 30 days’ notice. Non-perpetual Chunks come out of production within 60 days. Perpetual Exclusive licences and accrued payments survive.
- The Author is a licensor, not a user. Licensing grants no Avatar Owner, Admin or user rights. An optional branded Author Avatar can be built at no cost, and an Author may separately subscribe like anyone else.
One caveat worth stating before anyone has to ask for it: exclusivity here is a contractual commitment, in the way a publishing licence is. It is enforced by the agreement, not by a technical lock.
The full plain-English walkthrough is on the Foundation Author Business Model page, and the detailed questions are answered in the Foundation Author Content FAQ.
Why this matters if you are buying an Avatar
An owner’s problem is rarely that they lack a general AI tool. It is that their staff need judgement the owner has no time to give, and the owner’s own expertise — real, hard-won and worth a great deal — has never been written down. A general AI tool asks them to accept generic answers from a system that has read everything and stands behind none of it. A training programme asks them to send people to an event and hope it sticks.
Publishing answers this differently. The Avatar is useful on day one, before the owner has written a word, because it stands on a curated library of licensed work by named experts who are paid for it. The owner then adds their own Expertise on top, and the Avatar blends how this business does it with how it is done well generally.
- Provenance. Every answer traces to a named, licensed, credited human being who consented and is paid. That is a different thing from a general model that absorbed the internet, and it is checkable.
- The flywheel. More Foundation Authors make richer Foundations, which make Avatars more valuable, which grows subscription revenue, which grows the royalty pool, which attracts more Authors. An owner joining today benefits from every Author who signs after them, at no additional cost.
Foundation Content is distinct from Expertise, and the two are never merged. Foundation Content is Author work, licensed to the platform and shared across Avatars in the limited ways the Content Licensing Agreement sets out. Expertise is a customer’s own uploaded content, held to their Avatar and never shared with another organization. Neither is the safe one and neither is the risky one — they answer different questions.
Talk to us about licensing your work
If you have built a body of work in your field — a book, a framework, a training programme, a distinctive methodology — and you want it to reach the people who need it without requiring more of your time, email expert.authors@maxgood.work and tell us what you have written. We will answer your questions before you commit to anything, and for each category of expertise the number of Authors we license is limited.
Prefer to see the Foundations at work first? Sign in at maxgood.work/login — every new user gets their own free Tester Avatar — or request a demo and we will walk you through it.