[therealwardo]

I've been working on a project with a couple people that I don't get a lot of value from as co-founders right now because they aren't designers or engineers. They are trying to help us define the set of requirements given their relationships in the industry, but they have not really done product work before. I keep telling myself how valuable they will be once we launch because they will bring customers. Echoed by the author here:

"When you start a project, you always think that finishing and launching your project is the hardest part. However, after the launch you realize that the most difficult part is just ahead."

Any recommendations for how to handle this kind of co-founder situation?

I'm thinking about working with them to define equity incentives on both sides, but I'm short on other ideas for how to make things feel well balanced in the short term given our unbalanced skill sets.

[psgibbs]

Without much more detail than this, they don't sound like cofounders. If they're waiting until you launch to go 100%, then you're assuming all the risk right now.

Again take with a grain of salt, bc I have no context, but , if there's one you think is clearly the best, that you like working with them, get them to be a cofounder and make them go all in. They can do lots of manual work to validate the idea/product (ie manually do things you'd like your product to do). If there's noone you could see doing this, then their role is probably not going to grow that much when there is a 'product'.

Also: the product will never be done, and framing launch as a binary event doesn't help you (or your potential cofounders). It's all just a continuous spectrum of trying to cover as much scope/utility as possible for your users, and using a product to try to automate that. After 7 years, you'd be shocked how much stuff my sales cofounder does manually that we had framed as a 'required feature for launch'.

[1stcity3rdcoast]

You need customers signed up and ready to pay well before you have a product ready to launch. Having a co-founder who is good at outreach, sales, and making connections is honestly more important than having a finished product, so you should give serious weight to having a non-technical co-founder. There is no company without sales!

[magnetic]

Note that the below makes big assumptions as to what the situation looks like. I read a lot between the lines, so take the words below with a grain of salt.

I won't sugar coat it: it's a tough situation to be in because you need to fix a potential mistake that was done a while back and doing so, while going in the proper direction of fairness, can be interpreted as unfair by other parties.

First I would have a discussion by putting yourself in the shoes of the company, not your personal shoes, as you have a fiduciary duty to do it. This removes your personal interests from the discussion, as it should, and will make it less personal (as it should too). From that perspective, the company needs to do what's best for itself, and giving away significant equity for little in return doesn't seem to fulfill that duty. I imagine your cofounders also have a fiduciary duty to make decisions that are aligned with the company's interests, even if these decisions aren't the best for themselves. This is a good test for that.

If the contributions of your other co-founders are minimal, then it needs to be reflected in the equity allocation.

Perhaps an acceptable solution would be to turn these "future founders" into advisors. You can use the Founder Advisor Standard Template as a simple framework to allocate shares vs contributions (see https://fi.co/fast ) - this will keep them engaged, compensated for their current contributions, and also gives the company a way to have a history with them to decide whether it makes sense to turn them into co-founders later or not (whether you want to call it co-founders when that happens is irrelevant).

What's nice about the FAST template is twofold: first, it formalizes the type of work that advisors do (in terms of workload too) and it relates that to a specific percentage of equity, allowing you to map their levels contributions to a more reasonable compensation. Second, it was not engineered by you: you have not written the template so you cannot be accused of influencing it for your benefit.

Lastly, a lot of this depends on how the relationship between the founders is. You may find out that things don't work out as easy as you'd want to, and that's a lesson that's better to have earlier than later. Conversely, you may find out that your cofounders agree and perhaps were a bit uneasy by the unfair allocation.

Good luck!

[pplonski86]

I were in similar situation. I had two shareholders in company that will bring value in the future - that was the hope. They have some skills that I were missing (I thought). At the end I was alone with my product and was stagnating. I decided to ask them to leave the company as I will re-write the product from scratch and make the product core as open source. They agreed to leave the company. Now, I'm 100% solo. Sometimes it is very hard - you even cant talk to anyone. But I know that I'm going to make everything myself or hire a freelancers for help, but I am not relaying on anyone and I think this helps me stay motivated. Having shareholders (or cofounders) that are not shipping regularly with you is very demotivating in my opinion.

[yread]

Maybe they can work on writing content marketing articles or documentation, link building, partner outreach, building relationships with potential customers, mapping out growth strategies, handling social media, looking for key opinion leaders, getting key facts that demonstrate your value prop, figuring out good questions for sales scripts, listing requirements for contracts and T&Cs, doing the bookkeeping, looking for subsidies/funding, getting a feel for what competitors are doing and probably a million other things that we as solo founders have to do.

Good luck

[aj24]

one thing they could and should be doing is enabling those conversations with potential customers right now so you can validate the product/features you're building as well as have them be ready/aware to use your product when you do launch.

[benjaminwootton]

Agree with this. Your domain experts should already be inputting into the product and bringing early adopters to the table to help you build the right product. You development for X months whilst they wait for the product to be fully baked is the wrong way to go about it.