[osrec]

Good you walked away. In my experience, the heavy lifting in a tech start up is, by definition, the tech. The "idea guys" rarely understand that it's the execution that makes an idea valuable.

Sales are important, but are a bit of a crapshoot. You can't consistently sell trash, no matter how good a salesperson you are. The guy was happy to roll the dice, while using your mental energy. Great deal for him, but not so good for you. You risk the burnout, stress and pressure, while he feeds you requirements and deadlines, and essentially becomes your manager.

In my younger days I got a lot of similar proposals, but thankfully could see right through them from day one. Bootstrapping as a solo founder was the harder, but ultimately more rewarding route for me.

[notfromhere]

The business side needs to have subject matter expertise in the market, running an org, fundraising, marketing, etc. 'ideas guys' are pretty worthless without that.

80/20 is an insane proposal; 50/50 feels reasonable, but I 100% agree with you that the technical side is way more crucial than the business side, since under $10m in ARR your biggest issue will be making the tech work well enough to attract customers.

[nand_gate]

You can consistently sell trash, you just need a captured market.

[osrec]

Yeah, but that rarely lasts (I am assuming the absence of corruption etc etc). If you set the bar so low with your product that it's easy to outperform by a 10x margin, then you present your customers with a huge incentive to move away.

[blackqueeriroh]

And captured markets no longer exist