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Comment by phanindra_veera | Hacker News Reader

If you guys have no paper agreement regarding equity, then you can forget about it. If you do have one then I think your proposition is good. Again that depends on the type of the deal.

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Well, we both own the company (Jim 60% and I 40%) that operates the app, so there's no way Jim can get me out of the company.

The question remains whether he can simply take the app & create a new company since technically he paid for the app and the contract with programmers is only between Jim and programmers

Yes, he could do that now quite easily since right now it sounds like the app isn't worth much under generally accepted valuation methodologies

Right, so that may be something they can use against me. Although since I've done the most work, I know all the ins and outs and not having me available for occasional consulting would be pretty bad for them

TBH, if the app doesn't currently have any traction, it's current value is essentially nil. If that's the case, knowing the ins and outs doesn't provide much value, especially if they have to rework the app as it would generally be cheaper to just start from scratch.

Thank you. They won't rework the app until they make some money off it first, so for the time being they would pretty much leave it as is. Since the freelance programmers (unknowingly) took very little money, the real value of the source code could potentially be a few tens of thousands. Even if it was just the $11.000, there is a value just in the source code

There’s only value to the source if someone wants to buy it, regardless of how much money was put in to make it.

When you enter into a partnership with someone, you usually have a non-compete and/or intellectual property clauses. If none of these exist it probably comes down to negotiation, but IANAL.

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