How much of the profit do I share with the employees? What does the society deem fair in the case where founder comes up with the product, identifies the problem and works with the customer to configure the product? Do I get to take 5 salaries or 1 salary?
You wrote 80% of the code (who wrote the rest?) and you got it deployed. You're making a decent living on 15.000 users. "Scaling" guy comes in and "scales" you to 150.000 users. Do they get an order of magnitude more profit than you?
I'm not placing any value on "scaling", I'm asking what it should be valued at.
> Who wrote the rest
For argument's sake, let's say there's 10 devs who wrote the rest.
Let's say that in span of 12 months, after paying yearly gross salary of $150 000 to each person in equation (10 devs, 1 scaling/devops guy, 1 founder), $2 800 000 is left and we're dividing it.
How much goes to each of the 12 people in the equation?
Economy isn’t so hot anymore, folks with obligations will absolutely settle and take it on the chin. You have all the power here.
The "boss bad, worker good" is getting really boring and disgusting, just like not all bosses are evil - not all workers are good. I presented a scenario where there's no investors and where the founder did majority of the work.