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moralestapia

3% is quite low if it's true that you've done most of the product.

But disregarding that, this thing is DOA.

• You haven't touched the market, have you done at least some sort of market study? (inb4; nope)

• One of the co-founders (you) is leaving.

• You and your "partner" are definitely not friends.

• Your product is an MVP in NextJS; is it also yet another OpenAI frontend? That has close to zero market value. (Although in the current environment you could raise a few million with that, lol. Note: you could raise != you could make.)

Because of all these reasons the chance of this making money irl is very slim.

What you both have to do is call it a day, stop fighting over literal pennies, end it up as gentlemen and then go on with your lives and find people that fit both of your desires and lifestyles more appropriately.

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This app does not use AI at all (nor is it AI slop—I used AI very sparingly to build the product). The app uses NextJS and Postgres, and it’s mostly CRUD and a bit of scraping+caching behind the scenes. It does solve a business problem that we’ve validated with a pre-MVP (low-tech Google Forms + Google Sheets + Twilio) via waitlist members.

The free version of our MVP is ready to launch to general users, though, and the only thing holding us back is that we haven’t signed an agreement about compensation.

We’ve already identified/communicated with some potential customers, and deals with these customers are typically 40K+/year based on our research (FOIA requests to public institutions using competitor products). Based on what’s built (and what I could finish building by August), I think I’d we’d have a fairly competitive offering in the market we’re targeting even if we changed nothing after August.

This risk of “dead equity” to future investors is why we have discussed doing profit sharing. Does this info change anything? Got any alternative proposals/advice? Thanks for your help—it is very much appreciated.

Ok, then, why are you going for a 120K/year job, which will most likely destroy your soul after a few years, as all corporate jobs do, if you have "several potential customers" worth 40K/year each?

If you knew for sure this thing was worth what you say, you would stay. But it's not worth that, it's imaginary, and you know it.

Tbh, I'd just move on. Learn from the exp. etc. You deserve to get what you want, and the other guy deserves a real co-founder (no offense to you).

Just go find new things to do, also you mentioned you were in college, you still have like 100 shots left to take on.

Yeah, this is a great point (and no offense taken—I appreciate the real talk even if it’s a bit painful to hear). I’m taking the other job because the risk is so much lower. And while I do believe that this business could potentially make me more money/be more fulfilling than a day job, there is a huge amount of risk that we’d never make any money and that I’d be forfeiting a guaranteed high salary. We’re still a ways away from making enough revenue to warrant me forfeiting the salary job.

I appreciate your insight. I’ll definitely keep this in mind. Even though I want to get my slice, I also want to be fair to my partner. It might just be that we’re not a good fit for each other right now.

If we can’t come to an agreement and I have to exit, do you have any suggestions about what to do with the app (I currently own the IP for all the code)?

Why don't you launch now together?

It will clarify the business value and you still don't have an issue

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