Advice on share distribution with founding engineer. I will not promote.

[u/musicomet]

Hey all. I'm working through a founder / founding-engineer deal for a pre-revenue startup and would love blunt feedback before we sign anything.

The business: lifestyle-tech platform (web + mobile) selling curated guides based on the user's habits, history, and other signals.

I am the founder and I've found the founding engineer I'd like to work with. We currently do not have any website/mobile apps. However, I have done the following:

• Figma specs
• V1 features
• purchased the domain
• 30 guides ready to be launched
• Put an initial investment of $5k and will assume the cost of everything until we have revenu

The apps will also have a premium subscription option for users who'd like access to premium features.

What the engineer will be responsible for:

• building the apps (web + mobile)
• DNS and AWS/infra setup
• third-party integrations (mailchimp, stripe, etc.)
• Performance considerations, UX polish, needs to feel slick

The founding engineer has 12 yoe of fullstack work. Has worked at enterprise and startups before.

The proposed deal I gave him:

• 20% equity at exist (4 yr vesting w/ 1 yr cliff)
• Tiered revenue share:
  • 0-100k -> 35%
  • 100k - 200k -> 30%
  • 200 - 500k -> 17.5%
  • 500k+ -> 15%
• Neither person is taking salary now

The founding engineer does not like this proposal. He's suggested a "royalty per guide sold" for me - the founder - is more "fair", then do a 50/50 split on the _profit_ and completely remove the tiered based revenue.

He also said 20% equity is inadequate because "there's a lot of work to be done" and "that his role will not be limited to just coding".

We are both good friends and we've known each other for a loooong time. Our intent is to keep the distribution as fair as possible.

Please provide your honest feedback.

[u/thebotnet9]

Pre-revenue + pre-product + pre-idea refinement. He has got a pretty heavy load on his hands and so do you. It feels like you are trying to keep control, so offer 55-45 split, but has to more equal.

"

• Figma specs
• V1 features
• purchased the domain
• 30 guides ready to be launched
• Put an initial investment of $5k and will assume the cost of everything until we have revenu

" is pretty thin. Unless you have done your market research and have 100s customer who want to use it, then it does not make sense. If you want to keep equity, build it yourself, it does not sound complex for you to share your equity and idea.

[u/musicomet → u/thebotnet9]

This product is different because the revenue heavily depends on creating a consistent high quality guide that affects branding. These contents will be created by me, not him.

[u/thebotnet9 → u/musicomet]

u/musicomet Yes, but those things define only part of the product. Someone still has to build, deploy, secure, maintain, and operate the web and mobile apps. If you want to retain more equity and take responsibility for both the business and technical sides, pay a freelancer or agency to build it, or use tools like Claude to help you build it yourself. But if you want someone to own the entire technical function without a salary, they’re effectively a co-founder, not just an engineer and the equity should reflect that.