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Comment by ggeorgovassilis | Hacker News Reader

> so I started getting suspicious if someone actually shared the video of my app with these people because they were solving literally the same problem

I once met a guy who had a good idea about an app, something that became fairly mainstream two years later. He asked me to code the app for free and we'd share revenues. When asked what his contribution would be, he offered to "run" the company and otherwise his 50% was "having the idea". I thanked him and told him that he has a head-start of 6 months, if his app hasn't hit the market by then, I'd write the thing myself.

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I was once involved in an indie game project. We had a middling idea for a crappy game but we were all hankering for software development experience in that field.

Of the 3 of us who set about coding it, 2 of us just sat down and started blocking the thing out. The third, pushed faulty code to the SVN, created a design document crediting the entire idea to himself, and then called a meeting telling us he is the game designer and he would sue us if we made the game elsewhere. The 2 of us actually contributing just looked at each other and dropped the whole thing. He basically played his cards face up and we got to see he was a pissant.

Later I did see someone with the same general idea on steam. Good for them honestly. If they came up with the idea separately, great. If they stole it from the loser, also great. If they managed to persevere under him they deserve some coin.

As someone extremely logic and programming oriented, I -wish- I'd met someone like that. I'm just not an idea guy, apparently.

If the idea was truly good so much so you believed in it, it was a heck of an offer tbh.

I'll give you any one of 3 or 4 ideas right now, if you want them. They're ideas I'd develop if I had the time, energy and brainpower. I've got personal connections for you too, if you want them, people who need the product. I won't even ask 50%, heck, 5% sounds fine by me.

My experience has been that, while that is useful, it's by no means sufficient to lead to a complete and useful tool. But I'd absolutely take that deal any day of the week, from the "idea" side of the fence. Imagine if you did it 20 times - quite a nice portfolio.

The ideas are important, but remember the idea guy also was to run the company. That's a ton of work, too.

In any event, while I appreciate the offer, I'm now too old and domesticated to work on it. I guess my comment should have said I'd have loved to met someone like that in my early 20s, when I had more free time and my brain worked better :).

> but remember the idea guy also was to run the company

Company of 2 where neither receives a salary.

> That's a ton of work, too.

In this case, I really, really don't think so.

Well, in an honest sense, that's kind of what YC's matching program does. I'm working for a company I found on there right now. It's a much different experience from job searching but it's full of people with ideas. Half or more of them are complete nonsense but any decent engineer should be able to sift the gold from the dross.

Do you have some tips for getting started on there? I poked on a few months ago, but wasn't able to make enough sense of it to get started. I think I just didn't find the right entry points?

Book meetings with people who seem interesting, don't judge a book by its cover. Fill out your profile in a pretty detailed way, you'll get better matches if you specify what you're looking for. If you're a technical person, you're going to have your choice, I gather many of the people on there are not technical.

> The ideas are important, but remember the idea guy also was to run the company. That's a ton of work, too.

Someone who thinks of themselves as “an idea guy” and that that is worth 50% is delusional to a level I wouldn’t trust them to run the company.

Can I hit you up for one those in September if my current thing doesn't work out? Completely serious.

Sure thing, goes for folks reading this too.

The problem with this setup is that having the idea is only the starting point. You will need to iterate, talk to customers, improve the solution for years while you learn more about the market.

Even if the idea is truly good all the value is in the execution and acting on non obvious information from your customers. Anyone who isn’t committed to this long and uncertain process probably shouldn’t be a co-founder.

> If the idea was truly good so much so you believed in it, it was a heck of an offer tbh.

Perhaps. But in the past 15 years I've never seen such a good idea.

If one is going to take 50% I'd expect them to be a really good salesman at least.

I mean handling sales + marketing + accounting and everything else required to run a company is worth 50% (maybe more). But of course while you were probably competent enough to "code it up", odds are he wasn't competent to "run the company".

i’ve recently had a revelatory experience with my cofounder, who is focused entirely on sales. we were pitching our product/services to the company execs- and he just owned the room. He definitely oversold, hallucinated a little bit, said some (many) things i never would have said, but he didn’t lie. I have a highly diminished opinion of my talents than compared to reality and i know it. And i can’t fix it, i’ve tried.

In that meeting, there are times i wanted to interject to add some context, they very skillfully pulled me away from talking too much and qualifying everything.

We got our first sale. Big client, big company, very important sale.

Came out of that meeting daze because that’s when i internalized it - im worth no more than half the company. It was truly revelatory. I’m writing all the code, all the “hard” work is on me. I dont care.

Before that, i spent two years on my own project with zero traction because i didn’t even want to sell it, i just wanted to make it better. by the end i was gasping for air.

If you can find a good decent person who has a great network and a knack for sales (and is fine doing administrative work) by god, let go of your ego and give them room to cook and have faith in yourself to ship.

I spent the first half of my career deriding and diminishing the effort of salespeople. Never again.

When you watch a great salesperson in action it’s like magic. It’s like watching a chess player find moves you couldn’t have found in a million years.

They chose the right words that converted to motions of neurons in your counterparty that caused action by them to give you money. Crazy.

> When you watch a great salesperson in action it’s like magic.

That, a hundred times. It's otherworldly, transcends laws of reality. That's why I dislike most salespeople I met, who don't tire of iterating how important sales are, but never come even close to what a great salesperson can deliver.

In my history the best sales people I've met wouldn't have me believe they were in sales at all. They are just great at relationships and solving problems for clients. You want to give them your money to solve your problem.

I literally couldn’t stop shaking my head on the commute home. I’ve always had the habit of underselling myself. I would have never made that pitch. But he made them believe in the product and in that process made me believe in it too.

Yes my former business partner is a rare hybrid of super competant salesperson and super competant engineer. I sometimes just enjoyed reading his contracts.

Administrative work should probably not exceed 10% of the budget, especially in a small company, where the advantage is to have less requirements in that area.

Marketing and sales, it depends on what you sell to whom. Let’s say 10-20%.

Then there’s a grey area. Obviously there needs to be a feedback loop between clients, development and business. If the business/idea guy facilitates a lot of this and is mostly responsible to maintain the relationships, then he is part of development. So another 10-20% give or take.

That 50% number seems kind of fair. Ultimately it implies that both are putting in the same time and effort.

If the business guy is getting overwhelmed, the developer guy can automate things, talk to clients, write pretty documents for clients or take on some admin tasks.

If the developer guy is overwhelmed then the business guy can simplify requirements negotiate deadlines, do manual testing and feedback, organize tasks and so on.

What I‘m trying to say is that 50% might be more of a social contract rather than an a priori, objective assessment of value.

I second your analysis, that's how things normally work. It's just that in these and similar scenarios, there isn't much product development happening before the MVP, so the developer fronts all the work and the risk.

> odds are he wasn't competent to "run the company"

A 2 people company where neither gets paid and "product development" consists of me coding the MPV, fronting all the work and the risk.

Not sure if it’s smart to do that if you aren’t entirely sure about what mental state a person could be in.

Edit: okay I don’t know why I’m getting downvoted for this but if you think you can just tell someone you’re going to steal their awesome idea in 6 months you better hope their not the type of “crazy” entrepreneur who will cause problems for you or in extreme cases even end up shooting you in the back of the head.

You never know when you're going to get hit by a car either. Or a meteorite.

It's a tempting trap to make decisions - or even worse, paralyze decisions - around the rare outcomes, rather than the common ones.

> okay I don’t know why I’m getting downvoted

Because saying "don't do something because an irrational player might irrationally punish you for that" isn't particularly insightful. To expand on your argument, I could find out your real identity (this is hacker news, so I might be a hacker) and pay you a visit (I won't, I'm too lazy & incompetent for that). Just saying that your argument doesn't make sense to me.

> you’re going to steal their awesome idea

I paid for it by listening to a bad sales pitch, that's 40 minutes of my life I'm never getting back. Also, there was no confidentiality or non-compete agreement.

> end up shooting you in the back of the head

Only a semi-related tangent, I live in Europe, people here usually don't carry guns which shifts the entire risk/reward calculation significantly.

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