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Time-based vesting implies full-time participation. In my case (and probably a lot of other cases), we are both part-time until the product gets traction. Then we will take the risk of going all-in.

If I tie the vesting to milestones instead of time, I should be able to fairly compensate the other person's part-time efforts without walking down the 'you aren't working enough, your shares aren't fully vested' path if/when we divorce.

Thanks for detailing out your approach! I wonder how many times you zigged when you should have zagged to get to this point of clarity...

Internal champions are an absolute must-have!

My (rejected) YC project literally addressed every single concern voiced in this article.

If you can relate to the struggles of managing and working in multi-resource, multi-project environments, sign up for the beta of FlowRocket at: http://signup.flowrocket.com.

Or you need to work on your pitch because you weren't able to effectively communicate the value proposition.

(Sadly, guilty as charged on that one)

Thanks for providing this level of insight!

As the saying goes, 'You can have good, fast or cheap. Pick two.'

Check out BuildItWith.me for a great listing of designers and developers.

I had great results with a logo contest. But the web page contest (opted for the $495 option) didn't work out so well.

Tried that in this round. No love. :(

Actually, it was a pretty sweet demo of the product. It would totally make the YC application process so much smoother from YC's side and (most importantly) allow YC to provide feedback to rejects (that feature alone would be amazing!).

Unfortunately, it looks like YC will (at best) only be a customer, instead of them being an investor.

There's a huge unsolved need when it comes to accounting software. Good job identifying it!

The customer problem, as I understand it, is that accounting requires you to understand bizarre terminology and concepts (debits, credits, financial statements). Anybody who hasn't taken Accounting 101 and 102 would have a hard time using any accounting software I've ever seen. Even having taken accounting in college, most of us don't use it enough to remember all the details.

I would solve that problem by assuming the person using your software has no accounting background. Take out the jargon and replace it with familiar concepts. It's a wonderful UX challenge, but completely doable.

You have about a year to execute before I tackle this problem. Good luck!

Being myself a summer applicant sans co-founder, it's important to differentiate between having a co-founder and wanting a co-founder. If you didn't want a co-founder, that would probably be an issue (it's way too risky to put the entire load of a start-up on one person). But not being able to find a suitable co-founder is another story. It's not something to rush into just so you can say you have one.

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