Idea: FounderShare

[jv2222]

What’s the product?

Of the thousands of startups that are launched, there are ten times more that never see the light of day. Even so, many of those startups are built by teams of friends over a 6-12 month period and then they go ker-plunk.

A debate that often comes up for any team in the very early stages of building a startup is who deserves what % of ownership. This is especially true of the naive 20 somethings who don’t understand that it’s best to just split it equally.

FounderShare is a system that lets founders track who did what. Over time, in those early stages, it becomes clear who is staying up all night and putting in 10x more effort than the other folks.

FounderShare cleverly keeps track of this and creates a sense of competition amongst founders so that they if one person starts loosing too much equity (due to being a lazy) they will get motivated to put more effort in, or they will quit before too much damage is done.

For example:

Dividing equity for cofounders - bootstrap style?

Hi there, Me and my three co-founders have been working on a product for a few months, we've been lagging on figuring out equity allocations, but we can't put it off any longer. It's been especially tough because we're a distributed team all working on this in our spare time, some of us have full-time jobs and some of us do freelance work, so we all have varying amounts of time we can put into the business. No one has immediate plans to quit their job and work on this full-time, it's also…

Who is the ideal customer?

Startup folks.

What pain does the product solve?

As explained above.

How will it make money?

Charge $24/month per business in exchange for time and effort tracking tools.

What is the early-stage path to market?

Content & niche marketing via startup focused websites such as this one.

[steve]

Interesting idea. Perhaps have tiers: bootstrapped, angel funded, and VC, where the last two keep track of multiple startups for more, and much more, money.

You might want to look into what can be quantified beyond hours, such as sales calls, lines of code, etc. and figure out how to track them and generate reports.

Devil’s advocate
Two minor points:

1. I’m not sure what this would do compared to existing project management software such as JIRA, which technical founders would probably already know. Not in itself a real problem, but worth knowing what’s already in the market.
2. Often the biggest contributions are hard to quantify. Not everyone’s hours are of equal value. It’s a truism that working on the right thing is more important than working hard. A time tracking tool isn’t likely to capture who came up with the best ideas. If one developer is a 1x developer and another one is a 2x developer, simple time tracking won’t show their contributions. You might want to have some features to capture who came up with ideas, and perhaps a time multiplier for individuals to indicate how much more valuable their time is vs others.

[Pieter_Dumortier]

You can’t see any hourly contributions in JIRA, can you? And even then it can be usefull to have a tool to directly link it to equity shares, or not?

Please tell me what you think about it.

[mpalmer]

You can track time in Jira, and I’m sure there are tools that can measure what you’ve got up on the screen and feed that sort of info straight into Jira, if you want to go that way.