Ask HN: How much equity should I pay for a salesman/spokesman co-founder?

1 points by HasanYousef 4 years ago | 2 comments

Let's say that I'm a software designer and builder and can handle all the technical side of a SaaS company alone in the early stages, but of course in this case I'll need a co-founder to secure sales and acquire customers. To be clear I'll attend all the meetings with the customers in the early stages, but I cannot do that alone because it has to be more professional and more "majestic" (I'm not sure if this is the right use of the word). Also we need to show up and market our products so we may attend public events or, for example, talk about our product on the radio and so on...

I know that the following question has no right answer and it depends on the context, but I'm open to hear different answers for different scenarios: How much equity do you think should I pay for a co-founder like this?

h2odragon 4 years ago |

How much of your company is the product, and how much the salesman? Perhaps gauge it at "i spent 500hr building this project" vs "i expect it will take 100hr of selling it to make $N billion in revenue" and divide accordingly. This should probably be a mutual discussion.

HasanYousef 4 years ago | |

The product is like a management system, basically I will update the product every two weeks (adding/deleting features). It's not a product that I just build and throw it to the users, I need to follow the customer needs and analyze the data they produce to redesign and develop the product. FYI, I already spent more than a year watching the market and designing several solutions, I also developed different MVPs that no one used, but learned a lot of them, talked to several potential customers and took their feedback but didn't secure any sale.