I am working since two months with a potential non-technical co-founder, but I plan to end this collaboration. I like him personally, but he doesn’t bring enough to the table (not enough experience, not enough business acumen) for me to justify working with him anymore. Also, product-wise, I want to change direction, and I want to go my own way. Since I also have a consulting background, I am sure I can handle the client work and to be honest, I am also hungry to do sales more than my current co-founder.
We have no terms, no contract, no NDA. neither of us made any money from this, I just put in the time and I built an MVP (some data and server costs that I can handle) and we have two potentially paying customers.
If I leave, he has to let those customers go, or at least pause until he finds someone new. Now, I am fine with giving him my code and the data I bought, but I want to avoid having to keep working on this for free until he finds a new tech person.
I was thinking about revenue sharing if one or more of these opportunities turn into paying customers, but that would not be a good deal for me as I need to focus on finding new customers for another project I have in mind.
Has any of you been in this situation before and found a good solution for this? i dont want to fuck up their business, but i also need to look out for myself.
Sooner rather than later, I’ve had almost exactly this situation.
It’ll be an uncomfortable conversation, don’t tiptoe around it and give them time to process it to come up with their next move (don’t make an agreement what to do there and then on the call as that’s unfair on them)
If they can’t run it themselves it was never really their business and they’re depending on someone else to run it for them which happens a lot when people try to build technical businesses without technical ability.
Cofounder relationships are tough but do it quickly, you’re just wasting their time if you don’t tell them.