You have one goal right now. You need to get enough of a SaaS product going that you can figure out whether it can find users (“product-market fit”, it’s called).

DO NOT add other goals that don’t advance your one goal. Not til you have some surplus revenue coming in to spend on research.

Plus, low-code and no-code tools have a history of producing not-quite-good-enough results needing tweaks and workarounds that serve the tool vendor, not your customers. Clunky form handling, rigid database designs, and the other assumptions that go into lo/no code tech may, or may not, serve customers well. Stuff you make yourself that’s perfect will.

If you’re in the USA, look at https://score.org/ You may be able to get some top-shelf advice for free.

I went through this a while ago and it was berry berry good to me. Others have talked about stuff like 83(b) elections, vesting schedules, and the like, and you need to understand all that stuff. If the founders don’t know about it you’d be wise to hire a lawyer who know about startup stuff to read over your paper work and advise you.

Here are some important biz questions.

** Who is working on the “Product-market fit.” That’s a fancy way of asking “will anybody spend their hard earned money on what we hope to sell, and when will we know that?”

** How long until we need more financing, and what do we have to do to convince investors to kick in more money?

** Good startups make sure everybody has the same incentives. Do the founders have the same deal in terms of vesting schedules and share pricing as you do? At this stage they should show you the capitalization table (list of shareholders) or have a really good reason not to.

Here are the significant questions for you personally. Is this business idea and prospective company worth ten years of your life? Do you think it will fly? Do you want to spend the next decade with these people?

A piece of hard-won advice. If you take this on, avoid doing multiplications in your head. Don’t waste your time thinking, “I have 100,000 shares, and if they are worth $50 I’ll have five mill.” Your shares aren’t worth the laser printer paper they’re printed on until the business is up and running on revenue from customers. (WeWork and other never profitable unicorns are so 2019.)