paymentI am an app developer, submitting apps to App Store. Usually I get feedbacks from friends, and I am appreciative for it. It can be a small thing style / colors, but sometimes they came with whole ideas, visions, and sooner or latter I realised that it effects me, and my app works as he described his / her vision.
What do you do in this situation. Give share I you get rich? How much percent? He / she has no programming knowledge / App Store etc. only ideas.
Buy them a dinner, or two tickets to a sport event or the opera or whatever they like.
Seriously.
If you end up in a situation where they’re expecting payment, they’ll no longer be delivering feedback as friends.
If they actually execute the idea, of course, it’s different. Then they’re definitely entitled to some kind of payment – hopefully agreed upon in advance. But just for the idea: nada.
Assuming they’ve had negligible assistance with the actual execution, you don’t want to put yourself in a position where they have some control over the business - whether it be legally through voting shares, or through socially through expectations.
However I think there’s a case for being more generous than just buying them a couple tickets to a sports game. Note that I’m talking about generosity in return for core business ideas here, not small stuff like UI tweaks.
For yourself
How you conduct yourself affects your reputation, which in turn affects opportunities. If you get a reputation of generously rewarding people who’ve shared valuable ideas with you, I expect that others would be more inclined to share their ideas with you.
What’s considered “generous” is going to be proportional to your success - make a couple hundred k, sports game tickets could be reasonable. Make a couple hundred mil, sports game tickets are looking pretty tight-fisted.
For others
If you’ve taken the idea and generated serious profit from it, you should have space to be benevolent with that profit towards others. If someone’s given you valuable ideas, I think they’d be a fair candidate to receive something.
I quite like this motivation, as firstly it means your hard work benefits others in a increased number of ways, and secondly it drives you to build more profitable businesses.
The way any of this comes about is critical though - the generosity shouldn’t be under compulsion. Given the nature of startups, any expectation from them for personal reward is likely to cause issues.
All content is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.