tech-company, equity, softwareI am at a software startup where we all are college students and have not been working very hard outside of the school holidays. There are 11 people on the team but most barely dedicate time to the project, and of those only 4 of us are programmers. Of those 4, only two of us dedicate at least a couple hours a day to it.
I have built about 60% of our software, am the one designing the technical part of it, and taught the devs that don’t work so hard the basics. Yet I own only 15% equity because I joined two years after the project was started, and soon before we got 20k of funding from the government.
We are not paying any salaries nor making any revenue, and the financial plan only takes into account three salaries two years in.
We have a half-baked website and mobile app, but the university is interested in good publicity so we have appeared several times in different media. Our web traffic is still very little though.
Everyone keeps saying the idea is great and it will work out, but I’m not so sure. We are too unprofessional now. What do I do? Do we try to fix it? Should we let go most of these 11 people that barely do anything? But none of us gets paid and most do not own equity either. Or should I quit and find something else to do? I’m not really sure building web businesses is something I enjoy. Will I be seen badly in the future by potential employers or partners if I quit now?
Probably quit and find something else to do, or oust the folks who aren’t working on the project.
Look… it’s 11 people, most of them are idle, the team is not shipping in spite of being overstaffed, you’re not getting paid because there’s no money, and you’re evidently not enjoying the situation – for good reasons.
You could stop now and call it a day. Not everyone is contributing based on your question. Which begs the question: why are you working for them instead of with them if you’re not getting paid?
Alternatively, put that problem forward and suggest you’ll quit unless the dead weight gets ousted. You might then enjoy the situation a lot more then because you’ll be working for yourself with a team that cares.
And no, you won’t be seen badly in the future by potential employers or partners if you quit now. You can always say you didn’t want to pour more time into a dead project.
I would have to agree with the previous poster. If you are in a dead project; you are best to face them with an ultimatum and see if there is anyway to cut the dead weight and move forward. Otherwise, cut your losses and take the code that belongs to you and move on to different projects.
IMHO, this seems like a golden opportunity for you to learn the basic ropes of management and handling situations. If everybody feels your idea is good then probably there is something in there.
It is typical to get burnt out for sometime. I suggest you hang in there. Take charge of the situation. Go out of the technology development mode. Talk to potential investors, talk to your university, fire people and hire effective doers.
Start with addressing a niche subsection of your potential customer base. Improve the product. Motivation will naturally follow :-)
Cheers!
If you say you are unprofessional, then thats that. Do not bank on yourself getting suddenly determined once again. Try to sell the product to someone right, because it has had good response. Take a break, get inspired, read about other entrepreneurs who faced such obstacles. An example is Deepak Ravindran, from Lookup, a start-up in India. He has been a serial entrepreneur, and is now doing his 3rd start-up. He had built his 1st 2 start-ups in the SMS space, which died out soon after Whatsapp took charge. But, he gave it all to open source, and started another soon after. He has now received a Series A from a series of international investors including Twitter co-founder Biz Stone.
This is just one of the several other success stories out of the rough. In the end, do whatever your calling is.
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