should i join?
i met with some founders, currently they are in idea/poc phase with some contracted engineers. looking for a engineering head with cofounder kind of role. no pay till the product starts being paid off by customers founders are so conservative to go for funding, infact not willing to go till they get 1Mill ARR seems genuine my biggest worry is how long i need to work without pay because waiting for customers to pay is time taking finding them. idea is not something new but can be offered with lower price than other players founder has good handle on the problem and currently has 2 customers closely working with them and mentioned they are willing to pay if the product is out what do you suggest if i can work for 3-4 mon without pay? what else do you consider?
Don’t think it’s is a good idea for you to do leave your job full time. Feel free to help them on some lower rate for hours and ask for equity in return for the time you put in. Then once they have funding, they can pay you for full time and you can revisit your decision to leave your current job.
Well... how much equity are they offering? Are any of the other founders technical? Do they expect you to build the product? Is it a SAAS product? 1 Mil ARR is typical for a SAAS series A funding round. Expect this to take 1-3 years from getting the first paying customer. How much is each of the potential customers going to pay for the product? Have they figured out a pricing model yet? What’s the customer acquisition funnel? Do you need sales people? How will the company hire sales people without money? Can the founders alone sell the product to get to the Series A? Just some of the potential questions to consider
Great questions and some of them already discussed. 1) yes to expect build product but with some help from contractors. They are paying them from friends and family money 2) enterprise sass product 3) pricing model is around 40-50K per customer per year 4) there is a go to market person along with founder. Seems like sale people not a prob. They pitched the same like to me to pay after first paying customer 5) equity we discussed but not too detailed.
Lot of red flags. At $50K per customer, budget six months to a year to land the first customer. Figure the current valuation of the company and what you time is worth, then get at least that much equity. What experience do you have leading engineering orgs of this nature?
6 mon is what I think it will take eventually. Need to chat more on valuation or equity with founders. I have prior start up exp and know what to expect at that nature of the org
do you have a job now？
Pretty stable job
If you have strong faith and passion in the company, maybe you can decide to join. Or else, don‘t bother since they fail majority of time. If you are good, money will follow later stage in life.