It's obvious where your priorities are (family/wife, career/money) and at this early stage where product development is driven by coders that need to go full steam ahead, you're not in a position to help.
When your product gains more traction and more attention, you should step back in and help. Your experience in terms of financing and business development will be of better use then.
The timing, unfortunately, just isn't right. Number 1 should move to the West Coast, live for a few months, mingle with people, latch on with a couple of more developers and then give you a call a couple months down the road.
This is #2 again. I think you're getting to part of the issue here. We need to be coding full-steam ahead and we need more coders - it is the clear bottleneck. We can either do that through money or options. To date, we have been cycling through developers with all options, but we have found that it's hard to source good ones, and they often move on by the time we've gotten a return from the time spent getting them familiar with the code. The current course is to have #1 and #3 crank out some code in the next month, launch Beta, and go after another round of funding to hire some full-time developers to join #1.
I don't think what I mentioned above or what you mention in your post means that I have to "step back" or "step down". I do everything but code, enabling those that code to be as efficient as possible. You said yourself that the product is currently "driven by coders that need to go full steam ahead" and I'm not in a position to help. If #1 had to figure out all the legal documentation, pay taxes, manage cash, put together marketing materials, respond to users, find and log bugs, put together investor reports, file trademarks, etc. would our development would be going "full steam ahead"? Also, do you think the quality of that stuff would be the same coming from a developer? I'm also guessing it would cost a considerable amount of money. I'm not sure how I'm not in a position to help and what good "stepping back" would do. If #1 wants to move, network, and take greater risks, I'm open to talking about re-working equity, but saying that I'm just going to drop off the earth for 2 months until I get a call is just rediculous.
Comments
I think you need to let go, for now.
It's obvious where your priorities are (family/wife, career/money) and at this early stage where product development is driven by coders that need to go full steam ahead, you're not in a position to help.
When your product gains more traction and more attention, you should step back in and help. Your experience in terms of financing and business development will be of better use then.
The timing, unfortunately, just isn't right. Number 1 should move to the West Coast, live for a few months, mingle with people, latch on with a couple of more developers and then give you a call a couple months down the road.
This is #2 again. I think you're getting to part of the issue here. We need to be coding full-steam ahead and we need more coders - it is the clear bottleneck. We can either do that through money or options. To date, we have been cycling through developers with all options, but we have found that it's hard to source good ones, and they often move on by the time we've gotten a return from the time spent getting them familiar with the code. The current course is to have #1 and #3 crank out some code in the next month, launch Beta, and go after another round of funding to hire some full-time developers to join #1.
I don't think what I mentioned above or what you mention in your post means that I have to "step back" or "step down". I do everything but code, enabling those that code to be as efficient as possible. You said yourself that the product is currently "driven by coders that need to go full steam ahead" and I'm not in a position to help. If #1 had to figure out all the legal documentation, pay taxes, manage cash, put together marketing materials, respond to users, find and log bugs, put together investor reports, file trademarks, etc. would our development would be going "full steam ahead"? Also, do you think the quality of that stuff would be the same coming from a developer? I'm also guessing it would cost a considerable amount of money. I'm not sure how I'm not in a position to help and what good "stepping back" would do. If #1 wants to move, network, and take greater risks, I'm open to talking about re-working equity, but saying that I'm just going to drop off the earth for 2 months until I get a call is just rediculous.