As someone who has always heard, "Ideas are worthless without execution" and who was recently told, "Just because you have an App in the iTunes Store doesn't mean that you're not still at the idea stage" I'm going to say his idea isn't worth anything.
If I'm going to give 5% of my company to someone, it will be to my very first Dev who built V1.0 for very little money to build out his portfolio and because he liked the "idea". Without him I would never have had the opportunity that I do today.
I'm not the original poster, but I believe the most important part is finding, creating and executing on the business model (value proposition, finding channels, CUSTOMERS), the coding is just a small part of the execution:
If your iOS app is just relying on the App Store as its channel, and the coding involved more than just writing to spec then maybe it's worth more than 5%, but the main value is in finding the spec, not coding it :) - if part of the value or the main part is having a good execution and user experience, it's also likely worth more than 5%, but it's maybe better for a VC-backed startup to just pay employees.
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As someone who has always heard, "Ideas are worthless without execution" and who was recently told, "Just because you have an App in the iTunes Store doesn't mean that you're not still at the idea stage" I'm going to say his idea isn't worth anything.
If I'm going to give 5% of my company to someone, it will be to my very first Dev who built V1.0 for very little money to build out his portfolio and because he liked the "idea". Without him I would never have had the opportunity that I do today.
Serious question to you - if the idea is 0% and the v1.0 is 5%, what's the other 95%?
I'm not the original poster, but I believe the most important part is finding, creating and executing on the business model (value proposition, finding channels, CUSTOMERS), the coding is just a small part of the execution:
http://steveblank.com/2010/01/25/whats-a-startup-first-princ...
http://www.businessmodelgeneration.com/downloads/businessmod...
If your iOS app is just relying on the App Store as its channel, and the coding involved more than just writing to spec then maybe it's worth more than 5%, but the main value is in finding the spec, not coding it :) - if part of the value or the main part is having a good execution and user experience, it's also likely worth more than 5%, but it's maybe better for a VC-backed startup to just pay employees.