What percentage should a programming partner get?

I am a software engineer / programmer.

My 2 cents are that even 50% is an absolute rip off for any programmer worth their salt. If someone wanted to partner with me where I did all of the work and they just had some idea they thought up in 5 minutes, I would expect a vast majority of the lions share (99.9%).

Ideas are a dime a dozen. No really. They are. You are not special. Do you think that out of the ~7 billion people in the world with hundreds of millions much much smarter than you - that you have developed an original idea? Success is largely measured not so much by the idea, but by the execution. Look at Google. They were very late in coming to the Search Engine game. Yahoo, Alta Vista, Excite, etc... had been around for years. Their execution? Amazing.

1) Hire / contract a developer to build it, that way you can retain ownership and receive all of the profits. 2) Partner with a developer. But if they are doing most of the work - they get most of the pay. If it took you say 10 hours to develop the idea and provide a spec / design for the developer and it took then 90 hours to implement it - then in my opinion: The developer should get 90% ownership, and you 10% ownership.

Basically: Actual hard work / time is rewarded. Anything else is absurd.

Don't forget to take into account maintenance and support of the product past the development state. This is real "work" and should be compensated appropriately.

Now if you are going to be doing other real work, like forming the LLC, managing all the finances, contracts, invoices, legal, taxes, customer support, etc... then you can up your share. Why? Because you are then contributing more "work" and time.

What value are each of you bringing to the business? You say the idea is easy to implement - is that judgment based on implementation experience or that you have seen it implemented elsewhere so you assume any problems involved have already been solved?

You mention in a follow up post that you expect the developer to also be in school (and presumably concentrating on their studies as their highest priority) and that the equity in the company (which is worthless at the moment) is their sole remuneration. If someone asked the same of you how would you respond?

If all you are providing is the money I'm afraid that is the smallest hurdle to overcome - servers are cheap. If you are handling the promotion and SEO roles as well that would make a big difference. I am looking for a co-founder myself and I'm pretty clear as to what I'm bringing to the partnership and what gaps I need filled that I am not good at. 50/50 seems to be a good place to start at but you do need to be prepared to negotiate to a less than 50% position even if you originated the idea.

An idea only has value when it is implemented at the right time. The concept of Twitter would have been worthless in 1985 (or 1990, or 1995). Twitter, as a concept, is only valuable now. Implemented a mere 2 years earlier than it was and everyone would have ignored it.

I'm afraid that if all you have to offer is an idea and funding for infrastructure you have the short end of the stick.

Define what you and the developer are going to do, time commitment, paying costs, and property ownership.

If you plan on maintaining a full-time job somewhere else while you just toss random thoughts like, "You know what would be cool" at a developer working 80+ hrs a week on this project, you may have to give up more than 50%. On the other hand, if you have expertise in the given industry, are constantly marketing the app, helping with the testing, getting users to test, and your developer is only putting in a few hours on the weekend, it would be the other way around.

It really is a case-by-case situation. Naturally, when 2 people decide to work together 50/50 is a common equity outcome.

Truthfully, the idea alone is not very valuable. There are many, many factors to consider for each partner, including:

• Will this be a full-time job?
• Relevant industry experience?
• Any industry contacts?
• Track record
• Who is providing initial funding?

All of these variables should be considered (plus, there are more specific to your situation) make sure to weigh everything and spend time analyzing the possibilities...