Selling my share of a 50/50 business

Don't hire another sales person. Who compensates sales people by how many hours they work? This should never be part of the equation. Sell something and take a percentage.

Where is the 10K? Did you get any salary for creating a product no one buys? Consider yourself lucky.

You're not a worker; you're an owner. You went into a partnership with NO contingencies on the level of ownership based on contribution. What did you expect? Learn from your mistake.

Close the company and take whatever from it the law allows. Maybe you can get bought out. Use what you learned from creating this code base and start new. Either that or your partner doesn't call your bluff and gets to work. Good Luck.

It's hard to believe you charge $100 per hour with 14-18 hours per day.

The development cost of your start-up is about 40k a month or 500k a year, that's for one developer only.

From business perspective it would be much more efficient to hire full time developers than being charged so much by a founder.

There is few freelancer(who charges by hours) could charge so much hours. The industry average, as far as I know, is about 25-30 hours per week. Not all hours are valuable to business and then could be charged.

I think you need to understand your friend, and suggest as follows.

If the software you delivered could still be possible to generate enough revenue, as your friend's estimation, you can: 1. Summarize a list of real hours chargeable, by making some huge deduction 2. Suggest to make those hours as debt.

If it's not possible to generate revenue, there is no need to hire sales. Or you should only test it by hiring sales based on revenue share instead of equity, as Jeff suggested.