Ep. 3234 - Q&A: “What’s a fair founder-investor deal between friends?”
Side Hustle School
Chris Guillebeau / Onward Project
4.8 • 3.3K Ratings
🗓️ 8 November 2025
⏱️ 8 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Cash can launch the product; labor will keep it alive. Today we map out founder-friendly splits, vesting schedules, and a simple “dynamic equity” formula that grows with effort.
Side Hustle School features a new episode EVERY DAY, featuring detailed case studies of people who earn extra money without quitting their job. This year, the show includes free guided lessons and listener Q&A several days each week.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | If you ever shop online, which, let's be real, who doesn't, you already understand how important |
| 0:05.6 | customer reviews are. You know this as a consumer, right? You always check the reviews before you buy |
| 0:10.1 | something and your customers are checking reviews as well. That's why if you run an e-commerce |
| 0:14.7 | business, reviews have an enormous impact on your business and you want to level up your business |
| 0:19.0 | to get better reviews. You can do that with |
| 0:21.1 | our longtime partner ShipStation. It is a fantastic service that has served so many of our listeners |
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| 0:37.2 | and use code hustle. No credit card or |
| 0:39.7 | contract required and you can cancel any time. That's shipstation.com code hustle. |
| 0:48.2 | Lemonada. |
| 0:52.9 | Here's a tricky listener question we have today. |
| 0:59.8 | I had to think about this one a good bit because I always want to make sure we're giving our |
| 1:03.9 | listeners and our incredible global audience the most helpful information. |
| 1:08.3 | They're wondering about what is a fair split in terms of equity, |
| 1:12.2 | what's a fair founder-investor deal between friends. So as I said, this can be tricky. |
| 1:17.4 | Often partnership deals, if it's not clearly delineated, who's doing what, who's providing what, |
| 1:23.4 | how much time, how much resource in this case, people are putting into it, then it can lead to |
| 1:28.1 | difficulty later. But, you know, done well, it can actually lead to leverage, which is good, right? |
| 1:33.7 | It, you know, it allows the project to move forward because one person has more time, one person has more |
| 1:37.6 | money. So today we've got two people, Tessa and RICO. RICO's got some money to invest. I think |
| 1:44.1 | it's $25,000. Tessa has the idea and the |
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