90/10 Partnerships: Collaboration Without Cofounders
Playing with an idea on how to make business partnerships work for lifestyle ventures.
I often see the advice that founders need to partner up to really achieve things. Intuitively, it makes sense. Like taking on an end-game boss, it makes sense to have a high performance team to back you up.
And smart people like the folks at Y Combinator tend to agree. They found that only 4% of the top 100 startups that went through it at some point were solo founders.
But what if you kinda hate partnerships?
I’ve partnered on over 7 different projects with friends (whom I quite like), while things do get a little better each time the same or similar problems crop up:
Personal volatility. Some people are emotionally stable. Others aren’t. It’s hard to know until things get busy or execution is difficult.
Unclear responsibility. I’ve mostly fixed this by having a clear partnership agreements in place, but sometimes it pushes into a grey zone where both parties expect the other to be caring about some thing.
Lack of self-awareness & skill. Similar to volatility, we all lack self awareness to some degree so it’s hard to know whether Person A should really be doing some task or that Person B should doing it. What do you do when they love it (and are crap at it)?
Lack of leadership. In some situations, you can agree Person A is the leader, but when it comes down to certain situations, are you going to push against that agreement in order to take the project in another direction that you think is better?
Loot sharing. It seems counterintuitive to even partner on projects that are small in nature, since sharing the loot on something so small makes both people struggle, rather than a single person comfortable.
🌩️ Before you smirk ironically at the idea of me blaming everyone else but myself - hold on. I’m with you — I could be the issue. Haha.
Even so, partnerships seem like a weird way to do business. Especially for a small or indie project striving towards a sustaining lifestyle business, with plausibly lower rewards than going for a big time traditional startup.
It’s like hiring an employee and deciding to give them half-ish of your project that makes a freedom-level $2k per month into a ramen budget of $1k (practically less, after costs). Add on a personal relationship to list of things you could lose from this arrangement if you know the person…
But thinking aloud, what if there was a way to make it work?
What if small time founders just focused on partnerships when the effort was a clear 90 / 10 split in terms of work and responsibility. So instead of full time equivalent partners, contributors are asymmetric allies.
What I mean by this is partnership engagements where:
The help is useful but non-critical. The core operations can still run if the partner sucks or vanishes.
It’s modular. Their contribution is scoped and sliced and you can add multiple or replacement engagements of the same thing if necessary.
Cleanly exit-able. By the way the infrastructure is used e.g. “Just promote us on your Youtube.” “Use our blog, but put your author name.”
For example:
An influencer partners with an eCommerce operator. But the operator already has a running business servicing multiple people so the relationship has no stress if it works or doesn’t. Likewise, the product being promoted by the influencer is just a small part of their overall portfolio so it makes no difference.
A marketer who partners only with a developer, where the coding required from the developer acts as a CTO to the marketer’s vibe-coded mess. The show could continue if the CTO partner leaves.
👉 You can see it goes beyond simply affiliate sales. It could be applied to a whole spectrum of skillsets.
While we may not get the key benefits of sharing a vision with a true founder, I’d argue we may be able to get the key benefits of partnerships without the drawbacks of being sewn in.
You’d still get:
Emotional support, even if lesser than a regular co-founder. I know I’m emotionally invested in projects I contribute in, and even my client’s businesses! Why wouldn’t someone else be who benefits from the success of the project?
Shared vision. I don’t know about you but smart people can’t help but give feedback when they see something going off the rails. Not a certain thing for sure, but there’s also a chance the feedback may be even better since they’re less emotionally wound up in the project.
Stuff I’m Still Figuring Out
Money motivation without equity spaghetti. Revenue shares make sense for revenue-generating partnerships, like those with marketers. But what about developers or service/product delivery folks? Fractured and small equity stakes are probably not worth getting into either.
What if you outgrow the model? I thinking that if the idea blows up, you’ll revisit roles anyway. A good problem to have.
Legal formalities. I’m guessing you can write a special kind of contributor agreement: like two pages, plain English, auto‑vesting and winding down.
Anyway, that’s the idea I’m playing with. Basically, if you’re about to handshake a 50 / 50 split on a micro‑product, maybe consider the 90 / 10 view first. Worst case, you keep more pie and do more work. Best case, you dodge the partnership drama entirely.