Hey all,
I'm a college student looking to start an online company, both for a school business plan competition and hopefully for full-time after graduation. I can run the business but can't write a line of code, and am meeting with potential partners to handle initial coding

I can't pay them (they are also college kids) and most know enough about the web to take partial ownership in case this thing takes off. I'm wondering what a typical amount of ownership I should be willing to offer at this stage.

Obviously as little as possible but I can't do anything without the site running, so I need to know what a good offering is

20% to a partner, 30% to an engineering team?

Any and ALL tips help thanks!!

Generally, you have to be very very careful about giving away stock and therefore ownership for something that you want to own. The idea of shares for labor has its place, but just remember that not only are you getting your product coded you are also giving away a good deal of control. Even a 10 percent dilution makes a difference in the case of a coder who decides he or she doesn't like the direction the company is going.

Your agreements have to be pretty solid in order for you to move in with a coding partner in order to preserve the integrity of the business later on. Suppose you are wildly successful and you gave 20 percent to two people. Now they want more and they run the production organization. Also if one of them dies his family now owns the shares if you haven't dealt with that in the contracts.

I've found lots of people who are willing to do code for cheap. Here are some suggestions for getting the most for the least by using new or emerging code talent:
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Keep your coding tasks very very small and ask for little pieces rather than large projects. This keeps the level of investment low on the part of the coder and if it turns out they aren't any good then you aren't out much time. Small bites make it easier to integrate into a bigger project.

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Offer the person a prominent tagline in you company's web pages and/or a letter of reference. This gives them credit for their work and you get work done.

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Find pros who are wanting to learn a new language and are willing to work for free or cheap while they learn. There are a surprising number of people out there who want to switch from say a windows based language like .asp to .php or python. These folks will be fast and do good work but you won't get an awful lot out of them so keep it simple what you ask for.

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Try to find other people who CAN pay them and offer referals to paying jobs when they do one for you. This is a real hit or miss thing and requires some legwork on your part but you can get some surprisingly good results if you network in the right circles.

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Trade homework help for code. If you find a techie who has problems in writing or history classes do their homework for them in exchange for code.

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Find something that you do really well and trade up for it. Assign an hourly rate to what you do and keep track of how much time you have into whatever it is. Then exchange that time/dollar value for code work at an appropriate hourly coding rate established in your market or for that type of technology.

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If your idea is really good find seed money from an angel investor. Or convert a coder into an investor. Offer stock as a security for the code. Base the amount on the time that the coder puts in on an hourly basis and pay him or her back on the same basis. You cede control for less time and come out with a better product in the long run.

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Learn to code yourself. Its not really that hard to get something simple up and running to use as a basis for doing business. You don't have to be able to do uber algorithms, just enough to get you rolling. Once you get a little bit of experience there are a ton of free packages out there that will do a lot for you. www.sourceforge.net www.freshmeat.net www.hotscripts.com and many more that offer free tools and even entire applications. I got a free real estate listing site tool from sourceforge that I altered and ran with. Most of this software is GPL and you can take wherever you like as a proprietary license of your own.

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The bottom line is that before you take on an equity partner, and thats what they would turn out to be at the stage you are at, you need to consider all other alternatives. There is nothing worse than a bad partner!

All the best

"Things are difficult only while you don't understand them."