Key takeaways
  • When cash is tight, founders buy the cheapest team they can afford. That is rarely the team the product needs, and it is the most expensive saving in early-stage product.
  • I take up to 40% of fees as equity on qualifying CPO, PM and Coaching mandates of three months or longer, priced at the last round and agreed upfront.
  • The point is not discounting. It is shared risk: if the product does not work, I do not get the upside either.
  • Paid only in cash, an agency profits from more work. Paid partly in equity, I profit from the right work. That changes what I am willing to tell you not to build.

There is a conversation I have had more times than I can count. A founder has something real, a bit of traction, and a number in their head for what they can spend. The number is too small for what they actually need, so they do the rational thing and buy the best they can get for it. A cheap dev shop. A junior contractor. An offshore team quoted per hour. In their words, more than once, they end up scraping the bottom of the barrel: paying for what they can afford rather than what they need, and nowhere near what they deserve.

I understand the maths. When runway is measured in months, spending half of it on senior product help feels reckless. But I have now watched enough of these decisions play out to say plainly that the barrel is the expensive option. It just bills you later.

What the cheap version actually costs.

It rarely fails loudly. What happens is quieter. Six months in, something exists. It roughly matches what was asked for. But it was built on a stack chosen because it was what that team happened to know, the scope was whatever was in the brief rather than what the market needed, and nobody in the room was senior enough to say no to any of it. So you pay again: to fix it, to migrate it, or in the worst case to build it a second time with the money you were saving. I wrote a whole issue on not spending, and this is its mirror image. Restraint is a strategy. Buying the cheapest possible version of something essential is not restraint, it is deferral.

The hard part is that the founder almost never had a real alternative. They were not choosing between a cheap team and a good one. They were choosing between a cheap team and nothing. That is the actual problem, and it is a pricing problem, not a judgment problem.

So I made the good version reachable.

On qualifying mandates I will take up to 40% of my fees as equity instead of cash, priced at your last round, on engagements of three months or longer, agreed in writing before anything starts. It applies to the ongoing Pieces where I can actually affect the outcome: CPO, PM and Coaching. It is not a discount, and it is not deferred cash dressed up. It is a genuine swap of certainty for upside.

What that does for a founder is straightforward. The monthly number becomes payable out of a runway that has to cover engineers and rent and everything else, without dropping to the version of the help that will need redoing. You keep more cash in the business at the exact point where cash is the constraint on survival, and you still get the senior call on the bet, the build and the sequence.

What it does for me is more interesting, and it is the real reason I offer it.

The question underneath: whose side am I on?

Here is the uncomfortable truth about how most product and development work is sold. The supplier gets paid whether the thing works or not. Worse, the supplier usually gets paid more when there is more to build. Every incentive in a standard agency contract points towards saying yes: yes to the extra module, yes to the bigger scope, yes to the feature that will not move a single number. The invoice clears either way. Nobody is lying, nobody is even doing a bad job by their own measure. The measure is just wrong.

I do not want to be an order-taker. I have no interest in picking up a brief I think is wrong, building it competently, invoicing for it and moving on. That is a fine business. It is not the one I am trying to run, and it is not what I want my name attached to in three years when someone asks whether the thing I helped build is still standing.

Diagram · what each payment model rewards
Cash-only incentives versus part-equity incentives A four-row comparison. Paid in cash only: gets paid on hours and scope delivered; more scope means more revenue; success means the invoice is approved; and when the build is wrong, it gets built anyway. Paid partly in equity: gets paid on delivery and on the product working; more scope means more cost with no extra upside; success means the product still working years later; and when the build is wrong, there is a financial reason to say do not build it. PAID IN CASH ONLY PAID PARTLY IN EQUITY PAID ON Hours and scope Delivery and the outcome MORE SCOPE More revenue More cost, same upside SUCCESS IS The invoice clears It still works in three years WRONG BUILD Gets built anyway I lose money if I stay quiet
Nothing here depends on anyone being virtuous. Change what the supplier is paid for and you change what the supplier is willing to argue against.

Take equity and the arithmetic changes. Scope I do not believe in stops being revenue and starts being cost, because every month spent building the wrong thing is a month of my own money going nowhere. Telling a founder to cut a feature, delay a launch or not build something at all becomes the financially sensible thing for me to do. That is the whole point. I would rather be structurally unable to profit from your bad decisions than promise you I am too principled to.

If I only take cash, the worst outcome for me is an awkward conversation. If I take equity, the worst outcome for me is the same as the worst outcome for you.

What this is not.

I want to be straight about the limits, because an offer like this attracts a certain amount of wishful thinking.

  • It is not free work. Most of the fee is still cash. This makes senior help affordable, it does not make it costless.
  • It is not charity, and you should not treat it as such. I am asking for a piece of your company, which is the most expensive currency you own. Dilution is real and permanent.
  • It is not available on everything. Fixed-scope Set Pieces stay cash. Equity applies where I am close enough to the outcome, over a long enough period, to affect it.
  • It is not automatic. I say no to it often, usually because I do not believe the business will be worth more later, and in that case taking your equity would be taking a lottery ticket I did not think would win.

That last one matters more than the rest. Me offering to take equity in your company is information. It means I have looked at the thing and concluded there is a version of this worth owning a small slice of. Me declining is also information, and founders who ask why usually get an uncomfortable but useful answer.

Long-term partner, not vendor.

The honest summary is that I am trying to build a business where I do well because the products I work on do well. Not because I billed enough days, not because I sold a bigger scope than the problem deserved. Every engagement I take on carries my name on the outcome, and there is a limit to how many of those you can get wrong before the name stops being worth anything. Equity is how I put that where you can see it, in the contract rather than in a paragraph on a website.

Founders scraping the bottom of the barrel are not being careless. They are being realistic about what they can afford. I would rather change what they can afford than watch another good idea get built badly by the cheapest team available.

How this works at Product Pieces.

If cash is the thing standing between you and the version of this that actually works, say so early. The free Diagnostic is twenty minutes and will tell you which piece your product function is missing, and whether it is one of the ones I can take partly in equity. If the answer is that you are fine and do not need me, that is a perfectly good outcome too. It is the same twenty minutes either way.