I’ve invested 6 months of my time developing a tech product but my cofounder and I have drastically different values. Should I quit now before I get burned?

Interesting problem.

I do think he’s right about one thing: testing is useless until the product is done.

However, that doesn’t mean testing out how people respond just by hearing the idea alone.

If people get exited just by hearing it, you know you’re on the right track.

There’s also a hidden rule when working with other people: get the product out the door ASAP.

Morale is like a time bomb. It ticks very slow at start, but as time goes, it goes faster and faster, until someone is fed up with not having the product in hands. Go tell him to just launch the damn thing. If people don’t like the Mvp, then adding more features won’t even matter.

I totally agree that you should let him be more product-centric. Just providing random ideas will drive you both insane. Let him do sketches (on paper to start with) Simple Photoshop block-outs after. He should do this himself, seeing as that will make his ideas more real. (tell him that)

And good luck. -R

He’s most likely wanting to do patents so you can get investment. So back him on that. Point for him.

He should add enough features to get adoption. Everything else can wait. Point for you.

Ui/ux should be tested first. Make three versions and go out and test them. Take initiative on that. Lead the charge.

The last one is probably due to your inability to understand the business process. He sounds like an opportunist that has multiple targets that can only be streamlined with the ui/ux proof of concept and validation from your market.

Long story short – test the ui/ux, get a customer check, get investors, then build your little heart.

Founders squabble a lot about what to do. It seems in this situation there might be mutual distrust between you. If you don’t want to leave then you have to learn to work together.

It sounds like trust has broken down and you need clearer communication about what you and he are working on in the short-term to meet your long-term goals. It sounds like this would help him to focus and it would also help you to demonstrate to him you are improving the product as much as you claim.

As suggested above, adding a third person/advisor, possibly with greater business experience, domain experience, or to help you technically, would also be sensible to ensure your differences are balanced and that your different perspectives can be debated. Be warned that third person will almost certainly have entirely different opinions and ways of doing thing that wind the other two up. When people are under a lot of pressure, their flaws get accentuated.

Define your core values, individually and as a company.

Define your roles. One of you owns product development, that is, release schedule, feature spec, test plan, etc. The other agrees to defer to the owner on all these things. All of them. You can’t have one person owning the release and another changing the goalposts.

Do the patents if you can. Business people value them way too much but sometimes they are useful for fundraising.

He should QA the project every single day. How can he sell it if he doesn’t know it inside out?

Capture all his scatterbrained ideas and relentlessly prioritize them from the backlog. He’ll be happy because a) you listened and b) he can check if it’s on the roadmap, and you’ll be happy because you won’t actually have to do any of them.

I was in a very similar situation at my last startup. We didn’t do the roles thing and it went badly. If you do one thing do that.