My MVP is already gaining traction. Should I hire a partner to speed things up?

I started my solo startup and launched my MVP over a year ago. I developed everything, both backend and frontend.

My product is a social site that already gained traction. Currently hitting 20,000 daily visitors, 500+ daily signups. Quite an increase from 300 daily visitors 5 months ago.

But I’ve been losing a bit of momentum lately. So I’m wondering if I should hire a partner to help me develop some of the new features. Is it best to hire a partner? I’m still not making money so I would have to pay equity. Is 10% equity enough?


  • Why do you need a partner? Before you answer this question, list the weakness you have, the problems you are facing, what takes you to move ahead…etc. then list what the partner can do for you. Keep in mind that a partner can help your business and also can ruin your business. Finding a partner is another challenge. It is not the point of equity, 10% of nothing is still nothing.

  • I was in a similar situation with my startup, which was stagnating. I got a co-founder which helped tremendously, but in terms of the workload and also we tended to bounce ideas off each other and kept each others spirits up when things went wrong.

    If you think about it, most successful startups had at least two founders. It’s hard to make it as a solo founder.

    • I think the partner would be more beneficial to keep me sane.

      With the success on the MVP, I’m now finding out that I have a lot more work to do to improve user engagement. And this gives me anxiety sometimes.

      I actually met someone who quit his job and is starting his own tech startup. He seems nice and highly technical like me. So I think he would be good fit working with me.

      How did you guys split share? The thing is, my product is complete. All I need is help in new features.

      • Well my company wasn’t generating any revenue and it’s hard to ask someone to come work full time with you for no pay so we did a 49/51 split with me owning majority control. He could have went to work for a company and got paid but he chose to help me so I felt it was right to give him that percentage.

  • Curious how did you go from 300 daily visitors to 20000?

    What things you tried , how were you thinking about it? What worked ?

    • My site is already over 1 year old. So that 300 to 20,000 daily users did not take overtime. And my site pivoted several times. I initially created a platform similar to reddit. But now my site looks more of a social network focusing on people’s profile.

      I have a wide target demographics since I’m aiming to build a social network.

      To get initial traffic, I researched what teens search online in the past 30 days. Then I posted Q&A posts on my site about all of those topic and answer it myself. I also posted links to my sites FB page, G+, Twitter and some of the bookmarking sites.

      After 3 months, one of the Q&A post got #1 on google. I posted more Q&A related on that topic. And all of those posts are hitting top of google ahead of Yahoo Answers. So my traffic started to skyrocket.

      Then I pivoted my site based on what visitors look for in my site. And hundreds started creating their own profile on my site.

      Getting traffic is just part of the problem, conversion is the main purpose! So how can I make these people signup? My site is well designed so people will signup. And it’s gonna be long to explain here. I spent a lot of time analyzing my visitors psychology.

      Also the site should be easy to use. My site is fast and looks good on any devices. Actually most of my traffic are mobile. Everyone is on their mobile. So aim for mobile users! I’m also using FB/G+ oauth login so people can easily signup. And a lot of my members comes from FB login.

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