Losing Commandment of Control worth it?

[ALSL]

Hi gang,

I'm working on a project right now with 3 partners. There's no problem here. However, we've recently run into an issue that has made my mind run a bit.

I understand that the commandment of control is very important in your start-up. We recently came into a situation where there could've been a possibility to merge with a potential competitor to create a start-up with a larger amount of partners. However, I saw this as a threat to the commandment of control as they had a different approach and execution method in the same industry/service.

I voiced my concerns and was able to convince the rest of my partners that it would be a terrible idea. In essence, the competitor would offer nothing that was necessary to our group. They would simply be a luxury or a catalyst, something that would allow us to grow faster but not something that was absolutely necessary.

I do not mind sharing more equity with more people as long as those people are necessary for our group. Example: we need a full time developer to join us as a CTO so that we can get a true minimum viable product created.

We're circumventing the current lack of a developer by first:

#1 Head Designer designs landing page.
#2 We pay someone to code our landing page (which should be a small sum of money, worth investing and not much to lose)
#3 Have a coder friend build a referral system script (which he offered to do for free)
#4 Biz Dev to get clients and users during all of this.
#5 Have Head Designer move on to creating all the designs, UI and UX for our minimum viable product.

All of this will accumulate. We should have a large list of high conversion clients ready for our minimum viable product by the time Head Designer is finished designing the MVP. With this, we have leverage to either pay a developer or convince a developer that we're serious and we mean business and offer equity.

All of this can be done by the original founding members. Yes, it may take longer, but at least we maintain 100% control split 4 ways with 4 people that share the same vision.

What do you guys think? Is it worth splitting up more decision-making equity in order to move faster, or should we continue on our way and build our business at our pace and potentially contend with a strong competitor whose members have more experience in general because they've worked in the industry and have their own connections (who may end up being first to market with their service/product)?

(Note: the competitor has the same problem we do: no developer, but they're in talks and may potentially be able to convince a very experienced and powerful [read: already a CEO of his own company and is now trying to find a start-up to join and invest his time in] developer to join them.)

Cheers,
ALSL

 

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