Co-founder role conflict and equity-before-trust

Pain point

Two flavors of the same underlying problem. (a) Roles were "agreed" verbally but there's no mechanism for who decides what, so every suggestion reads as a territorial incursion — commenters piled on OP as the problem. (b) The flip side: a solo founder wants a marketing partner but is warned "hold off on equity until you've worked together — do a paid trial 60-90 days" and "I wouldn't give up equity to have someone run your Google Ads."

Signal

Moderate-strong — two independent threads (11 and 2 comments), and the advice in thread (3) is the direct remedy for the dysfunction in thread (1), which is a clean problem/solution pairing across threads.

Opportunity

A structured "co-founder trial" product: 60–90 day paid-engagement template with scoped deliverables, a decision-rights matrix (who is Accountable vs. Consulted, per function), weekly checkpoints, and an equity conversion schedule triggered by hit milestones. Sell as a template pack + facilitated onboarding call ($200–500 self-serve; $2k facilitated). Very quick to build — it's documents plus a light workflow app. Natural wedge into a co-founder matching/escrow service later.

Evidence

• co-founder in my marketing decisions
• finding a marketing partner