With the limited information that we have:
What is your personal cash situation like? How long can you maintain your life style without drawing a salary? I could probably last a year doing this full time without taking on any other work I am assuming you are not sitting on a huge pot of cash if you are looking for investors.
How long will it take the company to become profitable? I don't know but we're projecting one year Do you plan on taking distributions instead of salary? In a perfect world we would like to take a small salary against future distributions Will you need to make a proportionate distribution to your new partners? When the company is healthy enough for a distribution, yes When do you project that the company will be adequately capitalized so that you can start taking profits from cash flow? 2-3 years? This is a very important point because I see companies all the time take every dime out of the business then when something goes wrong they fold. This is a huge no no.We agree on that, everyone understands what the goal is and that is to build it and probably sell it or go public
Without knowing much about the business some other general questions: How many employees? None, there are four of us who have been doing all of the work.If revenue ramps up are you going to need additional head count? Probably a few but the way things are structured most labor will be contracted, (ramp up/ramp down)lean and mean. Remember that you generally have to hire prior to realizing the income boost and non owners don’t work for free. Are you going to have any CAPEX needs coming up this year/next year/next five years.Depends on our success, but not this year Remember for new companies cash is king!
I would be interested to hear more about what type of business this is. Here is what I'll say on a message board: It's a game changer, it will revolutionize a business segment and it will be an ongoing thing where we will become a patent machine, yes we've done the homework in that regard, yes we have a well known patent attorney working for free in exchange for a small percent. The argument/opinion that we have heard is it's still a risk and since we've made no money up to this point even though the work is done and everyone that has seen it has said "It's Amazing!" everyone is "vulturing" us. Seriously, for less than a million we can be to market and have a suitcase full of patents that any company in this industry will pay over a billion dollars to control, there are plenty of precedents and examples that back this claim. We don't know a lot of VC, Angel or Investment Groups so our pool of contacts is not so deep but I have to think there is a better deal out there but it's technology, we have to move. So the two "deals" that have been proposed to us are pretty similar, 3-450 thousand for 20% or 1.25MM for 50%. 3-450 will get us to market and maybe a handful of patents 1.25 gets us to market and a suitcase of patents and we can all draw a 50-60k salary.