Is it ok to launch Product with brother-in-law help?
I am working in the IT industry in India for the last 15 years and wanted to launch a Product or Service company for so long. My brother-in-law have a successful Point-of-Sale terminal hardware business with awesome sales network. He uses POS software from successful companies in India and wanted me to make a Simple one for him.
His reason is that the POS software are very pricey with high yearly Subscription charges. Even many big Retailers and Restaurant in India, also don't like to pay for software and he losses clients.
He wants to give my software free of charge or little one time fees and will give to the people who don't want the polish and pricey POS.
I started building the software 15 days back and plan to complete soon. I will launch the product with him and later decide on what marketing strategy needed.
POS is a very direct sales model in India and will require his help.
Is it ok to follow this. Feedback needed.
My brother-in-law got a bit uninterested in the project, as he wanted a very polished version. I was also loosing interest, and then i heard a podcast of an open-source Wordpress competitor here on indiehacker and decided to make it open-source. Worked on it very hard for the next 1 month and version 1 is out now.
Launched the product here on indiehacker and hackernews. Will soon launch on product hunt.
https://www.indiehackers.com/product/billing-restro
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20413901
Check the github link and give star if you like it.
https://github.com/nabendu82/BillingRestro
Remove the words "brother in law" and add "stranger" and your view will be very very different on how you see the situation.
Treat everything you do like as if it were a stranger. Sign your legal papers, NDA, License agreements.
Yes you should do this project ,
However..have a legal deal with brother in law...no a handshake deal...make sure you own the software..or at least 51 % of it .
My advice is to also have some code that tells you how much money is earned using YOUR software and where the software is located...also perhaps something that shuts the code off/down if payments are not made to you .
This might not make sense to you so I will give you some examples .
This is important because some restaurant owners will want to base payment on their amount of sales processed..not all business people are trust worthy....and since most POS uses the internet , your software should have a mechanism to notify you of each locations weekly/month sales so you can calculate how much they need to pay you .
This is important because you never know if brother inlaw will double cross you..and copy software...then simply tell you sales are not so good....while he is selling/leasing the pirate copy ....set something up that gives you restaurant locations
This is NOT to say brother in law is not to be trusted , but with business partners..you must
plan for the best..and prepare for the worst .
These 2 things will help you keep an eye on brother inlaw and your money .
let IH know how things go
Thanks for the awesome advice. I am building the POS in React , Prisma and right now might give each user a different web-link, as i have not yet figured out an automation.
So, it will be a bit difficult for anyone to copy right now :)
Why would it not be okay?