I am building a marketplace that is composed of bloggers and writers as the supply side of the marketplace. My target is to acquire at least 400 of them before Sept 2015. My idea is to offer stock options to the first 5 (say 5000 shares each out of a million shares of the company). I can ask them to bring another 20 bloggers each, to whom I can award 500 shares each. The rest of the later bloggers will have 100% return on revenue generated by them in the first 3 months after the launch. Can anybody help me refine my intuition? Thanks!
Writers write for various reasons:
Mercenaries ... for money;
Marketers ... for publicity;
Narcissists ... for vanity;
Intellectuals ... for curiosity;
Activists ... for influence.
In any of one of us, these motives are mixed in varying proportions.
Stock options target the first of these. But it's just not very enticing. Why would a mercenary work for a deferred payment that's so uncertain when cash jobs are all over the place? Also, once a writer has signed up for a piece of your pie, their incentive is to let other writers contribute while they sit back and wait for a reward.
Nah. Look at the other motives.
