I'm preparing to launch a fantasy sports, rummy, and online gaming app, which is fully built and market-ready.
Instead of traditional paid agency marketing, I'm exploring a performance-driven model:
✅ I want to offer equity to marketing or advertising agencies that agree to run performance campaigns.
✅ They would spend their own ad budget to achieve agreed user acquisition targets.
✅ Once those targets are met, they'd start receiving payment (in addition to equity).
✅ The idea is to reward long-term partners who believe in the potential of the product.
I am looking to build a team for future for below
➡️ SEO
➡️ Influencer Marketing
➡️ Online Advertising, SMM
➡️ Customer Connect - sms, whatsapp, voice, email
My questions are:
Has anyone successfully implemented such a model in India or globally?
Are there agencies in India open to this kind of equity + performance-based deal?
What are the risks or pitfalls I should prepare for (legal, financial, trust-related)?
How should I structure such an agreement to align everyone's incentives?
Long-term, I want to build a collective of such agencies or experts to support other early-stage startups. Is that vision practical?
Would love to hear from those who’ve done performance or equity-based marketing partnerships before.
Unfortunately this will not work in India or globally and you will end up wasting a lot of time dealing with scammers.
A better option is to take on a partner that will handle all the marketing on a full time basis. The partner should get a salary or a commission on each sale and equity in the 5 to 25% range.
Always best to maintain control over critical functions and marketing is one of them. Best of luck.
This issue, like all equity issues in bootstrapped startups, can be solved using the Slicing Pie model. Slicing Pie is a universal formula for splitting equity in an early-stage bootstrapped startup.
What you are describing is a complicated equity scheme. This is unnecessary.
The first step is to determine what performance means, securing a new customer, for example.
Next determine how you would pay for the performance and how much you would pay.
Let's say you offer $100 for each new customer acquired.
Then, just pay the $100 fee. If you don't have the cash you can convert it to slices in the Slicing Pie model.
Slicing Pie treats the unpaid fair market value of contributions ($100 in this case) as "bets" on the future success of the company. Everything that is contributed to a company and not paid for (time, ideas, relationships, supplies, facilities, etc.) is considered a bet.
The bets from each person add up over time. Just as you have not been paid since you started your company, you can calculate how much you haven't been paid.
When the company can pay for contributions the betting stops. At that point you would calculate everyones percentage of the equity based on everyone's percentage of the bets.
This approach gives you an exactly fair equity split because its based on facts and logic instead of guessing.
You can learn all about this at www.slicingpie.com or set up a call with me at www.clarity.fm/mikemoyer
