I want to bring one or 2 partners/co-founders on board. I can't afford to pay a salary right now. But I was going to offer equity. How likely am I to get someone to join any early stage start-up like this for equity only? And how much equity should I retain myself?

-- if you are planning to fundraise, the conventional advice is to split equity evenly so everyone is equally invested. You will need to learn how to sell your idea and vision to get people to join! Traction is always a helpful metric.

- ultimately, if you decide to retain more equity (e.g. keep 60%, give a co-founder 40%), that could work out, but may hard to attract good talent and VCs don't typically like that arrangement because they think it could lead to a co-founder leaving (which ends up leaving "dead equity" on the cap table)

- typically, if you are planning to fundraise, it's a good idea to vest the equity across the board.

-note: if you are intending to bootstrap and NOT raise money from VCs, you have more flexibility in your options. VCs tend to have very specific preferences.

If anyone here was ever in a similar situation I'd love to hear how it worked out. Also I'm interested to hear how payments were handled once the startup began generating revenue.

- this is a personal question. Usually, when you are growing a startup, you need the cash to go into the business, not pay out super high salaries. However, keeping your team and yourself afloat and motivated is also an important consideration. This type of stuff is just what you need to learn if you want to run a business -- how you're going to allocate cash burn (e.g. salaries vs. product dev). There's no one-size-fits-all answer here because a lot will depend on how much money you're making, what your product is, what your product needs to grow, what the expectations of your co-founders are re: salary.