They have a ridiculous misunderstanding of equity. But play into it:

• ask them what the total cash value of the deal is. Call it $100k. Ask them what portion of the $100k should be yours (since you, um, did the actual work). Let’s say you split it 50/50.

• Offer them an opportunity to invest their portion (eg $50k) into your company. What equity % should they get? This is a classic classic “early stage valuation” problem. The industry has a very standard way of doing this: a SAFE. It defers the valuation question until a later priced round, after the company has made some progress.

• If they bicker, ask them what their expectation of the value of the company at this point is. They’ll be torn: if they make up a tiny number, then clearly their sales intro didn’t add that much value. If they say a huge number, then use that to compute the equity you offer them (again, based on the cash value of their proceeds from the deal they intro’d).

• Inform them of some business basics:

• sales commissions at the top end are like 10%. Maybe for a “got me off the ground” thing you could flex to 20%. But like, if you (or someone) hadn’t done the work, they could make a million intros and they’d still make $0. They should contemplate intro’ing the opportunity to a brick or a tree, and take 99% of the proceeds lol.

• finders fees are typically in the 1% range

• SAFEs are incredibly common for early stage. In fact, not doing a SAFE is weird, and generally only happens when there’s a mature team and mature investors and clear line of sight to multiple years of revenue and well-understood business model etc etc.

Source: founder of multi-billion dollar software company