You don't hire people if you can't afford to pay them, holy shit.
"Hi, you mind cleaning my house? I'm a college student so I can't afford to pay you but I might get a job when I'm out of school, so I'll think about paying you then."
What you really are looking for if you are at that "I got an idea but no business plan" stage is investor(s). This could be a bank or one or more people, but these people wouldn't be employees.
Realistically though, you won't proceed with your crackpot idea as you realize "starting a business" is not "finding someone to work for you for free", ie, having them take on all the risk just so you can reap the rewards.
If a trusted friend with a good idea wanted me to "invest" in their software idea, I would be much more willing to invest the time for development than enough money to hire a developer. Especially if I could do that and work.
The context was "bootstrap without investment." The answer is, you don't, you either invest yourself (capital or labor) or you look for investors. You don't "make someone a co-founder," that strongly implies that they are a passive actor, you look for someone willing in invest, you look for someone looking to start a company. You don't have "employment agreements," you have "business partnership."
You don't.
Pay people for their work, or don't hire them. Anything else is at best ethically gray, but almost always bad.
If you aren't generating profits, and want someone to work for you, either:
* borrow the money in your own name
* borrow against your house
* don't bring them on
You're the one creating the risk. You've gotta eat it.
Anything else is massively unethical.
If you're less than 3-5 people and have no money, you're looking for a technical co-founder, not an employee.
I've done say, 1 day a week of dev on the weekend while having a dayjob to get a project started for a share of equity because I liked the project. (So have others I know.)
Just have realistic asks in terms of time/equity trade so people can balance their risk by having other work as well.
People pay them for their products or services, then they take the money so gained and distribute it to their employees in exchange for their work.
My understanding is that this concept has been quite popular historically.
It's almost like people have forgotten how a business works...
(One pitfall however is that some bootstrapped business owners become unreasonably cheap even when there is reason not to be.)
If you don't have operating capital now, what guarantees can you give that you will have x months later?
The former means giving more than you would to an "employee" and giving shares rather than options, and giving them a real say in the business.
The latter means going to people like me who earn well enough from consulting etc. that we can afford to spend some of our time on startups without getting paid in cash fully knowing it's a high risk thing, and who will insist on seeing your cap table and investment prospectus so that we can judge the risk, and who will insist on terms that provides additional security.
Note that in the latter case my first question would be "why haven't you been able to find an investor yet"?
I've talked to people who have had convincing reasons, but I've also talked to people who presented me with investor decks where it took me 5 seconds to see why they'd failed to secure investors.
Personally I don't think devs who are inexperienced with startups should consider those kind of arrangements. For me it's kind-of a fun gamble that I take on the side of making more money than most from my paying clients - I expect most of the won't pay, but that's ok.
Secure financing by convincing someone with money you have a viable business model, then bring people on since you can pay them.
Yeah, it might take a bit longer to reach higher revenues.
You wait until you have the operating income to afford to hire another. Until then, focus on growing your current business.
Two people taking on a third after 6 months would probably not split out 1/3 to the new person, but it should almost certainly be more than 10% and on the same voting terms as all the other equity.
Don't forget that this now gives them a say in further dilution when you want to take on a fourth or fifth, or carve out an option pool etc.
(I've been the "first non cofounder employee" at a startup, but they paid me properly from day 1 with actual money, as well as options on a normal vesting schedule)
"This also isn't one of those startups that is trying to find a developer to do what they can not. We have a fully functioning in house dev team and simply want to move faster. As such, you will also be working alongside one of the leading React developers in the world who will assist you every step of the way."
Go get a business loan. Go get funding. Don't ask others to work to make you rich for free. It's quite disgusting.
Edit: I guess I should have been less ambiguous, I wasn't really talking about an employee/employer situation, I agree all work should be paid for. Now that I think about it more, I guess the scenario I was describing was 1-2 people working on a project, and then getting someone else in their immediate circle (i.e. friend, connection, etc) involved. I guess this person would then be called a co-founder, since they are assuming similar risk as the 1-2 original people. My question was more, how have others structured equity for those people, (co-founders?) who join significantly after inception?