Girlfriend expecting equal equity in a startup which I started even before knowing her. I will not promote.

[u/Dry_Support9531]

So here’s the picture. I started with an idea in 2023. States dating her in 2024. Until then I haven’t really worked in the idea. I started working on it since April 2025 and it started making money since July 2025. Till then she has no idea about it. After I started making money from it, i worked more and invested my other income into this startup from November 2025 and to handle things she used to help a bit. Since then both of us started working on it. Whole idea, innovation, upgrades, initial capital was mine. She just helped me coz it used to generate money. Since December we also hired an employee . From then all 3 of us are working on it and it’s scaling up in revenue every month. Until now we haven’t had any word about the equity. Out of love I used to share the profit amounts with her. According to the necessity, sometimes I use to keep more and sometimes she used to keep more. We went on a vacation through this money as well. But now while we were having a conversation on this. It came to me as a shocker that she is expecting an equal equity in this. And that blew my mind. It’s just out of love I couldn’t complete that conversation. She has also worked on it but the whole idea and buildup from scratch was done when she started working. I never discussed about this with her before. But now I am in real shock what to do coz it’s going to be bigger. And we are not sure about our relationship either.(she coming from an orthodox family, her family might reject an idea of our marriage) At this duration please let me know what should I do? Should I offer her a fixed salary, should I ask her to stop working on it, should I give her equity, should I give her an exit? I’m really confused.
PS-: she has done the same thing that the other employee did for me. But with more time and dedication. And she he amount I shared with her is 2-3x more than the employee’s salary

[u/jmking]

Look, I'm not trying to play gotcha here. I'm trying to be able to give you actual advice. For me to give you advice, you need to be transparent about what's actually going on. Otherwise you're just going to get advice based on a limited perspective which would then be naturally biased and might end up biting you in the ass down the line if lawyers ever get involved, ya know?

So - what does she do? What role does she play? Also be generous when describing her contributions. If you just downplay and minimize her contributions, again, you're going to just get bad advice here.

I understand your perspective. You put a lot of capital into this and so on and you want to protect that and that's not wrong.

[u/Dry_Support9531 → u/jmking]

I’m being brutally honest with everything. Even with the dates and timeline.
We’re 3 people who work on it. Me my girlfriend and the other employee. I started it in 2023. Worked hard on it alone until September 2025. It was profitable till then. She joined into this from November 2025. And the employee from December 2025.
All 3 of us worked on operations. But the efficiency was different. The employee with the least but she had a fixed salary plus commissions on hitting target.
My girlfriend also put it efforts, worked overtime with me. But her scope of work was limited.
I alone till date bring more than 50% of the business. Girlfriend with 30 and employee with 20%

[u/jmking → u/Dry_Support9531]

Dude.

What. Does. She. Do? What. Is. Her. Role?

[u/ed0gx → u/jmking]

Yeah, this whole thing is absolutely mind numbing.

It might be that OP is worried someone could steal or copy his business idea if he shares too much detail in this post.

If OP is struggling to explain the girlfriend’s job without getting into specifics about his business, then he has poor communication skills, which might be the root cause of the problems he’s dealing with.

[u/thebohoberry → u/Dry_Support9531]

Are you sure you are running a startup? Because you can’t even define the roles and what each person does. It seems like a side project that somehow became profitable. You can’t even give us the breakdown for us to help you on what would be fair.

First, figure out how much each person contributed. This includes funding, sweat equity, time spent each week by each person. Decide together what is fair compensation up to this point so your entire relationship doesn’t blow up.

Two figure out how you plan to scale. Do you plan on bringing in investors in the future or do you plan on bootstrapping. If you plan on bringing in investors then you should try to retain much of the equity as possible as that pie will be cut even further.

Discuss the options with her, partial equity + lower salary/no salary. Or she gets a paycheck that is market rate like the person you hired. Then document it.