What building Tinrate as co-founders instead of contractors taught us about incentives, scope, and shipping.
Most agencies have a simple business model: a client brings an idea, the agency bills hours until the idea is built, and everyone hopes it works out. We run that model too, for the right projects. But for the ideas we believe in most, we do something different. We take equity instead of sending invoices.
Tinrate is the clearest example. It is a marketplace for paid 1:1 expert consultations, now live with 2,000+ vetted experts across business, tech, legal and finance. We built the full product: the marketplace platform, expert search and booking, payments, and the mobile apps. But we did not build it as a contractor. We co-invested alongside the founding team and worked as co-founders.
Hourly billing has a quiet flaw: the agency gets paid whether the product succeeds or not. Nobody says this out loud, but it shapes every decision. More features mean more hours. A longer roadmap means a longer engagement. The incentive points away from the one thing an early-stage product needs, which is ruthless focus on what actually matters.
When we hold equity, that flaw disappears. A feature that does not move activation or revenue is not billable work, it is our own money burning. On Tinrate, that changed real decisions. Payments held in escrow until the call happens, VAT-compliant invoicing for experts, a booking flow that takes two clicks: those made the cut because they directly affect whether an expert gets paid and comes back. Plenty of ideas that would have padded a nice invoice did not make the cut at all.
The difference is not just financial, it is behavioral. As contractors, we would present options and let the client choose. As co-founders, we argue. When we thought something was the wrong call for the product, we said so and pushed, because we would live with the consequence too. That kind of friction is uncomfortable and useful. Founders do not need a vendor who agrees with everything. They need a technical partner who treats the runway like it is their own.
It also changes the timeline mindset. A contractor’s project ends at handover. Tinrate did not end for us at launch. It has been featured in Forbes, HLN and De Tijd, and it keeps expanding with Tinrate Business for teams. We are still there, because our upside is still there.
This model is not free money and we will not pretend otherwise. Equity pays later, if at all. We carry real risk on every incubator project, which means we can only take a few, and we say no to most pitches. We look for founders who bring distribution, domain knowledge, or capital, because product and engineering alone do not make a company.
It also means we are exposed to decisions we do not fully control. As a contractor you can watch a client make a bad call and cash the cheque anyway. As a co-founder, their bad call is your bad call. You have to pick people, not just ideas.
If you have a validated idea and budget, a straight build engagement is often the right structure, and we are happy to do that work. But if you are a founder with strong distribution and no technical team, giving up equity to get a product team that acts like co-founders is usually a better trade than hiring the cheapest agency and managing them from a distance.
The test we apply to ourselves is simple: would we put our own money into this? If the answer is no, we should not be building it on someone else’s money either.
We build websites, software and companies. Tell us which one you need.