From first commit to first payout
NovumStartup is the operating system for small founding teams: it records who actually built the thing, turns that record into equity everyone can see, and splits the money when it arrives. Here's the whole journey.
Set up your pod
A pod is your team — the people sharing credit and revenue in what you build together. Create one, invite your co-founder by email, and start a project inside it. The dashboard checklist walks you through every step.
Agree on the terms once
A short setup wizard captures the things co-founders usually argue about later: who invented the project (they earn a reserved cut), how the four contribution pillars are weighted, and whether early building-phase work counts extra. Prefer handshake percentages? Switch the project to fixed splits and type them in.
Track the work — mostly automatically
Log hours manually, run the timer, or connect the editor extension and AI-coding-tool hooks so coding time records itself. Finished tasks, approved expenses, and verified business wins all count too. There's no separate “report your work” step.
See your equity from day one
The scoring page shows every member's share of the team pool immediately — not after months of history. Early numbers wear a “Provisional” badge while confidence builds, but 100% of the pool always splits proportionally by what the data shows. Zero data? The split is simply equal.
Close the period, ratify, get paid
When revenue arrives, costs are repaid first, the pod-owner and inventor cuts come out, and the team pool splits by contribution. Turn on Period Close and the split becomes a signed decision first: everyone with money at stake reviews the numbers and signs before an invoice can go out — and the paid invoice uses exactly the percentages everyone ratified.
The part that keeps co-founders friends
Most equity fights aren't about greed — they're about surprise. NovumStartup removes the surprise: the split is visible while the work happens, provisional numbers are labeled as such, and when money is about to move, Period Close turns the split into a document everyone signs. Typed name, content hash, timestamp. Nobody discovers their percentage after the fact.
Want the math behind the scores? How scoring works breaks down the four pillars, the weights, and a worked example.
FAQ
What does the “Provisional” badge mean?
It means a member hasn't been active long enough for a statistically confident score — nothing more. Provisional members receive their full proportional share from day one; the badge is honesty labeling, not a payment gate. It disappears as tracked history accumulates.
Do we have to use Period Close?
No — it's an opt-in toggle per project. Without it, paid invoices split by the live computed shares. With it, invoices can't be sent until everyone with money at stake has signed the proposed split, and the payout uses the exact frozen percentages they signed.
What if the computed split is wrong for one period?
The pod lead can edit the percentages inline while proposing a Period Close review — a one-time manual override. It's loudly labeled for every signer, it still requires everyone's signature, and it never changes the project's settings. The next proposal recomputes from tracked data.
Does NovumStartup hold or move our money?
Client payments go to your project's connected Stripe account, not to us. Member payouts are settled directly by the project owner — bank transfer, Stripe dashboard, however your pod pays — and recorded in NovumStartup so everyone sees what's owed, what's been paid, and the receipt trail.
Can someone game the scores?
The model is built to resist it: heartbeat tracking is validated and capped at ingestion, overlapping editor sessions never double-count, business-development wins need a second member's verification, and every pod member can see the underlying entries. Consistency beats heroics by design.