Tech · Dublin
€400k business, no exit clause
Two friends built a SaaS to €400k ARR. One wanted to sell at year three. The other refused. They had never discussed it. The dispute lasted 14 months and cost €38,000 in legal fees before settlement.
Pre-incorporation check · Ireland
The conversations founders avoiduntil it's too late.
Most Irish business partnerships don't fail because of bad markets or bad luck. They fail because of conversations that were never had — about equity, exits, money and decision-making. PartnerReady surfaces them in ten minutes, before you sign anything.
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Partnership Risk ReportHigh overall
Sarah & Tom · Dublin
Generated · sample preview
Equity & OwnershipMedium
Exit & BuyoutHigh
Money & SalaryMedium
IP & AssetsHigh
Hidden risk: "You appear aligned operationally, but there are signs of long-term ambition mismatch."
65%
of Irish co-founder partnerships hit a serious dispute within 3 years
€15k–€100k
typical legal cost when a partnership unwinds badly
<10%
have a signed shareholders agreement before incorporating
10 min
to surface what most never get around to discussing
The pattern
The 5 disputes that end most Irish partnerships
They are remarkably consistent across SaaS, services, retail and family businesses. They are also entirely predictable.
Money: salary vs reinvest
One partner needs cash from the business. The other wants every euro reinvested. Year two becomes unbearable.
Commitment: full-time vs part-time
One quits the day job. The other doesn't. The full-time partner builds quiet resentment for 18 months, then explodes.
Exit: someone wants out
There's no buyout mechanism. No agreed valuation. Suddenly your business is a hostage negotiation.
Decision deadlock at 50/50
Equal shareholders, equal votes, no tie-breaker. Every disagreement becomes existential.
IP ownership disputes
A founder leaves. The code or content they built was never legally assigned to the company. The remaining founders panic.
How it works
Three steps. About ten minutes. Built for Ireland.
No signup. No legal jargon. Designed to give you something you can actually share with your partner, your accountant, and your solicitor.
01
Answer 20 questions
About your partner, equity, salaries, exits, IP and how decisions get made. Plain language. Built for the Irish legal context.
02
Get your Risk Report
Personalised flags across six categories — with concrete actions, conversation prompts, and topics to raise with a solicitor.
03
Have the right conversations
Before you incorporate. Before you sign a shareholders agreement. While the partnership is still healthy enough to fix things.
The patterns we see again and again
How Irish founder partnerships actually break.
Not the stories told at conferences. The ones told in solicitors' offices, eighteen months after a handshake that everyone remembers slightly differently.
1 in 3
Irish co-founder splits happen in year two — the year most agreements were never written for.
62%
of early-stage partnerships have no written exit terms when the first founder considers leaving.
#1
Equity and decision-rights disputes remain the leading cause of early-stage company collapse in Ireland.
0
is the number of founders, in our interviews, who said the conversation was easier after incorporation than before.
Directional benchmarks compiled from CRO dissolution data, interviews with Irish solicitors and mediators, and PartnerReady's own anonymised diagnostic data. Treat them as patterns, not precision.
What founders usually discover too late
The same six themes. Every time.
Drawn from interviews with Irish solicitors, mediators and founders who've been through it. The conversations are always the same. The pain of having them after the fact is always greater than having them before.
Equity"We never agreed what 'fair' actually meant — until one of us did 80% of the work for two years."
Exit"We didn't think we'd ever want to leave. One of us did. There was no buyout mechanism."
Money"We didn't agree a salary policy. One of us was burning savings. The other had no idea."
Decisions"We were 50/50. Every serious disagreement became a stalemate."
IP"Half the code was written before incorporation. We never assigned it to the company."
Ambition"One of us wanted a lifestyle business. The other wanted to raise and scale. We weren't building the same company."
Real-world breakdowns
What it actually looks like when these conversations don't happen.
Composite cases drawn from Irish practice. Names and details changed; patterns identical.
Agency · Cork
Technical co-founder leaves at month 18
The IP assignment was never signed. The remaining founder discovered the platform was technically owned by the leaver, not the company. The company nearly collapsed before a buyout was negotiated under duress.
Retail · Galway
Salary asymmetry, two-year fuse
Both founders agreed to draw nothing for year one. Year two arrived. One had savings; the other had a mortgage. Resentment, then mediation, then a forced buyout at a number neither wanted.
Start your free check
Three minutes. Five questions. No payment.
What we check
Six categories. Twenty questions.
The six areas where Irish founder disputes consistently start. The same map a solicitor would walk you through — without the meter running.
🏛️
Equity & Ownership
Who owns what, and why?
🚪
Exit & Buyout
What happens if someone wants out?
💰
Money & Salary
Who gets paid, and when?
🧠
Decision Making
Who has final say?
⚖️
IP & Assets
Who owns what you build?
🤝
Commitment & Roles
Is everyone pulling equally?
Founder archetypes
Which kind of founding partnership are you?
The dispute pattern is shaped by who you are to each other before you became co-founders. Recognising the archetype helps you ask the questions that match your actual risk profile.
Friends starting a business
Highest risk: assuming friendship will resolve future disputes.
Technical + commercial founder
Highest risk: undervaluing the non-technical contribution after launch.
Family business expansion
Highest risk: blurred lines between family loyalty and business decisions.
Investor + operator
Highest risk: misaligned incentives on growth pace and exit timing.
Experienced + first-time founder
Highest risk: information asymmetry on equity, vesting and exit norms.
Find your archetype's risk profile
The check tailors flags and conversation prompts to your specific partnership shape.
Honest test
Questions you probably haven't asked each other yet.
Read each one in your head. If you don't have a precise, mutually-agreed answer, that's the conversation worth surfacing now.
01
What happens if one of us wants to sell in three years?
02
What's our salary policy if revenue is half what we hope?
03
Are we both committing full-time from day one — same hours, same urgency?
04
What happens to equity if one of us leaves at month nine?
05
Who has final say when we genuinely disagree on a major decision?
06
What if one of us wants outside investment and the other doesn't?
07
Whose IP is the work we did before incorporation, legally?
08
What happens to our friendship if the business fails?
From the legal side
What a solicitor wishes you'd discussed first.
We interviewed Irish solicitors who handle founder disputes and shareholder agreements. The same six items appear on every wish list.
Solicitor topic
A documented buyout mechanism
Including how the company is valued, who has right of first refusal, and the notice period.
Solicitor topic
A vesting schedule
Standard is a 1-year cliff with a 4-year vest. Without it, a founder leaving at month nine keeps their full equity forever.
Solicitor topic
IP assignment for every founder
Especially for any work created before the company was incorporated. Without it, the company doesn't legally own its own product.
Solicitor topic
A casting-vote or deadlock clause
Equal shareholders without one will deadlock on the first major disagreement. Mediation costs €5k–€15k. Casting vote costs nothing.
Solicitor topic
A salary and dividend policy
Even one paragraph. The number of partnerships destroyed by unspoken expectations about money is staggering.
Solicitor topic
Cross-option insurance
If a founder dies or becomes incapacitated, this is what stops the surviving partners running the business with the deceased partner's spouse.
The economics
What founder disputes actually cost in Ireland.
€5,000 – €15,000
Mediated dispute resolution
€15,000 – €60,000
Solicitor-led negotiation & buyout
€60,000 – €250,000+
Litigated dispute through the courts
PartnerReady costs €49.
The cheapest meeting you'll have before the expensive ones. And the only one designed to stop the expensive ones from happening at all.
The hard truth
Why verbal agreements don't survive contact with reality.
Memory drifts. Predictably.
Two people in the same kitchen agreeing the same words walk away with two different understandings. Eighteen months later, those two understandings have hardened into two different stories. The paper is what stops both stories from being equally valid.
In Ireland, the default isn't yours.
Without a shareholders agreement, you fall back on the Companies Act 2014 and your CRO filing. Those rules are designed to be neutral — not to reflect what you actually agreed. The default rules are almost never what small founders would have chosen.
What founders say
Built for the conversation. Trusted before the solicitor.
"We thought we'd talked about everything. We hadn't talked about three things that mattered. Doing this before our solicitor meeting saved us at least an hour of billable time and probably a year of friction."
Aoife Brennan
Co-founder, Greenfield Studios · Dublin
"Cheaper than a coffee with my solicitor — and more useful as a starting point. The action checklist alone is worth the €49."
Ronan O'Sullivan
Founder, Blackrock Trades · Cork
"My business partner and I sat down for two hours after this. We came out with our actual roles defined for the first time in nine months."
Niamh Walsh
Co-founder, Atlantic Health Co. · Galway
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- All 20 questions, all 6 categories
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FAQ
Questions founders ask before they start.
No. PartnerReady is a preparation and conversation tool. It helps you identify risks and gaps before you engage a solicitor. It is not legal advice and does not replace a shareholders agreement or legal counsel.
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