Why We Capped
Our Rev Share at A$250k.

I want to walk through why we made the choices we made when we priced Quokkacorn, and why the single most important number in our pricing isn’t 12%, isn’t $0 equity, isn’t even the A$3k MRR threshold. It’s the cap.

The founder I saw get trapped

Picture a founder I’ll call M. She’s a sales operations leader. Eighteen years in B2B software, three Series-B revenue orgs scaled under her belt. She had a brilliant product idea that her old peer group would buy tomorrow: something the existing CRMs were too generalist to do well.

Because she was non-technical and didn’t want to waste 12 months hunting for a co-founder, she partnered with a venture builder that offered what sounded like a dream deal at A$0 MRR: no upfront fee, zero equity, and a simple 20% revenue share in perpetuity. No risk, right?

They built the product. She launched. The business took off—really took off. By month nine she was at A$1M ARR. By year three, she was hitting A$10M ARR.

“The partner that helped her get off the ground had become the boat anchor that stopped her from ever scaling.”

But that’s when the dream deal became a nightmare. The venture builder was taking A$2M a year off her top line. Forever. Her gross margins were completely shot because of a single P&L line item. When she tried to raise a Series A to scale, institutional VCs wouldn’t touch her cap table or P&L because of that permanent royalty. When an acquisition offer came in, it was dead in the water for the same reason.

I watched this unfold from the sidelines, and it was painful to see. It was the catalyst that changed how we thought about venture structures. When we built Quokkacorn, we resolved that our model had to be different.

Two pricing extremes: both fail

There are two dominant pricing models for “we’ll help you build your company” offers, and they both fail at the extremes.

Equity-based deals (accelerators, technical co-founders, equity-for-services) fail at the low end. If the company doesn’t take off, the founder is left with a messy cap table that makes any pivot, side project, or fresh start hard. Investors at the seed stage hate seeing a 7% line for an accelerator that delivered nothing. Co-founders who ghosted three months in are now permanent fixtures on the documents.

Perpetual royalty deals fail at the high end. The deal that looks fair at A$0 MRR (“you only pay if you grow!”) becomes a margin-destroying tax on growth that, in the worst cases, blocks the founder from ever raising or being acquired.

Both models also miss the same thing: founders aren’t a single person. They’re a person who needs to fail cheap if it doesn’t work, and keep the upside if it does. A pricing model that doesn’t accommodate both states is just a bet against the founder dressed up as a partnership.

What we wanted our deal to actually do

When we redesigned, we wrote down three things we wanted the deal to accomplish, and we tested every number against them:

• The cost stays small until you’re winning. If the founder can’t get past a meaningful revenue threshold, the deal cost them a subscription (not equity, not a five-figure agency bill, not 40% of nothing). They walk away with their shirt on.
• We earn meaningfully when you’re growing. In the middle of the journey (when the founder is at A$10k–A$50k MRR, working hard, but not yet a unicorn), we get paid like a real partner through the rev share.
• We get out of the way when you outgrow us. If the company becomes the thing it was always meant to become, we don’t drag on the cap table, the P&L, or the acquisition. We hit our number and the rev share ends.

The actual price ladder, in plain language

Before the math, the model in one paragraph. Validation and scope are free. When you’re ready to build, Builder is A$149/mo for a pre-revenue venture. Once the venture is live and we’re running the managed economics, you’re on Pro at A$399/mo. Quokkacorn takes a 1.5% platform transaction fee on processed venture revenue from the first customer payment.

Separately, the rev share is 12%, but only after you cross both A$3k MRR and 5 paying customers, and it caps at A$250k or 36 months, whichever comes first. The 1.5% platform fee does not count toward that cap. After the cap, the rev share ends and you roll to flat Alumni hosting, which is tiered to your scale: A$299/mo under A$500k ARR, A$799/mo from A$500k to A$2M, A$1,999/mo above that. Zero equity at any tier. You keep your brand, your domain, your code, your customers.

Walking the math, three ways

What the 36-month clause means

The cap is “A$250k or 36 months, whichever first.” It exists because the rev share is designed to be the building relationship, not a permanent one.

If a venture takes off fast, the A$250k cap is what bounds our take. If a venture grows slowly and never crosses the cap, the 36-month clock is what gives the founder a clean exit from the rev-share clause anyway. Either way, three years from launch is the maximum window where 12% applies. After that, we’re on flat hosting only.

The buyout clause: for when you want to raise a Seed

There is one more piece of the model that founders ask about every time, so it’s worth saying out loud. If you want to raise a seed round before you’ve fully paid out the cap, you can pre-pay the remainder. The number is 24× your last month’s rev-share payment (roughly two years of rev share at your current run-rate). There’s no premium, no penalty, no opaque “fair value” calculation we get to invent.

Why this matters: most royalty-style models don’t give you an exit clause. They want the trailing royalty for as long as they can hold onto it. We think a founder should be able to walk into their seed pitch with a clean cap table, and the buyout clause is how that happens.

Why VCs will actually prefer this to an accelerator

I’ve had three different early-stage VCs in Australia tell me, off the record, that they prefer seeing a Quokkacorn line item on a P&L over seeing an accelerator on the cap table:

• It’s finite: A time-bound commitment that ends.
• It’s balance-sheet, not cap-table: All of it sits cleaner because we’re not in their structure.
• It’s transparent: No information rights, no board observer seat, no consent rights. The founder is in charge.
• The founder kept their equity: Which means they are aligned for the seed journey ahead.

We modeled the deal after the kind of arrangement a seasoned founder negotiates with a friend who lent them startup money. Finite, fair, structured for both failure and winning, and easy to close out when the time comes.