daiidgo

Actually, if you have multiple owners you really want to have your company appraised on a regular basis (every 6 months if you're beyond a little startup). Reason being, if you should happen to encounter an event that triggers a buyout right of one of your members/shareholders/partners, you want a contractually accepted valuation to control the cost of the buyout. Well planned valuation procedures can really help avoid costly litigation over the value of an ownership interest.

Appraisers can value your company above a billion dollars without you ever taking on an outside investor. If someone does go to invest, they're going to hire their own appraiser (or entire firm of economists) to determine how much your company is worth prior to investing.

Appraisals aren't free, but they have significant long term benefits. Their estimate of your company value tends to be as accurate as any potential investor's estimate (competing biases on other sides of the ideal valuation).

The short answer is no. The long answer is -- wait for it -- it depends. Sorry to have to give such a useless answer.

When investors or competitors are looking at your company and deciding whether they want part or all of what you have, they are going to put together a comprehensive analysis of the value of your company. Meaning, they are going to try and identify each and every asset you hold (physical property, intellectual property, key employees, and company goodwill) and decide what your company is worth. Then they are going to put together an estimate of what your company will be worth in the future.

If your business model includes the use or production of open-source software, then the value of your intellectual property (software copyrights and patents specifically) will probably be lower than if your business was developing/selling proprietary software. Thus, if your business's biggest asset is the software you develop, then your companies value is probably lower by producing software that doesn't produce licensing fees. But potential investors are still going to look at the value of other assets such as whatever key employees you might have on your team. Currently, most business's greatest single asset is their brand (Google is currently biggest with some $150 billion valuation).

To address your hypothetical, if Dropbox's client were open source then anyone could put together a client of their own to use with Dropbox. We'll assume that Dropbox would still produce their own client and charge the same amount for each tier of service. So the question then becomes, does the existence of alternative clients devalue the Dropbox brand, reduce the number of paying users, or allow competitors to poach users that would otherwise choose Dropbox?

In the case of Dropbox I think we can safely assume that the answer to all three questions is an emphatic 'no'. First, Dropbox has plenty of competitors that offer nearly identical products that they developed without the help of the Dropbox client: Google Drive, Apple iCloud, and Microsoft Office 365 to name a few of the bigger ones. An open source client wouldn't have had any effect on the competitiveness of the market. Second, the number of paying users would probably remain the same whether they were using a proprietary client or an open source client, because Dropbox is really charging for a service rather than software license.

Finally, we look at the effect on the Dropbox brand. It is possible, though I would argue unlikely, that if Dropbox allowed developers to freely put together their own clients for use with the Dropbox service that those unlicensed clones would diminish the Dropbox brand value. I think this is an unlikely result because I think that the vast majority of users would stick with the official Dropbox client and ignore the clones. Geeky power users might want to play around with customizable alternatives but they are a tiny niche market. Like most successful products, Dropbox's revenue is driven by average, non-tech-savvy people who just want a simple product that works.

Dropbox's potential is driven by the companies recognizable name, the product's ease of use, and the reputation that the company has built as being reliable and trustworthy. The product itself was never very innovative.

Companies who are developing highly specialized software, or patent-heavy products stand to lose a lot more value by going open source.

If you want to give some specifics about your company I would be more than happy to discuss how you might avoid losing value by going open source.

Here's the quick walk through for posting scores using dynamoDB:

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/amazondynamodb/latest/developergu...

My friend and I recently encountered a similar situation -- we decided to put out a mobile game together, and we have a third friend that we knew was interested in joining the project. He could have given us lots of ideas, but little or no productivity.

My test for deciding if you want to bring an 'idea man' along is this:

Imagine that you and your friend -- the idea man -- work together at a nice day job. You both make a good salary. One day, your boss tells you that he wants to fire your friend (who wouldn't take a pay cut) unless you're willing to take a pay cut. Your have two choices: (1) take the pay cut, or (2) your friend gets fired. How big does that pay cut have to be before you let your friend get fired?

For me, it's less than $1,000/yr. I love my friends dearly, but I'm not going to pay a buddy just to hang out at work and keep me entertained.

Unless your friend's idea is going to make you wealthy enough that you no longer have to work, then you probably don't want to give him 5% of your company just to be your friend.

Several of the comments suggest a social leader board; I think that's a great idea. If you don't want to support Game Center on iOS, maybe a Facebook leader board. You could also set up your score board using Amazon's simpleDB. They support Facebook, Google, and Amazon logins. There's a basic article on that here: http://aws.amazon.com/articles/SDKs/iOS/8829919029640036 Amazon's dynamoDB does more than that, but I can't seem to find the article on high score integration through dynamoDB. Hope it helps, and good luck!

Congrats on the game guys, it's pretty cool. The federal registration on the Marble Drop name was dropped by Maxis back in 2004 (do a Tess2 search on the uspto.gov website). That doesn't mean that they've abandoned all rights to use the name for a mobile game... before you panic and change the name, or just shrug and ignore the coincidence, I would say go talk to a Trademark attorney. I'm sure you can find plenty of them up around MIT (most firms that do patent work will have one or two trademark guys). If you're going to continue to grow with your game, it'll be well worth the money.