Micro-equity, papered
For a century, work meant wages. But the people who build the future should own a piece of it. GetSweaty makes ownership the default reward for effort, and keeps entrepreneurship human-led while it happens.
Marlow
Seed · Consumer marketplace · Auckland
Finance lead, ready for the raise
Turn a spreadsheet and a folder of receipts into numbers an investor can actually check.
Milestones · equity vests on completion
What we can prove so far
68%
Of professionals surveyed are interested
They want equity for the kind of senior, part-time work this platform is built around. The number is our own, from our own survey of the market we are opening in.
One
Trade completed end to end
A micro-equity trade has already been run all the way through by hand, through Ownourship. The model is not a hypothesis; the software is what makes it repeatable.
September 2026
Launching in Australia and the United Kingdom
A market opens once its paperwork is built. Canada, New Zealand and the United States are next on that list.
How the trade works
Four steps, and the third one is the product. Nothing moves until the agreement is signed.
Describe the work as an opportunity: discipline, required skills, work mode, weekly hours, duration and the equity on offer. Then break it into milestones, each carrying its own slice of that equity.
Experts publish the buyer they have sold into, the disciplines and industries they want, the stages they back, their available hours and an equity floor. Discovery ranks both sides on those structured signals.
Nothing moves until the agreement is signed. The compliance engine generates the option agreement covering the full equity on offer, records the milestone schedule that governs when each tranche vests, and produces the filing pack and deadline schedule for the jurisdiction the company is incorporated in.
Vesting is milestone-based, not time-based. Equity is earned against verified deliverables, so an engagement is a structured ownership arrangement tied to outcomes rather than a time-bounded contract.
Three sides, one trade
Founders prove and broadcast. Experts triage and protect their hours. Investors scan for signal and move.
The job to be done
Prove I am worth a bet, then get warm intros.
You are further along than you feel, but nobody can see it yet. GetSweaty turns your proof of demand into a live profile that does the pitching, so the right operators and investors come to you already convinced.
Match on who they did it for, what they actually ran, and how early they did it. Someone who scaled a team of two hundred is not who you need at eight.
Each tranche has a deliverable and a due date. Time served vests nothing, so work that never lands costs you nothing.
The equity, the milestone schedule and the scope are recorded before any work starts. Nobody is relying on a handshake and a Slack thread.
Contributors hold options, not votes. Bring in several operators without one governance decision changing hands.
The job to be done
Spend scarce hours on the few founders worth it.
You have given away the same advice a hundred times for a flat white and a thank-you. GetSweaty turns that playbook into a cap-table position — founders arrive ranked by fit, terms on the card, papered before the first call.
Requests arrive ranked by fit to your exact expertise. The founder's proof of legitimacy is surfaced first, so you triage in seconds.
The equity, hours, duration and vesting milestone are on the card before you click. No negotiation theatre.
Advise part-time, own long-term. Set your hours, your equity floor, and the milestone the equity vests on, without touching your day job.
Your time is the scarce resource, so the product is built to help you decline. Hold, accept, or decline in one tap, with clean paperwork either way.
The job to be done
See real signal, not a pitch, and move first.
You pattern-match for a living, so you do not need another pitch. Founders here publish their metrics as structured fields, and the operators advising them have taken equity to do it.
You set the sectors, stages, geographies and cheque size. Deal flow is filtered to what you actually write. Nothing is ranked, scored or recommended for you.
Retention, revenue, burn and runway are structured fields with a stated currency and a metrics-as-of date, published before you take the meeting.
The experts advising a company here were paid in its equity, on milestones they had to deliver. What they chose to work on is a fact you can read.
Every equity position here was papered before the work started, with its milestone schedule attached. The trade you back is the trade that holds up.
The operators you cannot afford yet, for equity you can.Turn the playbook you already have into a cap-table position.The team the deck assumes already exists is verified here.
The product
Profiles that do the pitching, opportunities that carry their own terms, and the paperwork that makes each trade enforceable.
Career highlights, primary discipline, industry expertise, availability and the hours you actually have. One profile, three ways to be found.
Problem statement, why now, business model, customer segments, stage, team, incorporation details and the metrics investors ask for first.
Milestone-based roles with equity, hours, duration and work mode stated on the card. Draft, open, matched, completed — the whole lifecycle.
Applications arrive with a cover note and rank against the structured signals you set, so review is triage rather than a slush pile.
Folder-level access control, groups, per-node grants, versioned files and a full audit trail of who opened what and when.
A read-only record on every company profile: the operators who took equity to work on it, the milestones verified, and when each metric was last updated. Founders cannot edit it, which is exactly why it is worth reading.
Conversations with context attached to the opportunity or company they came from, with attachments and read state.
Mobile verification and email confirmation on every account, so the requests in your queue come from people who are real.
Metrics, check sizes and raise targets in the reporting currency that fits, with country-aware discovery.
Our why
For a century, work meant wages. But the people who build the future should own a piece of it. GetSweaty exists to make ownership the default reward for effort, and to keep entrepreneurship human-led while it happens.
First conviction
Cash rents talent by the hour. Ownership aligns it for the whole journey. When effort earns equity, the people building the company are the people who win when it works.
Second conviction
Automation will write the code and draft the deck. It will not carry the conviction, the judgment, or the scar tissue. We build for the operator and the founder — software in service of people, never the other way round.
Questions
A small, defined slice of a company's equity traded for a specific piece of senior work. The percentage is set per engagement and agreed before anything starts, so a founder can bring in several operators without losing control of the cap table.
Three groups. Pre-seed founders who need judgment they cannot afford in cash. Senior operators, usually employed full time, who want startup upside without leaving their job. And investors who would rather read evidence than a deck.
Freelance marketplaces move cash for hours. GetSweaty moves equity for outcomes, and the paperwork that makes the trade enforceable is the product.
The instrument is an option agreement, signed before work starts and covering the full equity on offer. Vesting is milestone-based, not time-based: the opportunity is broken into milestones, each carrying its own slice of the options and its own due date, and that slice vests when the deliverable is completed and verified. Vested options are a right to acquire shares, not shares themselves — they become shares only if they are exercised, which is a separate step under the terms of the agreement.
Price the outcome, not the hours: a role that unblocks a quarter is worth more than a role that fills a calendar. Write each milestone as something the operator delivers and you can verify by looking at it, not as a company result that depends on things outside their control. Vague milestones and unwinnable milestones both end the same way. Whatever you land on is stated on the listing and written into the agreement before work begins.
Only the milestones that were completed and verified vest. The options attached to the remaining milestones lapse, and that equity stays with the company. Both sides hold the same signed record, so there is nothing to argue about later.
We open in Australia and the United Kingdom in September 2026. Join the list and we will write the day your market opens.
Free for founders and experts. Nothing moves until the agreement is signed.