My cofounder/husband is lazy and unmotivated. Sales dropping rapidly.
Hi guys, I'm not quite sure if this sub is the best place for this.
My cofounder is my husband and he's supposed to be the technical cofounder. We quit our jobs a few years ago to start the business, and it did well for a couple of years. We work from home and have a small team who also works from home.
Recently, AI has impacted our business quite a bit (negatively). Despite that, I tried to keep positive and we are starting another venture.
All along, as the technical cofounder, he's responsible for building, while I'm the business and marketing side. However, he is extremely lazy and unproductive, and this used to be fine, but now that sales are dropping rapidly, it's become very difficult. He does not even keep a to-do list (keeps delaying and forgetting deliverables and important milestones we've discussed), does not communicate or lead our team at all (some members of our team have no work and have to beg for work) and lacks basic communication and time management skills. As such, I've had to lead the team and cannot rely on him at all to deliver anything without chasing him regularly..literally being his Todo list. In fact, I've had to ask members of the team to remind him of stuff repeatedly. I've also had to give him hard deadlines...which again, he never respects or abides, just doing whatever he wants, delaying small stuff by months.
Anyone in the saas start up space would likely know that it's important to ship fast. But he takes extremely long and blocks everyone in their respective work streams. Our engineers literally are blocked by him all the time. He doesn't know how to lead them..or maybe he doesn't try.
He spends a disproportionate amount of time treating working time as his personal time, reading articles, spending time on social media. Literally hours in a day.
Seeing that it's not working out, I've even taken it upon myself to even start coding and work on the most technically challenging aspects (yes) and he only works on infra and simple tasks (literally just calling LLM to generate a list of stuff). Even then, he takes weeks or months to review my code for no reason at all and literally drags his feet while working on other stuff on the side that aren't critical. He also ended up delegating those tasks to others, who seemingly complete them in a day or two.
Our sales have dropped to the extent that it might not even be possible for us to continue this business. This is despite the fact that our new venture is extremely forward looking and has great product market fit.
I'm honestly at a loss. He's my husband, so I'm not sure what to do here. Has anyone dealt with such a cofounder before?