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As someone who has made a modest business around helping people find technical cofounders, let me share some things that tend to make it EASY to find one. 1. Y
by dyeje 3y ago
As someone who has made a modest business around helping people find technical cofounders, let me share some things that tend to make it EASY to find one.
1. You're an expert in the domain.
2. You've done significant work to prove out the idea already. This can be a variety of things. You've already made mock ups or a prototype. You've interviewed a bunch of potential customers and organized your thoughts. Best possible thing is you've already acquired customers ready to pay.
3. You have a clear, grounded vision of what the product needs to be now and a grand, compelling vision of what the product could be in the future.
4. You can articulate what type of project this is clearly (venture backed biz? lifestyle biz? funky idea that has no intention of making money?) and what sort of working relationship or culture you'd like as it grows.
As someone who has founded before and spent time on YC cofounder matching, most people have vague ideas in domains they don't understand with no prospective customers and put no effort into validating the idea. So they try to offload the cost of validating the idea onto some engineer by building it (building, btw, being the most inefficient method of validating).
- GianFabien 3y ago> ... most people have vague ideas in domains they don't understand with no prospective customers and put no effort into validating the idea. Brilliant summary! BTW what would you consider to be the best method of validating ideas?
- dyeje 3y agoIt depends on the product. Most of my experience is in B2B, for that I recommend building a clickable prototype in Figma or another tool. If you can get 3 customers to sign contracts based on that, the idea has potential.
- karmakaze 3y agoAnother key one I would add is an appreciation of what a technical co-founder brings. They're not just there to manage devs to realize your brilliant idea. Success is "99% perspiration" and that goes all-around--aka ideas are a dime-a-dozen.
- timeagain 3y agoI was going to write these points but in reverse. I’m an outgoing engineer in Seattle and I find myself to be a bit of a lightning rod for “just hear my app idea out” types. Invariably every bar-top pitch I hear breaks down on just the points you mention. - there is no clear vision of how the app addresses a real world, widely experienced problem. - “how are we going to make money” should be a really easy-to-answer question for a founder, but not in my experience. - there is a weird obsession with a tech stack that they obviously know nothing about. More vaguely, requirements they describe are at the wrong level of abstraction for an “ideas person” - they are way more likely to vomit more and more “potential” user experiences than to have a solid understanding of the core experience, like a PM from the pits of hell itself. - As an engineer I can smell a salesman from a mile away. My brain works in logical steps and bottom-up, so grand-design sales pitches fall flat on their face. The people who pitch apps tend to be salesmen to the bone. Don’t sell it to me, motivate me to work with you—you want me to make it, not to use it. I’m not against the idea of helping someone make an app, but I’ve never found someone with a compelling idea. My normal constructive critcism is that they should get their pitch clear enough that they could convince a bank to give them a loan. These types of people somehow think they can wrangle an engineer, but most aren’t delusional enough to think they can cheat the bank.
- busterarm 3y agoWhat worries me about these types of folks too is that they usually find an under-experienced engineer who has just enough chops to build out some MVP but not follow things through to completion. They then invariably string this person along through build out and then find a way to cut them out and bring on a real technical cofounder.