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I'm always looking for a co-founder, whether I'm the geek or the suit. When a suit approaches me to be the geek for their idea, I usually give them some simple

• deleted 14y ago
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• Swizec 14y ago
  Isn't 5000 emails a bit steep to ask for in a day or even a week? A conversion rate of 5% is pretty respectable, that means the landing page needs to be seen by 100k people to collect 5000 emails. That's quite a bit for having nothing more than a landing page to offer, I can see that happening for a MVP, but not for just a landing page.
  • Evbn 14y ago
    A post on Reddit, HN, etc, can get plenty of views for an interesting idea.
    • irishcoffee 14y ago
      I'm kind of curious what the 'etc' are to which you refer?
      • aerique 14y ago
        Websites specific to the niche you're targetting or well known sites in the native language of the target audience. Perhaps Twitter or more closed communities like Something Awful.
    • Swizec 14y ago
      Yeah, but it can't get that many. Not for a landing page. Being #1 on HN for a few hours will bring you 20 to 30k views (cumulative with getting up and drifting back down). The reddit frontpage frontpage will get you the amount of views you need, but you're not getting there, I can almost promise you that.
    • SoftwareMaven 14y ago
      Views are not email addresses. Worse, views are not real people expressing real interesting (e.g. would pay or be willing to change their habits) in your product. Views are a pretty meaningless indicator, overall.
      • tobyjsullivan 14y ago
        I think the point was the parent post was saying you'd need 100k views w/ a 5% conversion which would be challenging. Evbn was saying reddit could get the 100k views.
        • SoftwareMaven 14y ago
          I think you are completely correct. I think @evbn is, well, not wrong, because you can get the 100k views. I just don't think those views are going to net your (incredibly high) 5% conversion. The value of a view from a bored redditor is generally less than the value of a well-earned, targetted view.
  • cstejerean 14y ago
    It is quite a bit to get from a landing page, but I think that's the point. If something can get 5000 people on a mailing list in 1 day then it shows that there's a strong interest in the idea, so it's worth investing time in developing it further.
    • Swizec 14y ago
      Man, if you can get 300 in a single day, you have my attention!
      • adambenayoun 14y ago
        I got 300 in 1 hour - I used HN! :D
        • Swizec 14y ago
          Well congratz to you sir!
• daemon13 14y ago
  Why spent everyone's time? Usually it is clear from the beginning what people are made of and the quality of their thinking. Just say "No, thanks, good luck" and in 99,999% cases your decision will be the right one.
  • jyu 14y ago
    Making decisions based on conventional wisdom prevents you from "farming black swans." By asking the other person to do some basic tasks, they're at least passing the equivalent of fizzbuzz in execution ability and motivation.
• startupfounder 14y ago
  I am also always looking for a co-founder. When a geek approaches me (or I approach them) to be the suit for their project, I usually give them some simple soft skill to do - like go out and talk to potential customers and get feedback from say 500 in a day. Finally, before I even consider hustling customers and investors I want some paltry measure of ability. If you can hack something together in 24-48 hours or even a week, then they're quality geek co-founder material. Any longer and it's a judgement call. Most won't get past step one, and you certainly didn't want them as a co-founder. I have learned this the hard way. I raised money only to find out my tech co-founder couldn't push code in a timely manner. This street goes both ways and that is why teams of 2 work best, one to build it and one to sell it to the world. The question for me is, can the geek cut it?
  • cstejerean 14y ago
    Talking one-on-one to 500 customers in one day to get feedback doesn't seem possible. If you only spend 5 minutes talking to each customer, and you have them lined up back to back so you don't waste time in between, it would still take 40+ hours. I guess you could do 1 minute conversations and get it down to about 8 hours, although even assuming you can get 500 people to queue up for this, I'm curious what will come out of 500 x 1 min. back to back conversations. It seems to me that the only useful way to get feedback from 500 people in one day involves sending out some kind of survey. Then again this isn't really my area of expertise, so I'm curious, how would you go about gathering feedback from 500 people in one day?
    • carbocation 14y ago
      The entire post was a satirical response to the GP comment. It was meant to show how, depending on your point of view, the same logic can be applied to either the tech or the business side and maybe even "look good" but seem unreasonable to those on the other side of the table. Not saying I am in full agreement, but it's pretty clearly the purpose of the parent comment.
      • hosh 14y ago
• claudeshannon 14y ago
  Any early stage startup where there's so much polarization between geeks and suits at the outset is in trouble. Basically geeks need to learn to sell and suits need to learn to code. I could elaborate on this in a longer post. But I have to go back to working on some new channel capacity ideas. Stay tuned.
  • Evbn 14y ago
    HN has novelty accounts now?
  • danielweber 14y ago
    Honestly the suits don't need to code, but they do need to be comfortable discussing software and the limits/possibilities of technology. Similarly, the geeks don't need to know all the aspects of selling, but they do need to know how to tell a customer that their product is awesome and all the advantages it has and why it's silly to not have use it.
    • tobyjsullivan 14y ago
      Tell me the limits of a miter saw as they relate to project X without ever touching one... I don't actually think suits need to learn code either but the knowledge is worth its weight in gold if they can.
      • freehunter 14y ago
        In just about every business relationship I have with a vendor, there are two people talking to me. A sales guy who doesn't work on the product, and an engineer who does. The sales guy sells me the product, and the engineer gets me to buy it. It's far from standard to have suits get their hands dirty.
        • tobyjsullivan 14y ago
          My experience is similar but with a key difference. The sales team often consists of a sales guy who has barely seen the product (as you said) and a "systems engineer" who should not be confused for a developer. The engineers are often technically skilled members of the sales team that are experts at deploying the product and using it in customer environments. That said, they often have development skills (from previous experience) but they are certainly not getting their hands dirty with code in this role. The "suit" co-founder of a start-up should be playing the role of a systems engineer and the account exec rolled into one because the "technical" co-founder rarely has the right personality/sales experience to be involved in sales. Obviously, if you do manage to find a technical co-founder who has the systems engineer skills then you can change up the roles a bit but, in my experience, such people are incredibly rare (even in successful start-ups).
• saurik 14y ago
  (Note: I am a programmer.) Being "the suit" isn't just "I have an idea", and assuming the suit must be capable of doing something technical undermines the interesting complexity that that kind of knowledge entails. Instead, imagine someone who has found a "market opportunity" (not "an idea": everyone has ideas, and assuming programmers somehow don't have enough of their own to work on is part of what makes these kinds of e-mails insulting ;P): in this case, "the suit" is someone who has the knack for turning ideas into formal/defendable contracts and closed/agreeable business relationships in the same sense that you or I have the knack for turning ideas into stable prototypes or scalable production implementations. I personally then love dealing with "the suit": I love bringing my ideas to him, and I love seeing what he does with them; I love not having to worry about that particular aspect of building a business that I often find tedious, frustrating, or even intractable (a similar feeling, I imagine, to how he feels about what I do). From this perspective, I can't imagine any of "the suits" that I know (and I now know a bunch) sending an e-mail like the one in this article: it doesn't have any of the properties I'm used to "the suit" having found fascinating about these kinds of problems. (Of course, this e-mail is probably not verbatim, summarized through the veil of this blogger, and I might be reading a bunch into it based on your response.) I can thereby understand feeling the need to ask someone like this to go off and do tasks like "try to find a customer" and "can this be done manually", but somehow I feel like this is really just trying to tutor the person on the other end to see if they have basic business sense (the same kind I imagine you have): when "the suit" contacts you, you will know it ;P. Now, you may also have been contacted by many such "the suits" already, and disliked them: sometimes, these people's slavish devotion to business opportunity and formal agreements might cause them to be as alien as someone with a slavish devotion to process and repeatability (as many programmers have) is to a "normal" person. Alternatively, you might not have been inspired by the kinds of markets they attack: they might not seem world-changing, or challenging, or technical enough to even involve you; but the property of "the suit" that gives him that title is that he didn't just have an idea: he is thinking about how all the people fit together, and is fully intending to be the person who makes it all happen. I thereby encourage everyone to get to know a real "the suit", get to know his friends, and try to see how they live their lives and why they do so: I think you might be pleasantly surprised. That said: you might wonder how to recognize "the suit" if you feel all of them are like this e-mailer (by which I really mean the stereotype of the guy who has a lightbulb go off in his head, brands himself "the idea guy", and tries to find "the programmer"). I might recommend finding someone older (although my go-to "the suit" isn't), who honestly likes wearing suits (;P), and weirdly knows all of the lawyers in town; he probably also knows about every business operating nearby (and exactly who funded them), is friends with the guy who owns half the buildings, and is respected enough to be invited to give advice to others at local business plan programs. You might, then, be surprised both at how useful these people are, how unimportant it might be that they are currently technical (although enough geekiness in their past to have at least some feel for what is technically possible is quite handy), and at the same time how the people sending these e-mails are more like a guy who just learned PHP last week trying to start a business with the CEO of General Motors than someone we should be up-in-arms about.
• 1123581321 14y ago
  It would be interesting to correlate the numbers in your post with numbers that measure a developer. For example, the ability to get 5,000 email list subscribers in a week could be equivalent to creating a project that gets 200 Github watchers in a week. Both parties in this arrangement are classifiable.
• huhtenberg 14y ago
  No offense, but how many exits have you had to date?
• wethesheeple 14y ago
  Does the suit ever give you some technical task to do to test your execution or some other criteria (what if he actually wanted to see some code you've written)? What if the suit has some preferences on the technical side, sort of like how you have preferences on the "businessey" side of things? (e.g. C corporations and provisional patent applications)
• deleted 14y ago
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