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Co-founder search

matchfounders.com

48 pointsoceanician51 comments

i honestly don't get these services.

the market is too insignificant. Even if you get 100% market share, you'll end up with something like 1000-10000 users, most of which will be the business type looking for a code monkey.

can anyone actually think of a single founders team that found a cofounder like that and was successful?

I just contacted a business guy with a nice profile and an impressive resume.

If anything, this can serve as a medium for introduction, and not necessarily final match-making. Think bar, not a marriage agency for catalog Romeos.

Ya - that was our thought. Just like eHarmony - it doesn't marry you, just offers you some people that are more likely to be a match than the random selection at your local bar.

Digg ?

Have any of you ever considered building something on your own, and trying to bring someone on-board with something in hand, instead of joining a co-founder dating site?

This is becoming a repeating theme here on HN and it seems like its another way for the people who aren't doing anything to feel like "entrepreneurs". It also seems like what takes place at a lot of conferences these days and especially on twitter.

If you're serious about building something, build it. If it's any good, even if incomplete, people will want to join you. It doesn't matter what it is. Really. The guys building the traffic/headline grabbing companies today are just farther along in the process. You can't get there without starting somewhere.

Are you a business guy looking for help building your idea? Outsource it. Pay someone to build it for you. Don't try to "convince" someone else to join your vision and build it for you.

This stuff has to be obvious to 95% of the members on this forum.

Sorry for the rant but this nonsense is getting old...

Absolutely... but that assumes two things: a) you're the person with the idea AND b) you're the developer.

If you're not A or B then you need to find somebody that is...

I came up with this idea because I was A for quite a while... but I did want to get into the space. I'm good at executing, but at the time wasn't so good with coming up with ideas (you may still think that is the case ;) )

I also know that business-development and marketing are not my strongest areas of knowledge.... so I went in search of business guys who had a great, marketable idea but nobody to build it for them...

I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one... though maybe I'm in the minority on this particular news site :)

Also - I'm not sure if I read it from Seth Godin or 37signals, but I do like the idea that if you can't convince at least one other person, then maybe you should reconsider the idea...

Okay, just tried the search function and it does not give me any results whatsoever... but I just flipped a few options.

oceanician, are you the founder/creator of this project? When did you start it? Could not find any information regarding that but it would be interesting to read.

Hi - nothing to do with me; though I did have a very similar idea, that got nowhere, so I'm keen to encourage this one.

Seems search got working toward the end of the weekend: http://twitter.com/Launch48/status/25585635159

I'm the creator... I pitched the idea on Friday night. We got the registration page up on Sunday morning... :)

Awesome time frame :)

Just a heads up, I'm not anything to do with this project but its from an event in the UK called Launch48, this idea was started on friday night and the idea is that over the weekend you build a MVP then work on it after the event.

Nice idea, but results I get from a quick search seem to be more suitable for a dating website.. "24, male, 5.9ft, dark hair, brown eyes.", "I'm a good guy".

Anyone actually found a co-founder through this website?

Hi :)

I'm one of the co-founders. This is a Launch48 project, i.e. we started it yesterday morning, from scratch. (48 hours to launch a web startup). If someone has found a co-founder by now I would be over the moon.

The main idea is that search based just on skillset matching is not ideal for finding a co-founder you will truly be able to click with and work to build a successful startup. We bring in methods such as what is your desired exit strategy or how much time can you currently put in. These can be real issues.

Let's see where this goes..

Launch48: Encouraging people to throw unrefined shit against the wall and see if it sticks.

No. It is a networking event that revolves around building stuff.I have attended 4 of them and I cannot get enough.

1) You should have a list of short 1-2 week projects that founders can work on together. Something founders can work on that is pretty generic and can put a price tag on.

2) You can charge for forming groups around these 1-2week project. Like 5 pounds or something.

So, teams can be formed around ideas and there wouldn't be so much focus on the other person. You can collect their personality types and track which group went on to form teams, this data will be useful for PR.

You can even charge for people to watch a project progress. This might be useful for early start-ups who want to find good people[essentially the same thing as finding a co-founder]. This should open the market up beyond the 1,000-10,000 that vaksel talked about.

Also, matchfounders.com might be infringing on match.com name, so that might need to be looked into.

Thanks, some good points. I like the "trial projects" idea.

do you think the name infringes? Our name came from the concept of "a match-making service" - which is an idea as old as the hills... I don't think that match.com can own the word "match" or the concept of matching people.

Don't forget to provide a location search...

This. I think utility goes waaaaay down without being location-centric.

agreed. it's on the list of high-priority features.

This is way too superficial to give a meaningful result. What's needed is something like "eharmony for co-founders", "based on 29 Dimensions® of Compatibility for lasting and fulfilling businesses". There needs to be a way of matching the things that really turn people on without anyone giving up their secrets.

Just a few possibilities:

  - background (education, experience)
  - specific industry experience
  - technical skill set
  - nontechnical skill set
  - space (iphone, web app, desktop, social media, business, gaming)
  - end user (consumer, SMB, enterprise)
  - model (freemium, advertising, subscription, licenses)
  - geography
  - source of capital (bootstrap, incubator, angels, VC)
  - goal (lifestyle business, exit in x years)
  - special domain expertise
  - pet peeves
  - favorite things already done
  - philosophical beliefs of how things should be done

I could go on and on, but you kinda get the idea. If enough of these meaningful "dimensions" could be identified and codified, you could probably narrow down a search to a few very good possibilities fairly quickly. Business idea, anyone?

Nice suggestions @edw519, but I think what they have done is great as an MVP and can be improved gradually.

Yeah, I find it a little humorously ironic that the MVP drum gets beat here all the time, and when people announce an actual MVP, there's always someone saying that it needs more features to be useful. :-) (With all due respect to edw519.)

It's trial by fire here at HN. Yeah, people can be harsh, but HNers are nothing if not practical.

I'd rather some guy tell me my product sucks, here's 10 ways to improve it, rather than someone pat me on the head and commend me on a good job!

agreed :)

If you decide to go deeper with the details like in the bulleted points above, I think 2 additional features would be useful:

1. Radio buttons for each item that lets the selecting person set how important that item is to them on a scale of 1 to 10.

2. Something to do with attitude/personality, such as (serious)(humorous)(quiet)(outgoing) etc... where both people can rate themselves on a scale of 1 to 10.

Another dimension for compatibility:

- religious beliefs (Emacs or Vim)

Hiya, matchfounders.com is my baby. It is my pitch from launch48 (launch48.com)

I'll start by saying I completely agree with you... but add that I pitched this idea only three days ago... we built it over this weekend ;)

So when we say "MVP" here... we really have only just started.

That being said - love your ideas for fields to add to the db. As should be fairly obvious, we just grabbed a small handful of random fields just for show... now it's time to start thinking about stuff that would actually be useful.

Oh, and the idea I pitched was exactly "eHarmony for founders"... that's our goal. :)

This website works in Safari on my iMac, but not Chrome. I get the same results as dataguy -- none, just a page refresh with my selections intact.

If you want to start a business, you should get out of your comfort zone. Finding a co-founder on an online platform is the opposite.

Get involved in your area's tech (or whatever your startup is about) scene and find a partner. That validates your idea, too. If you can't find a co-founder in real life, you may need to change your plan.

Some areas don't have scenes relevant to a particular idea. Believe it or not, random small towns do occasionally produce the odd skilled hacker, who is then geographically isolated and needs an online way of connecting with the rest of the tech world.

Ordinarily I'd agree... but as another commenter pointed out, there are issues with small towns... but there's also a time-issue involved.

I created this idea because I'm a hacker, and needed to find business guys... it's taken me a year of joining every entrepreneur/networking group in London - ad I'm now starting to be confident that I know which ones to bother with and which to avoid.

I can imagine that it'd be even worse prospect for a business guy trying the other way around... which of five hundred "user groups" would a know-nothing business guy join to go find smart hackers that can get things done?

As a newbie, you'll join a lot of the wrong groups... and waste a lot of time at them. The two different crowds have an extremely small overlap... this site is intended to cut across the networks (well be going to networks on either side), and cuts through a lot of the time spent searching.

ie - first find a few people that might match your needs, then go join their network and see if you like it (kinda like the "first date")... then see where it leads from there.

I have some experience in the field of co-founder finding. I recognize a couple of features we had speced out in the early days of FairSoftware, that we gave up on fairly quickly.

My advice if I was to do this today: think of the Angel List model: a highly curated e-mail of top-notch founders going to top-notch potential co-founders.

I like the service you are creating, but it's hard to take the results seriously... are there any better (read: outside of box) ways to determine how good the potential cofounder is?

Also, I'm playing devil's advocate here - how do you differentiate yourself from LinkedIn? It's something I have relied on in the past.

On LinkedIn - I can reach out through my known network... through six degrees of separation, and not knowing which contacts are the ones I need to reach out through.

This site will have one "level" of separation - and you can define who you're looking for and get them straight away.

The site looks neat and I personally know a lot of single founders. But, when you bring in drop-down menus that talk about the number of months / days one can commit, doesn't it hamper the sanctity of the 'Co-founder' role and make it more like a freelancer website?

I personally know of very few "potential co-founders" that don't have a day-job. The only ones I know that have "plenty of time" are unemployed or students... that is a small sub-set of the available talent.

I also wanted to make sure that people that wanted to commit a larger amount could weed out people that are only able to commit to a few hours per month.

Finally - we were also thinking about the possibility of people such as lawyers/accountants joining up - who would in fact only need to commit an hour or two per month to add value. Obviously this means the site is open to much more than just equity-share/co-founder arrangements

I gave the tool a try and at first the search page would just refresh itself.

It turns out it does that if there are no results. I tried a more general search and a few profiles were returned.

While not a necessity, it'd be nice to filter by geography. Also, you should have to throw out three ideas you have -- just so there's a way to differentiate people.

We've already added the ability to put in an idea - but it's possible that the person joining doesn't have an idea - but wants to get involved with somebody that does...

thus the "pitch" field on our form was intended to mean "either your business idea or why you think you'd be a great founder"

I registered last week to see if there's any value in such a service, but after doing a search I cannot find myself in their database. What's up with that?

are you sure it was this service? the domain name was only registered yesterday and its being built as part of a hack challenge

if not this one then one practically identical which I learned about here on HN. What others are creating a nearly identical service?

Please do point me at this other service. :)

A great site to understand working style and check culture compatibility. http://roundpegg.com/

Bug: the highest the "I can commit at most" selector on the search goes is 6 days per week.

I think that's a feature.

yup. works as intended...

also check out cofoundernetwork.com

Shouldn't the sector you want to work in be a very vital thing? My choice of ideas and my connection with a co founder will depend of my previous experience, interests and domain specific knowledge.

yup. We'll be adding that too.

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