Show HN: I made a simple platform to find founders and buy side-projects | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: I made a simple platform to find founders and buy side-projects

80 pointsheyarviind225 comments

Hi Guys,

I got overwhelming support and feedback from my last post about secondfounder.com but still, I felt the need of connecting founders together so that they can together buy a side project. It's very often when a non-technical founder buys a project they have to find a technical founder to take that project further.

Today I have implemented this feature in secondfounder.com

Link: https://secondfounder.com/find-founder

Your feedback is always welcome.

Thanks

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Few UX suggestions:

1. People might be more inclined to be interested in applying to be a co-founder if they can actually read the information on the founder/company before applying. However, currently there is a login barrier to seeing that information which may cause some people to decide it isn't worth it and leave the website without looking.

2. Add an easy way to close the login modal. Currently the only way I found was th e back button and that isn't a good solution for the reason in #3

3. Don't hijack the user's history and take control over the back button, it is very user un-friendly

noted, gonna fix this before producthunt launch

> 3. Don't hijack the user's history and take control over the back button, it is very user un-friendly

yes, so much this. not as worse as hijacking my scrolling, but this comes second

I keep getting 'login to continue' when I click. Anybody have an account I can use?

Edit: OP stopped responding and it doesn't seem like anybody made it past the login-gate. If someone from the future is reading this, please take note, this is not the way to demo.

sorry i didnt get you, can you explain more please?

Which part?

> Anybody have an account I can use?

People don't want to create an account just to view things.

some information are only available to verified users to limit spam.

So is premium a "premium" experience or is it meant to be the base functionality of the site?

Two of the premium offerings are: • Contact directly with the founder through messages • Find and contact second co-founder

That seems like the entire reason anyone would use the app, am I wrong?

You are right, also you cant access the basic info of the project, all the sensitive information is provided to those who are premium. this is just to filter out the spam provide the real value to the founders/sellers.

By providing real value to founders/sellers, you're taking away so much value from potential co-founders such that no co-founders will want to use this. And if there are no co-founders, then why would founders or sellers use your platform?

Check this out, I believe it was popular on Hackernews some time back - https://microfounder.com

Semantic quibble: A founder founds a company, if you're buying it you aren't a founder.

More broadly is there a market for side projects? I could understand someone's side project expanding to the point they need to bring someone else on board (which is what the name implies to me). It seems to me that if the founder is selling its probably because there isn't money in it. Or at least I would be concerned that the bulk of sales are for that reason rather than because the founder has another job or something.

If a side project isn't a company and then someone else buys it and turns it into a company, I'd argue the purchaser is the founder.

If you take open source software or some white label solution and sell it, you're a founder.

If a company goes bankrupt, you buy the assets and then launch a new company. Founder.

It is a bit more nuanced. I bought a 3 month old "side project" which had like 10 customers at the time and I have bootstrapped it into a low 7 figure business with a totally new tech and lots of pivots/business changes. I call myself the founder for all practical purposes. Everything about this business was setup by me and the team I built from the ground up except the initial market validation which btw we have changed anyway since the customer profile is now different.

would you consider Elon Musk a founder of Tesla?

I would. But in general I would consider anyone a founder of a company if they had a significant impact before the companies first product/service went general availability to their target demographic.

If they already had a general release of product or service. I wouldn't consider them a founder if they joined afterwards.

Is Zuckerburg the founder of Instagram? The company went from 13 employees and 30 million users to 450 employees and 2 billion users. 98.5% of users came after the purchase, but I still don't think most people would call him the founder.

That's a bit disingenuous though, it's like saying YouTube got 99% of their accounts post acquisition, knowing that the majority of these were merely Google accounts who through the associative property of acquisitions were delegated these accounts by the purchaser.

In my opinion Instagram sold a bit early[0], but coming from an app that existed merely as the first widely used iteration of phone-camera filters, I can't necessarily blame them. Who'd have thought that Instagram, and also Giphy to an extent had -any- form of business model or potential for profit? I sure didn't.

[0] - sidenote: (in the financial and growth sense, not the chronological sense)

The projects have explanations on why they are selling, and what their current Monthly Recurring Revenue is.

I think you have heavily heavily discounted that the people building aren't the same people ready to make the same time and financial risks.

That site is doing two things: selling projects, and finding cofounders. These are two separate functions if it isn't clear. You can buy a project and find a co-founder, not buy into a project and be the co-founder with someone that has another job.

> is there a market for side projects?

Yes. I'm always interested in cool security projects.

This is really an interesting idea, because there are people who literally can't take it to the next level...but it's not really big enough for a capital infusion.

I guess I'll be hunting for something I can turn into a lifestyle business. Then I'll just roll these lifestyle businesses into riches!

I would have done this with one of my old companies years ago if this had existed. At the time I was making like 80k/year off of it for maybe 30 minutes of work a month. Now the market is gone, but still.

Unable to signup. Stripe checkout error "A valid Importer/Exporter Code (IEC) is needed to present in USD. Please contact contact https://support.stripe.com/contact/email if you have any questions."

I'm using US AMEX which works fine on all other Stripe checkouts I use.

I contacted stripe and they said there is an ongoing problem with AMEX Cards with Indian stripe users.

Could you please use a different card?

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