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Comment by spaceman_2020 | Hacker News Reader

spaceman_2020

Not a SaaS business, but an entrepreneur nonetheless. One thing I learned early is that having a co-founder with a serious b2b sales background, especially in a mid-tier company (big enough to bag F500 clients, small enough to work with small businesses) is a superpower.

My co founder was able to close deals I wouldn’t even know how to approach.

Don’t discount sales and marketing. Unless your tech is really revolutionary (chatGPT tier) or leagues ahead of the competitors (Figma), your biggest problem will be distribution and discovery, not tech.

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How do you find these cofounders? I've thought about reaching out to semi-famous names in my side hustle's industry and seeing who is at least receptive to seeing what I've got, my vision, maybe partnering in exchange for a bit piece of equity. But at the end of the day cold outreach like that - especially the "hey look at my product please help me sell it" - seems even worse/harder than just doing the sales on my own from the get-go.

Unless you’ve already got a big reputation - work or live with them. Cofounders I know all either were roommates or coworkers at some point.

Co-founder matching is a thing too (ex: https://www.ycombinator.com/cofounder-matching), but unsure how far it works.

Famously, the GitHub co-founders and the Instagram co-founders met at co-working spaces / hacker meetups. Tom Preston-Werner gave an interesting talk on how to build successful co-founding teams and products: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGTpU5XUAA8

My co-founder has been a close friend since high school, so yeah. That probably seems like the best option since there is already built-in trust.

Haven’t yet found one myself, but from the information I’ve gathered I see that you can: 1. Go to events where you can meet such people 2. Sign up for different clubs (marketing, tech, etc.) and build strong relationships there though projects. 3. Working at your dayjob, if you see something outstanding you see yourself working with in the future, go the extra mile to show them they mean something to you.

Generally I think it’s all about the buildup after a certain amount of time of working in your industry. And not only 9-5 working but just doing interesting projects and attracting such likeminded people.

As always, the best way is to already know them or have a shared connection with them - have a wide network.

Do you have frequent social interactions with other professionals? Off the top of my head (and from personal experience) some ways to meet people:

- Network within your company, particularly with people in other disciplines

- Alumni events for your college

- Send your kids to private school and make friends with parents (or have gone to private school yourself)

- Play sports that professionals play like golf, tennis, pickleball?

- Attend networking events (though I haven't really tried doing this since covid)

- Get an (in-person) MBA

- Marry/date someone with a wide network

That's a really cool note. I am currently non-technical and working to find a B2b Sales job selling to mid-market and enterprise organizations so it's good to know that having these skills would be a superpower for a startup.

I know I want to be a founder one day and since I'm 27 years old I've thought that instead I can learn sales skills until I figure out the startup idea worth pursuing.

I don't know where you are on the "non-technical" scale, or the kind of ideas you want to implement, but with all these new AI-powered tools, you can create a surprisingly competent prototype with very little coding skills - at least I did.

I'd say that with 6 months of dedicated effort and $20/month of Cursor.so prompts, you can create most basic product ideas you can imagine.

very interesting thanks for sharing, can you share what you were able to build ?

Sorry, can’t do that without doxxing myself, but its a platform where advertisers and influencers in a very narrow niche can connect with each other. Used NextJS, NodeJS, Express and Mongodb

Curious to hear about what you built?

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