I need a cofounder, so I built okcofounder.com
okcofounder.com
okcofounder.com
I was hoping for a full-blown site for entrepreneurial individuals to find and connect with each other.
I come across people quite often looking for co-founders. They don't necessarily need them, but that's their choice.
eCofounderHarmony.com
(I just made that up. But perhaps the "eHarmony" approach to cofounder matches makes more sense than OkCupid. Since, ya know, you're "married" to your cofounder.)
pocf.com
I want to find a match-- but nothing too serious... I'm really just looking for a good time. I want to be someone's interim technical co-founder with benefits for a while. Just temporarily. And not for equity (you see, I have a problem with commitment), but for cash.
Just long enough to get their idea from conception to climax.
And then we can part ways and I can find someone else who could benefit from my expertise.
I need a high-end co-founder matchmaker service, and okcofounder was not that.
In my humble opinion, I think you should abandon residen.se and work full time on okcofounder. This is not something I'm saying lightly. Consider it this way:
1. You designed and created okcofounder with a clear need in mind. I don't "feel" the same sort of inspiration and personal connection with residen.se
2. There are at least three comments at the time of this writing in this thread that express disappointment at okcofounder not being for finding cofounders and being applicable to their lives. You just got user feedback.
3. Residen.se looks like the perfect web 2.0 model of what a tech startup should be, but okcofounder is something that is immediately relevant and comprehensible on the front page. I had a little trouble figuring out what residen.se was for immediately. Not so with okcofounder.
I'll come out and say that I'd pay for a service like okcofounder. I live in NYC and it's harder to find people than it is in Silicon Valley.
okcofounder satisfies true entrepreneurial need - despite the odd fact that it's a meta-project, you created it trying to solve a problem for yourself. But there are users saying they'd love the idea on a wider, open scale. So do it.
But... I guess you have a very good point.
But, hey, good response to being rejected. At least you're doing something about it.
The rental market is massive and real and worth a shit-ton of money. Handling the pain of repairs and stuff? it's not even been vaguely tapped! That's a fucking good idea that's going to be hard to sell but it's a domino thing. When one major rental agency starts using it they'll all start using it. 'Your flat doesn't have residee.ce? How lame!'
Finding a co-founder is a tiny market.
Your advice is well intentioned and dog-fooding and all that lovely bullshit nonsense and really, really terrible.
Cofounderslab.com has a background that scrolls horizontally as I down-arrow on it. Stop that! Otherwise, the listings seem good. Best of the bunch.
Techcofounder.com provides no geographical search at all, from what I can see. Of the 3 ads in my area, 1 is from 2011.
Collabafinder gives me a list of people, but it seems I have to sign in to find more.
I have to register for Founderdating before I can find out if I want to register.
I'd never heard of any of those sites, I checked them out none made me want to sign up right now.
I clicked through on okcofounder here wanting and expecting to be able to sign up only to be disappointed.
Ideas are essentially worthless without effective implementation. This roughed out one page implementation was effective for me and I'm clearly not alone.
Inspiration through need is organic and genuine - he needed something, he built it, and other people want it. That's been the essence of startup culture from the beginning.
You understood the cofounder project because of your background. But for the vast majority of people, residen.se would be easier to understand.
And besides, how easy it was to understand from the site is something that can easily be changed with a few hours of work. What you really want to know is the viability of the underlying business model. And I find it difficult to see very many situations in which serving entrepreneurs tight on cash is better than trying to take a cut of the (very large) real estate pie.
Everyone in the world needs a place to live, whereas probably less than 0.001% of people need a cofounder.
1. As a business, targeting broke founders is not a get-rich-quick approach. I did it for love of entrepreneurs.
2. Finding a co-founder is hard. Over the years, I became convinced that personal chemistry is very important (that's why I moved from an online site to in-person meetups). And it takes time. Think 1 month of working together, minimum, before you even should consider someone as a co-founder.
After ~3 years of effort, the one very successful result fro my efforts is the co-founders equity calculator. That is something that a lot of people use, learn from, and solves an immediate issue. If you are curious, it's now the only content on the home page of http://foundrs.com
(I haven't used them)
That being said, none of the cofounder-matching sites I've used have solved my problem so I suppose there is room in this space. If you did take a cue from OKC and institute a system of curated user-generated Q&As you might be on to something. The services I've used were primitive in their matching ability (e.g. I am a developer looking for a designer, which tells you nothing about values, principles, working style, etc.) so hey, maybe you could make it work.
good luck with your venture. some thoughts on okfounder:
1. where is the return value of the site, in other words, if i found a great founder on the site and am happy with him/her, what incentive do i have to revisit? maybe your idea is that most people will start something else up, but that number won't necessarily be high. perhaps of more value is to find startup people, not just founders, but initial employees, founders, consultants, advisors, etc.
2. personally i don't feel some of the content are that relevant, such as your favorite artists/people, books you've read, there's a much better place for this information (facebook, twitter), you should link to those. you should put more things along the lines of what you're trying to build, personally, i don't think ideas need to be secret, that's what will really draw in a cofounder or employee, not whether or not you both like catcher in the rye.
I have a site that uses the '.se' and the (non tech) people who are my target market keep asking '.com?'
One constituency to keep in mind is the person who has a job but would quit it if they had the right cofounder -- ie some form of anonymous or semi-anonymous matching until both sides choose to reveal.
I've heard of other people getting married and a few of my best friends met through a dating website, but yeah. I think that it's not necessarily because of it.
danah boyd's talk here is a good reference: http://talks.webstock.org.nz/speakers/danah-boyd/culture-fea...
The TL;DR I got from that talk is that "Internet bullying isn't bad as normal bullying, it is just portrayed differently".
In line with that argument, I would say that dating websites in general just bring out those "crazy people" you meet in a different way.
Because at the end of the day, the "crazy people" would still exist.