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Comment by graham1776 | Hacker News Reader

So the funny thing for me is I'm the one who works in commercial real estate, know the problems deeply, and have little technical experience other than reading HN. So how do you reverse cruise HN to find the technical cofounder to build out the solutions to our RE problems?

I literally sit within a company run by excel spreadsheets, talk on a phone with brokers, manage market information via printed pdfs of comps, mark up site plans by hand and scan them, and conduct all reporting via email and word docs to multi-billion dollar pension funds.

At nearly every step of the way I see opportunities without the technical expertise to execute.

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I'd suggest adding contact info to your profile and talking about your problems here. Hopefully you'll pique some interest and have some email waiting later.

Contact Info done. Sorry about missing day-one stuff.

Since ideas are a dime a dozen: Glassdoor for Apartment Rentals: Tenants give their address and rent amount per month in exchange for access to everyone else's data. Know what other people are actually renting for, not landlord asking rates. Why is there no data on what your neighbor just signed his lease for?

Angelist for Real Estate

Imgur for Excel

Nextdoor for Office Buildings

I got loads more...got to be something worth making in there... :)

You could definitely write some blog posts about these ideas. I think it could be a great way to find technical co-founders willing to contact you about them.

Also, city tech events might be a good place.. such as startup drink and the like. Just going there and listening to ideas.. but being on the looking for opportunities. I.e. Someone is telling how his startup isn't doing that well and might be on the lockout for a new venture.

Imgur for excel doesn't mean that much to me.. What's the context, the problem, the value proposition, the channels, etc.

Graham, RentHackr is working on the pricing transparency problem: http://www.renthackr.com/.

Would love to hear more about your other ideas and tell you about the data and insights product I'm working on for property managers and others in the rental real estate space. Email is in my profile.

"Imgur for Excel" is the most disorienting startup summary I've ever seen. We must use imgur differently... or Excel.

If any of your ideas would be potentially useful internally too, you might be better off hiring people rather than finding a cofounder.

I suspect he's after something a little like Google Docs?

Otherwise, following his description literally, he wants a web-based way to share read-only copies of random spreadsheets.

I think you hit it on the head. Think what scribd and slideshare did for .docx and .pptx

I am constantly searching for datasets from Government websites, market data, etc. Wolfram alpha has the data but its not free. The federal government data is bloated and takes forever to parse. Why couldn't someone post an excel sheet of the data for everyone to use?

Your first idea exists...maybe look at the exhibitor and attendee list of CRE tech intersect...

"Tenants give their address and rent amount per month in exchange for access to everyone else's data"

This is a tricky game-theory scenario. It may work if all the tenants find the value in it. It may also implode for tenants or the land-owner.

"Why is there no data on what your neighbor just signed his lease for?"

If the info isn't public, most people that value privacy will not want to share this.

I'm not too sure about the other ideas, but maybe you need to think of something simpler, that helps address a problem that all people like you face.

Maybe the best idea in this case would be the simplest.

Cruising HN probably isn't the place to find founders, honestly. Where do you live? Is there an established startup community there? Make friends in IT, and get introductions. Go to meetups.

Meanwhile, narrow yourself down to a single problem that you think offers maximum opportunity and minimum scope and risk, something that can be tackled with a MVP (minimum viable product). Design workflows. Learn wireframing. Create a business entity. Do everything you possibly can on your own that advances the project without actually writing the code. The farther along you are and the more viable it looks, the easier it will be for you to get a coder to help you.

Orange County. Thanks for the help Beat, and thanks for the support from HN community. Time to get to work.

Cal poly is close-ish to you, and has an excellent computer science department. Start making contacts there.

There is a Cal Poly chapter of ACM, the Cal Poly Linux User's Group (CPLUG) and a Cal poly chapter of WISH (women in software and hardware).

I've done a ton of this type of stuff for the medical and insurance industry. I'm not looking to be a technical co-founder but if you need input I could definitely tell you what you need and what to look for.

I have a similar set of questions and would love to get your input - I'm at tzt1212@live.com

Just email me silverbax@yahoo.com - I am not being aloof I will gladly answer any of your questions I just can't really reach out to everyone.

Learn to code. At least enough to prototype ideas.

That's why I suggested wireframing. You don't need to learn to code in order to design a site for someone else to code.

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