Except I'm purely a software guy, and I'll openly admit I know nothing about developing a business, networking, or money. So I'll likely need a team.
How do you find one?
Right now you don't have a business, per se. You have a concept. It's an interesting concept, but it doesn't need a cofounder just yet. Turn the concept into a project. Work on any bits and pieces of the project that you can. Go to meetups, bring your idea to a hackathon, and maybe do a Show HN when you've got something tangible. (Something tangible could even be a really interesting blog post about the topic.) All the while, look for collaborators to help out.
The "collaborator" mindset frees you of the mental bottleneck of having to have a cofounder before making progress. It also allows you to work with, and to vet people instead of having a shotgun wedding to the first would-be cofounder you think you get along with.
PG once wrote that a sign of a good team is one that's worked together and knows each other. You can't push a magic button and add five or six years of shared history to any cofounder you meet. But you can get some work experience with collaborators before cofounding a business with one of them. You're looking for someone you can click with over the next five or more years; it's worth a few extra months of scramble in the beginning to find someone great.
Don't shirk the "who can I sell it to for how much" question, though. That's the common fear/concern of technical guys.
Long answer: if you feel you can't get started in any meaningful way on your own, hire somebody who can assist you. While truly good people can be hard to find, it will be a thousand times easier to find a competent paid consultant than a competent co-founder. After all, why in the world would somebody experienced who has valuable skills that can be monetized want to start a business with someone he or she doesn't have a long-standing relationship with? The folks who would be interested in this are precisely the folks you want to avoid.
Additional benefits of paying instead of partnering include the ability to retain full control and ownership of your business (if one materializes) as well as the ability to quickly and cleanly terminate the person you retain if he or she is unable to meet your needs.
If the person you retain delivers and there's a great personal fit that would lend itself to an ongoing collaboration, there's nothing stopping you from later negotiating a co-founder relationship.
I would not specifically search for a cofounder, but search for the right people who can help you to push the product, even without getting 30% of your company. people who like to talk about idea, help you with daily problem startup problems,...
within a very short time, you will learn much about people, how they act and you will soon find one or more people who are really interested in pushing you project forward.
just because i am curious - is the tool planned for the european or us market?
I'm based in the US, but there will be an EU market.
As a technical guy who became funded & CEO now CTO, getting a business plan both is, and isn't, rocket science.
Ask yourself: what would an investor want to know?
They want to know how expensive to develop, time horizon, risks, possible positive outcomes.
That's all a business plan is. If you haven't answered this for yourself, or it's just a "feeling" not backed up by data, then you don't really know it.
Run this past your friends, people who will give you a straight answer.
The entrepreneurial spirit is taking the bull by the horns and wrestling, not saying "I'm not a business guy." Try it yourself.
If you try it yourself, and "fail", you'll learn the kind of business guy who adds value, then you can look intelligently and correctly.
If you try and succeed, well, there you are.
What is your product? Who is the buyer?
The "business/money" part of things is easy. If you get big enough, you can hire an accountant to do most of that for you. The "networking" thing is pretty easy too: you can hire salespeople for that.
What you need is someone who knows this industry from a strategic standpoint: who are your competitors, who are your customers, and how do you sell to them? What do they even want? What value does your product give them over a more generic data warehousing solution?
I can tell you right now that your idea is neither novel nor particularly valuable (if your customers are big multinational companies, it's just a little custom reporting code on top of their enterprise data warehousing platform). Until you turn it into a product that serves some customer's needs, it will remain without value. But what you need is someone who understands the market enough to be able to tell you these things.
I would say your best option would be to find someone in the industry and say "Hey, I have a business idea I'd like to bounce off of you". Don't worry about people stealing your idea -- if it's worth doing, someone has probably already done it. That doesn't mean there's not an opportunity though, and you just need to find someone qualified to judge that.
People often claim that having a deep-rooted work history and relation with a person and knowing them well suggests they could be somebody you can work on a startup with. My experience has proven, that this isn't always true. Having somebody you know inside-out work on you with a startup is a good thing, but also make sure that you don't mix your emotions with your work.
Your best-friend or fiancé might make a great co-founder (considering they work in the same space as you), but it always makes it harder to talk business with them. Emotions are always ugliest when they surface in work conditions. Your cofounder is slacking? Just give them a subtle reminder. Oh wait, now you can't because he's also your best friend so he expects you to let this slide.
Bad for business, worse when said business is in its earliest stages.
* Write about the topics and projects that you want to work on
* Connect with people with similar interests
* Make time to do small trial projects
* Get outside your comfort zone
* Focus on building something and/or testing a business hypothesis
* Structure your collaborations with tangible deliverables
Give people a nice out (e.g. "thanks for helping test out that idea, sorry it didn't pan out like we hoped") if the project doesn't work well. Think of it like dating.
1) Find a place where startup people hang out (in San Antonio, there's a co-working space designed for this called Geekdom). Startup people are rarely found in big companies.
2) Find ways to get involved in the startup community by volunteering or just helping others. You'll determine very quickly who are the quality people and who you'll like working with.
3) Get an idea and go talk to everyone about it. Ask for their advice and get mentored. Even if it's a bad idea, you'll develop relationships and they'll connect you to other startup people who can help or possibly get involved.
To extend on something you mentioned, I suggest that you look for volunteer opportunities outside the startup community. The startup community is great, but volunteering with different organizations exposes you to people with diverse backgrounds and different skill sets. Volunteering is great for building a network of people with skills that compliment yours; it allows you to develop genuine relationships with likeminded individuals.
In this quest, they have brought onboard various experts such as former executives from Match.com, and leading researchers for the Kauffman Foundation. Furthermore, CoFoundersLab has acquired several companies over the years enhancing its IP portfolio, and execution capability.
Through CoFoundersLab, members can search a self-selected pool of cofounder candidates, while getting a much better sense for wether the cofounder candidates posses complementary skills, and have compatible personalities, goals, and values!
There is no "silver bullet" solution, but CoFoundersLab.com is an out of this world better approach to embarking on the journey of cofounder search!
Disclosure: I am the CEO at Onevest and we just announced a merger with CoFoundersLab.
Disclosure: No interest in either of companies or own any stock. Disclosures like this are for jackasses like the comment above by morgante.
I tried Cofounderslab.com, Collabfinder and did not find the quality people I was looking for.
Perhaps not surprisingly, HN yielded a much higher level of potential collaborators/co-founders. I spoke with a few folks on here and am impressed. Most prefer working with someone in person.
Many Universities nowadays have plenty of resources to the prospective Entrepreneur. Check out the local business schools to see if they host open innovation days.
If you are looking for contractors to help, ODesk and Elance surprised me with some pretty high quality people, but you have to sift through a lot of applications.
Then, choose another venue, lather, rinse, repeat. You just need to dedicate yourself to solving this priblem. Good luck.
The idea of selling a lot of software for money is kinda foreign to developers who learned their trained purely from the internet. Even me I'd rather make an open source project and sell support rather then just sell black box software.
The goal of open source isn't to stop making money. The GPL specifically encourages companies to exist to support and make money off of software. The problem is from a business standpoint its very profitable to make somebody dependent on your product.
This is where we meet the breaking point. Their goals are different, a business wants to exploit while open source wants to grow.
How do we fix this? Adoption. When you try to sell a service to a company, namely a technology company being open source is a positive for one simple reason.
>If you fail they won't lose the service.
Its the ultimate insurance. They don't have to bet the farm on your company. It makes it easier to bid and grow on software as your failure isn't tied to your plateform's failure. Which is often the largest issue with new technology companies.
Nobody would buy an IBM mainframe if IBM started last year. Nobody would have faith, or believe. You can't do the same stunts as companies that are decades old who built the industry as a new kid on the block.
I will follow up here also. Thank you for the question!
We created http://www.doerhub.com as a free tool to fix that. People from different disciplines (from surgery, to hacking, AI, business, law, 3d printing and human rights ) post what they are working on/passionate about and anyone who likes their project can contribute by joining, advising, becoming a beta user, doing a task etc. They collaborate right on the site or outside of it. You can share areas you are advanced in and learning in so you can discover complementary people easily http://peoplesearch-doerhub.herokuapp.com/viz/ and do private or public projects.
Other than individual SV doers, UChicago was first full organization in our beta http://www.doerhub.com/at/uchicago (1/3rd of the finalists and both winners of their New Venture Challenge and Social New Venture Challenge were using the site). And now we are opening it for free to other universities, hackathons, hack clubs and organizations who want people to get stuff done with others, instead of just talking about it.
When I (a hacker) posted this drone project http://www.doerhub.com/for/personaldrone a pilot with military experience and a VC I didn't know ended up joining me. Here are some other doerhub-powered teams:
http://www.doerhub.com/for/kikisauceco
http://www.doerhub.com/for/whichvc
http://www.doerhub.com/for/bluetooth-sensor
http://www.doerhub.com/for/robopaint
I see very few projects fill any information or what/who they need.
Rule 1: Code or Contacts. Hire (at the early stage) only if the person brings something in either department that no one else can do. Most "business co-founders" can't bring funding on an idea. You don't need them, if they can't. Business co-founders are naturally going to end up with a lot of power and you can't afford the slot for a guy who can't make it rain with minimal initial effort (save your effort for building) on your part. You need a guy with the contacts to solve the funding problem, so you can focus on building the product.
Your third co-founder ("the dragon has three heads") should be a crack technologist. Someone even better than you, if you can find him, and not a friend of the business co-founder. If you have two business guys and one technologist, you're not going to have a tech company and they (along with investors) will be calling the shots. In general, you want someone who will push back on technical matters where getting it right is more important than personally winning but always take your side on the political stuff, where the reverse is true.
Once you've established this "initial three" (or 4, if the technical problem merits it) you can hire more business people, but only for defined roles (accounting, business development) and anyone who tries to turn one of your initial team against the rest is fired immediately.
Don't hire a PM until you're at 30 people. "Product" people become necessary when you're hiring second-string engineers. First-stringers PM their own work.