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How to find a co-founder (or not)

18 Apr 2013

I’m in the process of founding my next start-up. I already have a history of failed attempts. This time I want to approach things differently and look for someone that would competent my deficiencies.

So I’ve been actively looking and talking to some people. I’ve found some interesting ideas, some people worth listening to. But I haven’t found a perfect match.

Here’s a couple of observations - there’s a lot of hoopla around startups - it’s the current fashion so everyone wants to try. There’s a lot of people with ideas, but a lot of them believes that creating a site is a matter of weeks (or even days) and it’s not a hard work. They seem to believe that you should first build the stuff and they will come. 

So they don’t understand why would anyone try to verify the idea ASAP. Like - let’s build a web site and process orders manually first, what? Are you crazy? I want to have feature X, and feature Y, and this site needs to look great, and it must be super fast, AJAX and mobile. You go now, build it.

I haven’t found anyone yet that would tell me that the idea came from his observation or a specific need, or lack of existing solutions. Usually it’s like “I had a dream” now let’s build it :-) Customer development, customer what?

It’s hard to get software developer buddies to be interested, if I’m talking to anyone they treasure their ideas. You want to join me? Great! You want me to join you? Sure, but first let me finish this, and that ;-) Or “sorry mate I’m so swamped”.

But it’s not that tragic after all. What I found is that talking with different people gives me a new perspective. I collect observations, it’s nothing that I can execute on now, but it gives food for thought.

Also looking or not in the mean time I’m trying to keep myself busy doing some fun stuff - like working on a Buffer Mac helper, or dreaming about a new better Twitter client with focus on lists, RSS like experience, and multi columns (TweetDeck style).

Because I love building software, and I want to learn new things.

In case you want to try to look for a co-founder too, there’s currently a plenty of places where you can start:

And good luck!