Do people actually find their technical co-founder on IH?
I see dozens of request from makers looking for their co-founder (mostly technical) and I rarely see answers to theses posts/requests. I was wondering if this actually works.
If you have an horror story I would be curious about that too.
Cheers.
comments are not the best way to connect, most posters leave an email or have one in their profile so communication is done somewhere else.
there is no way to confirm if match was found but there is a tendency of wrong expectations where the search is for technical cofounder see here for more details: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/why-you-wont-find-a-tech-cofounder-77baebbd35
I have spoken with a lot of founders the past year and in general things fall in 3 categories.
most of the opportunities here are connecting with people outside of the city, state, country you are in, but most people don't realize there are specifics when working remotely like that or that they really can't work remotely at all.
"looking for free labor with no connection to reality", yeah that's the scary part for me. How do you deal with someone who does not value the execution side of things? The only way I can think of is to brush them off or ignore the "offer" but there might be a more productive way to handle them.
I do see some people who have just lost contact with their outsourced development and are stuck with an unstable project. Not sure how to handle that kind of requests because it means extra loads of work for extended periods of time. On the other hand, they understand the value of what you offer.
Thank for the detailed comment, it was helpful.
"looking for free labor with no connection to reality" - you listen, smile, say goodbye at the end of the call and forget them knowing you will not get your time back. There is no productive way to do something with person like this and the main reason potential tech co founders to lose interest of the site (at least the more experienced people)
The second group you mention, the people that got in trouble for one reason or another can be helped, but unfortunately there are a number of reasons why they got in trouble in the first place.
if it was for purely technical reasons (co-founder left, bad tech partners, person in charge of tech had no idea what they are doing, etc..) with a lot of work you can move forward but need good advice from someone (this is the only reason at the moment I'm monitoring this forum) and some sort of traction on the project.
But there are also a lot of projects that got in trouble for a good reason. Someone started on an idea that had potential but after a few months reality that their cofounder doesn't have the capabilities to do what the biasness end requires hit them in the face. Selling the idea to 1 person (the tech cofounder) is not the same as selling it to 100K (the customers) you need to make the thing profitable, you need understanding of the market, connections with the right partners and ability to reach a significant amount of people.
Sometimes the problem is that people want to build a startup to sell, not a business to run and grow. All of the stories about the "garage startups" that broke the market in a few months are the expiation of the rule that 99% of startups fail. The idea is to build something give it for free to attract people use the numbers to attract funding then use the funding to market to more people and then exit, it is a way of making money but people are not that stupid, you may get some money in the beginning but the exit will be more of a "funding got canceled" than "few millions in $ retirement money"
This comment was deleted 5 years ago