Given up with Tech Co-Founders

I think what you're experiencing is the honeymoon phase with projects. I'm not sure why developers lose interest, but I'm sure it's not personal, and I think a lot of times what you'll find on here is that techies will often sabotage their own projects before they even get off the ground.

When projects start, the possibilities are endless. Everything is exciting and everyone is thinking about what the product could be. Soon, after the newness has worn off, you're left with all of the work that you now have to do and the project is less sexy.

Finding a good Co-Founder is more than just knowing whether someone can code something. In fact, I've even told people who I regularly have meetings with that I would not be a good tech fit for their project simply because I'm not passionate about the thing that they're trying to make, even though I think they're incredible people.

Purpose and passion are the main things that get me through my ruts. After the fresh, exciting, honeymoon phase has ended, I persevere because of that purpose. Purpose creates clarity, and clarity lets you realize your roadmap.

I'm not sure what kind of vetting process you have for finding a tech co-founder, but perhaps spend a bit longer talking to them before jumping in. Some people just have really busy lives and their side hustle gets pushed lower in priority when they're busy (I think this is also a good reason why you should be passionate, because any distraction or loss of focus could easily be the end of a project)

Have you looked into no-code? Is your venture something that you can build your MVP yourself?

funny (sorry) -- i'm reading this after posting an idea for how to address this type of problem

Hey Louis,
the problem isn't only with finding a tech co-founder, it's a problem the other way round as well. I've been looking at projects and dealt with my fair share of problems too.

Something to remember is that you're asking people to work for free essentially. So some would say that they don't have to be professional ?

Upwork is a joke. The most broken place I've spent time on.

That said. I'm open to projects, so if you have a document with the basic idea of your app/website that you can send me, I'll have a look.

AND, as an added bonus, You will hear back from me :D
My email address is in my profile

I agree with most what other commented, but want to suggest some other approach that might work for you.
It seems that everyone thinks that co-founder should be the same person who will be coding the product?
From my perspective the tech co-founder should be a software architect, or I worst case situation, a team leader or senior software developer.
Such co-founder should be able to suggest technologies and people needed to do the actual coding. Also he should be ready to invest some money in order to contribute for the coding activities, along with other founders.

That definitely sounds hard. But I think it's more of a people problem than a tech-cofounders specific problem. People don't think twice when ghosting internet strangers. I used to feel terrible about being ghosted but I've learned to live with it.

Don't have much helpful advice other than to hang in there and keep trying, friend. Have none of the people you've talked to given you any solid reasons as to why they don't wanna work with you?

Hate to say this but either you're talking to the wrong kind of developers, offering a bad deal to them, or may just need to work on your sales skills.

Just my personal experience but I've been able to convince devs to join me for all of my prior projects before. (maybe i'm just lucky though)

Rejection is part of the game, take it as learnings.

Sometimes you have to get 10, 200, 30, 67 NOs, to get 1 YES.

Think of all the NOs as valuable lessons you learn from books, blog posts, mentors, etc. It's valuable, but only if you learn from it.

Ranting is healthy.

I'm in the same boat, happy to be a resource!

I spent months working with agencies while trying to find a tech co-founder at my last company and eventually settled on someone. Emphasis on settled.

This time around, I'm proving the concept by building an MVP in Bubble and getting revenue coming in. Cofounders, like investors, will be more interested in something proven.

I feel you, and we've been in a similar situation when we first started building VReel. Being completely non-technical ourselves, we were really set on that we had to find a technical co-founder to make it happen. After having interviewed a few people we decided to go for an outsourced development agency, and overall it has been working pretty good.

I don't know how technical you are, but my partner who's a digital marketer made sure to learn some basic technical language and skills so he could understand what was going on from our dev teams side, which probably saved us a bit of time and money.

In hindsight, Im not sure what would have been the right thing to do, but we have a well working platform and 100% ownership ourselves. Feel free to reach out to my co-founder (and partner) Edward Thomas on LinkedIn or something if you have any questions about our journey :)

Good luck!

Don't get too down, man!

I think it's just hard in general to get anyone to commit to building a business on an idea without any immediate compensation or reward, whether the idea is validated or not. As such, the onus falls on the idea generator to move the needle to a point where it becomes less and less dubious.

Is there any way you can get started without a dev? Plenty of no-code tools out there today.

Developers want to build products for other developers, it's that simple. It's what they know and love and will work on passionately in their free time / for free.

(Big-time generalization, but you should be able to find numerous examples to support it on this site. Also not a knock on devs...)