Looking for technical co-founder for already built product with organically growing audience
Hey all - I've been building What the GIF?! (whatthegifgame.com) for ~2.5 years now. I'm not technical but have worked with one great developer through UpWork since inception. Unfortunately he has to move on and my partner and I think it's time to bring someone on as a technical co-founder. It's a side hustle for us both and we're at the point where we are organically growing the audience without any marketing. What do you all suggest for how to find a technical co-founder for a part-time gig? Would be full split on equity and no cash comp as we are pre-revenue. Next big feature set is paywalling the game so we can start tapping this audience for revenue. Thanks!
Dylan, organic growth without marketing is the holy grail - that's real validation! The paywall feature you're adding is a smart move.
For finding a part-time technical co-founder, I'd recommend being upfront about the tech stack (what's currently built with), estimated hours/week needed, and what specific technical challenges they'll be solving. Part-time arrangements work best when scope is crystal clear.
Also consider: does this need a "co-founder" or a strong first technical hire with equity? Sometimes the latter gives you more flexibility. Either way, having existing users puts you in a strong position. Good luck!
I think you have to be realistic. The app you have is buggy and not looking good. As an en engineer myself i could rewrite that probably in a week but i'm not interested.
The issue i see is more towards the idea itself. It's like you came up with an idea without any research behind it. Like realistically who will play to play a word game? Most games are free (especially on mobile) so realistically no one.
The best option you would have is to have ads and to create game features to allow maybe streamers to play the game and have their audience join.
There's also the issue of copyright. Where do you get the images etc...
It's hard to imagine how i'd get ROI from using my time in a "fun project". I guess the best bet is if you'd get a student to use this as his school project.
It's also not clear who is involved in this and what those people do to help the project.
Thanks for the feedback. I appreciate your perspective and it's helping me think about some angles I haven't fully thought through.
What I will say is...
There is solid precedent for paying for games like this. Jackbox Games is essentially the only player in the paid online party game world. They do >$10m in revenue per year and one of their most popular games is a word game (Quiplash). The IRL versions of this are Cards Against Humanity and What Do You Meme, both very successful games.
Yes, Jackbox has a far superior product right now, but I've also spent less than $2,000 to get this game to where it is. I feel it's a pretty solid MVP for that cost and has validated that people will play this game and tell their friends about it.
Ads are definitely a route I'm considering and copyright is something I'd have to understand further (currently creating our own GIFs but we do have about half of them from Giphy). We write all of our own captions in-house.
I think goals are important to keep in mind here. I don't envision this as an enormous company. My goal is to passively generate income and be able to spend less than 3 hours per week maintaining it. I feel like that is achievable with a game like this. My "pitch" to a co-founder is a passive income stream for a low time commitment.
You said. 'I feel it's a pretty solid MVP for that cost and has validated that people will play this game'
In order to have it really validate you should check numbers on which users are coming back. Using google analytics should be a way to do that.
Just because you have people joining and playing one game doesn't validate the idea. Make sure you have people coming back if that's the case than you could go forward otherwise i think you're just wasting your time and money on this.
I kinda have to disagree with the majority here. I checked out the game and actually enjoyed it... A LOT! It gives me cards against humanity vibes but with a fresh style. I played 1.5 full games until i realized that I play against bots lol 😂
Anyways, I have to agree with the others when it comes to financials. Ad revenue might not be enough to grow this thing big i guess. Maybe go check out how cards against humanity monetizes their games. Nevertheless best of luck to you guys. Great idea!
Thank you! The intention was a modern, mobile version of Cards Against Humanity and What Do You Meme.
The major online competitor is Jackbox Games and they charge for their games.
If you want to make it attractive to a technical cofounder, you need to show that the project has the potential to make some money that will ultimately be used to pay them for their time.
If you only have 350 monthly users after 2.5 years, they have little incentive to work on your project. You have not shown that it has the capacity to make it worth their while.
If you create an aggressive marketing plan based on some test-run ad campaigns and have some numbers to show (eg. 'we spent $500 on facebook ads and got 2000 new monthly users'), then you have something to entice potential technical cofounders.
As it stands now, it doesn't seem like you are ready for a technical cofounder. You should work on your marketing campaign to increase monthly users and hire developers off upwork or fiverr to continue improving your product.
Also, in 2.5 years you could have learned to code yourself and you would be able to work on your own project. I highly suggest you start learning to code if you want to create code-based products.
Appreciate the feedback! I hear you on the investment in marketing and learning to code. FWIW - while it has been 2.5 years, it's been very much a side project and slow burn. I also think the time commitment for a developer wouldn't be more than a couple hours per week, and it's at the stage of being a few hours of work away from being monetizable. I want to put the revenue features in place before investing in advertising, so we can realize ROI on that spend instead of randomly acquiring non-paying users. IMO - it's a relatively low risk and low effort way for a developer to potentially quickly realize a passive income stream.
I think that's an interesting discussion topic on learning to code and could be a whole thread. I've considered it in the past. Personally I'm in the camp of I'd rather focus my time on getting better on the business, operations and product management side, instead of trying to become an okay coder. I'd rather partner up or outsource (which I've done to date at minimal cost).
I understand your point of view wanting to focus on the business end of things, but realistically, that's the easy part. Anybody can learn the business stuff, and programmers who want to start a business go out and do just that. There is a great YCombinator video where they discuss this topic.
Another issue I'm seeing in your comments is that you are trying to estimate how long you think something will take when you don't know how to do it yourself. That's like somebody who has never done any electrical work trying to estimate how long it will take to wire a house.
Even if you are just hiring coders to do work for you, you still need to know how to code. I ran an agency for a couple of years, and I hired people off of upwork and fiverr to build some stuff for me occasionally. The difference is that I know what good software looks like so I know if what they were delivering was quality work or not. And if I wanted to make any changes down the road, which I often did, I could just do it myself. I paid for freelancers to get it 80% of the way there, then I did the rest.
I remember 15 years ago I had so many website and app ideas, and I tried to get people to partner up with me because I thought I had some great ideas that people would want to get onboard with. It turns out that all the people that know how to build software also have a bunch of ideas of their own that they want to build. That's why they learned how to code. And if they are going to work on something for free (or with the promise of future riches) then they are going to work on their own projects. Anyway, as soon as I realized that I started learning to build websites and apps myself. I highly suggest that if you want to build websites and apps, you learn how to build websites and apps.
What language is your game written in?
Blade - 88.6%, PHP - 11.4%
I'll have to agree with some of the others. The game is based on potentially copyrighted images. That alone is a bit of a non-starter.
Hello Dylan-
Interested dicussing the opportunities further. Can we chat sometime next week? What’s your email address?
DM me on Twitter! https://twitter.com/DylanShooska
Slightly unrelated, but this idea is very similar to what Discord is doing with their game "Know what I meme"
Interesting! Thanks for sharing
you need to find something else to do, the game is not something anyone will pay for
you can improve the graphics to make it more attractive and convert (rewrite) to a mobile app, but it will be a waste of money, there is no way to monetize this
What makes you say that?
He's correct. You will never make money out of a game like this. Especially as you are not a coder who can play around as a side project.
Thanks for the motivation :)
This comment was deleted 3 years ago
How many monthly active users do we have?
350+ in the past month. We do no marketing so this is word of mouth and organic traffic. This is also steadily growing month over month.