Where do top technical co-founders hang?
After years of indie hacking, finally have a project experiencing excellent waitlist demand (in AI <> nonprofit space).
I'm a semi-technical founder (self-taught dev, good enough for 0->1, but bad at scalable development). As such, looking for a world-class technical co-founder to collaborate with to build a great product.
Have had less success on YC Founder Match in the past. Has anyone else met outstanding technical co-founders in other places?
I would say it's impossible to find a tech cofounder in such an early stage (without confirmed pre-sales or funding) outside of your direct network, somebody who trusts you and you can trust.
As a technical person, the internet is full of "idea people" who don't seem to bring something else to the table except the idea, and then expect the technical cofounder to build it for like a 10% stake or something. Which is laughable, if not borderline offensive for that technical cofounder.
In order to attract that tech cofounder, you have to showcase that you have the sales skills, network, track record or the investment. Or a combination of these.
Because I'll tell you a secret: technical people are scared shitless to sell. Like I have literal nightmares about having to pick up a phone and cold call potential clients. If I were to partner up with somebody, they have to be able to do that part by themselves.
That's why the ideal "founding team" has a tech person, a sales person (connections or a track record of being able to gather leads and get clients) and a business person (strategy + connections + insider knowledge about the industry).
This is really great advice! Some hard realities.
If you are semi-technical and can go from 0->1, look for a co-founder who knows how to sell or market and ideally the product/industry that you are interested in. B/w the 2 of you, you can may be get to Market and sell more and then find more technical people later to scale.
If you have excellent waitlist demand, it sounds like you have some validation of the idea but haven't built anything. If that's the case, why do you need a co-founder to do scalable development? If you can build 0->1, can't you build an MVP that solves the core problem and start getting some revenue?
Once you have some revenue / traction it'll be much easier to find a co-founder, or employee, to handle the technical scaling issues.
Congrats. Try adding relevant conferences to find your tech co founder.
If you have decent enough dev skills to build a prototype as you are doing customer development in order to validate your idea, you don't necessarily need a tech co-founder at the beginning. There are very good full stack frameworks you can use for that phase of a startup. Once you have validated your project and are starting to have paying customers, and want to switch from validating to growing, that is the point where a technical co-founder, hired CTO, or fractional CTO makes sense. At that point you want to start thinking in long term sustainable and scalable development terms. Assuming you have used a modern full stack framework and sensible development standards during your validation phase, you should not have problems switching into growth mode tech wise. Happy to jump on a call to explain further.