I’ll put this out there as a point that’s serious and I’ve come across a few times as both a founder and freelancer.
No body wants to build your idea for free. For those that are reading this and thinking that finding a cofounder is actually just finding a set of hands you can work with, be buds and create your idea and you can split it 50-50 or whatever. Just stop.
These people don’t exist in the random hallways of the internet. You’re asking for someone to get on your amusement park ride of horror for a multi year commitment, risk it all at great cost on every metric imaginable.
Sorry to be a downer but anyone worth their salt won’t be willing to do that.
I would be willing to be the tech guy for someone credible, with many years of experience building domain expertise and real connections in their industry who approaches me with a viable idea (even - and perhaps especially - if it sounds boring on its face).
I am not willing to be the tech guy for some 20-something business student "idea person."
YC wants cofounders that have strong relationships, clear leadership, and significant/differentiated contributions to the venture by both cofounders.
“Build my idea” founders generally don’t have strong relationships and also not true hustlers, they literally have an idea, nothing more, which is worthless; met 10s of thousands of “founders” and the build my idea founders are definitely a type of (wannabe) founders.
No one cares about ideas, they care about growth, especially if they don’t have an existing relationship with you. If you want ideas, they are easy to find, any experienced founder would be happy to give you “good” ideas for free if they liked you; that does not mean the ideas are guaranteed to work, nor will magically build themselves. If you think your idea is worth something with nothing built, go ask potential customers or investors for money to build it; seriously, if it’s really such a good idea, they’ll give you money to build it; just make sure your estimated costs include realistic market rate labor costs.
It's not that there are no people who would want to risk it "all" and fall in love with the idea, it's just that most people are hedging bets [1] and the ones who are already successful are not that inclined to jump on board with somebody with just an idea. Friendship really helps!
It's also very hard to fall with someone else's idea - you are attached, it's your baby, others are not that attached. The job is to allow others to meddle with the idea, so they can treat it like their own.
Personally I've hired 2 people over the past year, one of whom I wanted to become co-founder and he declined - even when he is young, we have a good relationship together and he really had not that much to loose. He is working for respected company and don't just want to dump it like that. That's why joining incubators like YC can help a lot - helps with potential co-founders to join full time, among other things of course.
Sooo, now the plan is to build MVP and achieve early product market fit hehe.
[1] https://youtu.be/ephzgxgOjR0?t=958 I really recommend these videos, as a solo startup founder, working on a project for the past 10 years, at 32 and being broke listenting to this makes me much less isolated. These guys are really articulating ideas perfectly
This is really not true. How do you think people start companies together when they don't have capital? By splitting 50-50 and working on something "for free" on nights and weekends.
But it's not one guy has the idea, one guy does the work. It's two people who have the same vision working together. One might be more technical than the other but the less technical person is still bringing something worth 50%.
It's not even about bringing something worth 50%, you will often find at that early stage even having someone who brings 35% value while working as a team is worth giving 50% stake cause startups are so hard. It's usually down to owning 100% of nothing or 50% of something in those situation.
Tell me how much are you getting paid to write this? But then, how are your hands moving?
It reminds me of a guy who argued, as a beginner, I could never do security by myself. He pointed out the flaws, I fixed them. Eventually he said I just needed to hire a professional to do these things for me. His friend joked, you mean like you are doing right now? But this was wrong and that was wrong and this and that! His friend: But that is all fixed now isn't it?
An even better story: A guy I knew for a few weeks said he was going swimming. If I could answer his phone for a few hours and write down the messages. His phone rang the whole time! It was some kind of prank. People wanting to buy things, people wanting to sell things, people who owed him money, people he owed money to... It just kept ringing. He planned for it! He squeezed a ton of work into those 3 hours. He was very happy when he returned. A note book full of stuff. He only expected me to answer a few calls but I was to damn curious what the next call was about.
50%?? I did a bunch of coding project for free for peoples companies. Just for fun, no pressure. Last one would probably cost 50 k to get done.
5 min ago I was actually thinking that if I didn't find love I would quit my job and just go help this guy.
No body wants to build your idea for free. For those that are reading this and thinking that finding a cofounder is actually just finding a set of hands you can work with, be buds and create your idea and you can split it 50-50 or whatever. Just stop.
These people don’t exist in the random hallways of the internet. You’re asking for someone to get on your amusement park ride of horror for a multi year commitment, risk it all at great cost on every metric imaginable.
Sorry to be a downer but anyone worth their salt won’t be willing to do that.