5 Tips On How To Find A Technical Co-Founder

With technology and the internet becoming the easiest place for entrepreneurs to start businesses, more tech startups are being launched than ever before. With tech startups, you need someone who can manage the technical side of your business.

One of the biggest struggles many business-minded entrepreneurs have is finding the perfect technical co-founder to help them execute their vision. Starting out, I dealt with the same issues and learned some many valuable lessons along the way.

In this article, I will share 5 tips on how to find a technical co-founder:

1. Pitch Different 

Technical people are constantly getting pitches from hundreds of people with business ideas just like you to join their startup. There’s a reason why they haven’t joined their startup and that’s probably because their tired of hearing the same pitch.

When pitching to technical co-founders, you have to really convince them on numerous factors:

– Your idea is not only better, but has a higher chance of succeeding.

– You’re the right guy to execute the idea.

– You have something that none of the other people pitching them have.

– You value their technical knowledge and expertise enough to give them the equity they want.

Realistically, technical founders are in high demand. However, business ideas are in high supply. That means that for every 50 or 60 ideas that a technical founder hears about, he/she buys into 1 of them.

2. Don’t Worry About Skill, Worry About Ambition 

Often times, the best techies are already working for other startups or are getting paid ridiculous amounts of money. This can make it extremely difficult for you to find a very good techie to join your business.

Depending on the technology you’re building, sometimes it’s a smarter idea to hire the techie who may not have all the answers, but has ambition. If you find a techie that’s willing to learn and do whatever it takes to build your product, you may be on to something.

3. You Never Know Where You’ll Find Your Techie

Look everywhere! It’s not easy finding the right technical piece for your startup, but hard work pays off in the end. Here are a list of places you can try searching for your technical co-founder:

– Do some research on techies who have built cool things, connect with them (email them talking about something they don’t expect you to know about them), and try building a relationship.

– Find techies who are passionate in an industry or market you’re working in.

– Go to tech events such as Hackathons, StartupWeekend, and any conferences where techies may be present.

– Post advertisements in college newspapers/bulletin boards.

– Reach out to Computer Science professors to see if they can promote your project to students for you.

4. Prove Something

When you can’t build your product, there are other things that you can do in the meantime to figure out some data for your startup. You don’t need a product to go out and survey customers to get their feedback on what you’re building.

You can even pay someone a couple hundred bucks to throw up a landing page with information about your idea and a “Buy Now” or “Sign Up” button that doesn’t work. Test how many clicks those buttons generate and figure out your conversion rate.

These are things all great entrepreneurs do. For the techie who hears hundreds of pitches, think about how many of them have actual statistics to back up their assumptions?

5. Your Friends Know Friends Who Know Friends

The biggest part of being an entrepreneur is that you have to leverage everything you have. Sometimes, the most unlikely people end up being the biggest part of your business.

If you aren’t having any luck with some of the other techniques mentioned in this article, you might want to try networking. Talk to anyone and everyone you meet about your project and what you need, you never know who they can connect you to.

Conclusion

Finding a technical co-founder is never easy, but great things are worth waiting for. Patience is key when searching for one of the biggest parts of your startup!

photo credit: plewicki via photopin cc