I’ve been on the YC site for months, met 2 cofounders, worked together on 2 different ideas, almost finished 2 MVPs (never more than 20%), but then ditched the whole project due to lack of communication. Like, is communication and constant updates so much to ask for these days? I promise, it was all them, not me. I do my parts perfectly, I’m fun to be around, I listen, I communicate, I give feedback, I lead, I generate ideas, I find customers, I do all the business stuff, I spoke to tons of VCs, I planned the whole year, I literally do 80% of the work… And all I ask of them is to just finish a damn MVP in 2 weeks so we can get customers and find investors quickly! Are all the tech people this unserious or am I just unlucky?

Trust me, if I had enough money I would have just hired an engineer with a contract and a salary instead of all this headache. Sorry if I sound like the bad person here lol. I really am just so fed up of this unseriousness I keep seeing!

Now I’m back on the site to get a 3rd cofounder. Fingers crossed! But my options are really just very limited to begin with. Imagine being a female, and a POC in the startup world? Literally almost all the “good/unscammy” profiles on YC’s site either require you to be in NA/EU, or they all just wanna do fintech and AI, or they all just indirectly want you to have 6+ years of experience. I read every profile to the fullest before writing a message just so that I can write something personal to show that I care, but I still end up getting ignored lol. Since my profile is perfect compared to most, I really can’t help but take this personally. I feel like I am pre-judged the moment they read my name so they don’t even bother reading the message lol

For the sake of it, I will tell you guys what I’m working on and please let me know if anybody still wants to be my CTO after all of this :))

I’ve been studying Gen Z’s behaviour around the world for like a whole year, and I know what kind of tech would go viral. I have this very developed idea for an app that allows Gen Z to connect with others but while (playing a game of) answering interesting questions or debating a certain topic together. I believe this will unconsciously help them develop their interpersonal skills and teach them new things while having fun with other people in the process. I can already imagine this going pretty viral and I already have the marketing strategy ready. I also have a UI outline, and a rough pitch deck that includes all the business stuff. To be honest, I even have a clear quick exit strategy.

If this sound interesting to anybody and you’re not a mean person and feel like you’d love to join in, I’d more than love to have a team. I’m either looking for a CTO to build the MVP QUICKLY and launch it, or looking for an angel investor that will fund me to hire a tech person to build the MVP QUICKLY, while I handle the rest of the business stuff. Honestly, I’d prefer the latter because I don’t know if I can trust a CTO anymore lol.

  • NWmba@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    10 months ago

    I think the reason you’re being downvoted is because you seem like you didn’t employ any sort of methodology to your “study”

    It’s not bad to look at elements of different successful platforms and imagine how they could be put together or recombines to make an appealing product.

    But the way you are speaking about it suggests you have unrealistic expectations of how well you understand your target market. For example:

    1. You could have done focus groups and explored different metrics to measure engagement with different social media elements.

    2. You could have made prototypes in Figma, or just with pen and paper and done user experience testing with groups of people, so that you’d at least have fully fleshed out screens and user flows to start from.

    3. You could have run offline versions of what you describe, to iron out the wrinkles in real life before committing it to code. Like running a meet up where people debate topics and answer questions in a similar way as you describe.

    4. You might have made a questionnaire with self-reported data from your target gen-z group about what they liked and didn’t like about different platforms and then conducted 3 surveys a day for a year to get 1000 replies.

    It may be that you’ve done some of this, but if so, it doesn’t come across. It sounds a bit more like you tried using different platforms for a year, and then made your own design based on your impressions. It’s not impossible that it could work, but is far from guaranteed. Even with more methodological approaches it’s far from a sure thing. Companies employ armies of people with decades of experience doing exactly this and have failed to achieve success. There are tens of thousands of people employed by the biggest social media companies in the world who have both the experience and desire to build the next big thing who have raised significant money to try, and have still failed.

    Not attempting to be discouraging, but just to reflect back as to why it comes across as a bit self-important to assume your app would go viral from the idea stage alone.