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.
Someone told me once “I keep a very short list of people I could cofound with” when I asked him how he found his cofounders.
This was not helpful in the moment but stuck with me over the years. There’s no quick fix to finding cofounders. It’s a process of connecting, finding similar vision, complementary skills, and building trust. It’s a bit like dating, and honestly, the technical cofounders are the “pretty girls” in the platform. It helps to have money and an attractive profile, and even then expect to get ghosted a lot.
People seem to be coming down hard on you here, and they make some valid points. I’d chalk it up to inexperience that is showing through. It doesn’t mean you can’t make it, experience is something that you learn by doing, after all.
What I’d recommend: you’re better off spending time building whatever you can on your own. You don’t need a fully functioning app that will go viral. Build a community. If you want people to talk together about subjects and answer questions and meet each other, do it using told you have before you start building your own. Connect on WhatsApp. Host meetups in person or virtual ones on zoom. Start a discord or twitch stream where you put into practice as many pieces of what you envision as you can.
It will be so much easier to build an app for a preexisting community that knows you and that you understand well than it will be to attract an audience to an app you build no matter how clear your ideas are. The community building is the hard part. And the fun fact is that if you get good at managing that community, it will become much much easier to attract people to your team.