I have been building a startup for the past couple of years. Before any development work was done we sold our idea using a website, Typeform w/ Stripe, and manual delivery of the solution. We made a few thousand dollars doing this, and along with some other tests we had enough validation that there is a market we can build for.
We found a technical cofounder and by the end of 2022 (~4-5 month build) we had a bare bones MVP. The technical cofounder moved on with other projects, so we went looking for another. It was a 3 month process and while the replacement we found was competent, they didn’t have the time to move things forward substantially and left the team just recently.
Building a startup is tough. You need time, often around other commitments without being paid. The process from idea to MVP/beta takes months or longer, to find product-market can take years (and many examples in this post actually took much longer than they documented).
So I’m in the process of looking for a new technical cofounder (view to CTO) and I’d be interested to hear the experiences of others.
If you are a non-technical founder, how do you find an engineer/developer who can commit 20-30 hours per week before you build revenue or attract funding to pay the founding team salaries?
If you are a developer, what is the most important signal that a startup is worth spending that amount of time on around your other commitments?
We have some financial validation, we’re in an incubator program, operational costs are covered (from some early investment + incubator stipend + ecosystem grant), we have a solid deck and whitepaper that outline the vision, prepared to work with someone locally or 100% remote, maybe there is something we are missing…
I am doing the following:
- Posting to industry specific job boards
- Checking through YC Cofounder Matching (+ Cofounders Lab)
- Searching LinkedIn + cold outreach to local developers with experience that is a match
- Reaching out to contacts in my network, i.e. through the incubator and beyond
Where else would you be looking?
It seems that many developers, even joining as a cofounder, expect a salary right out of the gate. Where do I find those with realistic expectations and an interest to bootstrap, even if we don’t secure investment capital?
How much equity are you offering?
A developer can get any job and be paid relatively well. You’d need to convince someone to invest their time in this product so that it will perhaps grow and be worth something, most likely it will end up being worth nothing, therefore people will rather work for real money rather than equity.
Open to an equal split among cofounders if we find someone with an equal level of dedication, e.g., not trying to fit the startup around full time work.
I am currently working 0.6FTE (to pay the bills as we bootstrap) and taking a 40% hit to a more or less guaranteed income, so I understand it takes sacrifice.
I need to find developers with the risk tolerance to take a salary hit upfront (even once funded, salary is likely to be less than full market rate).
Then you’re not doing the proper fundraise and investors will care. If you don’t raise enough money to pay all of you decent salaries then you all will not be focusing 100% on startup and that might be a red flag for a lot of people.