My best source of leads for technical cofounders has been industry-specific job listing boards. Just make sure your listing is specific (i.e., no salary, vesting equity, etc) and expect to verify they understand the startup journey before spending too much time with an applicant.
Being in Australia, you should try Facebook groups like ‘Sydney Startups’ and other local startup groups.
It’s a good idea, but already being done as far as I can tell (examples: bhuman.ai, reachout.ai). Not sure if these are the expensive variants that you are talking about, but is there a reason you believe you can achieve a better quality and price? Maybe there is an approach you can take which makes it a superior experience.
Through experience and because the features are already built and working in a dev environment.
We still have a front-end engineer working with us, and we will get the MVP completed with their help, but I’d still ideally like to onboard someone with greater availability and stronger backend experience so we can build momentum prior to putting our hand out for capital.
Fair point. I have raised some capital. Some F&F investors, an ecosystem grant, a stipend through an incubator program, just not enough that it would support full time salaries for the team.
We have an MVP that needs perhaps a couple of weeks work before it’s next release and then the aim is to raise a round with angels that understand the sector. I just don’t want to try for that until we have a ‘complete team’ that I am confident can build/show momentum.
We have had some forward progress on the app, just not as much as I’d like.
I did contemplate no-code and have explored it. I spent a day working through various Bubble introduction videos and guides, then another half day exploring the limitations. Everything points to integrating three.js into a HTML canvas on Bubble being code heavy (for which you still need a developer or learn to code) and with very poor performance even if achieved.
It’s something I’ve considered. But we are at a stage where the MVP/beta product is fairly advanced, which would make this a huge backwards step. There are some technical hurdles that would make using no-code particularly difficult to get the product where I think it needs to be.
Also, even if we could get the product traction using a no-code MVP (then raise funding and hire a CTO), I’d rather find our technical founder who is dedicated enough to join during the bootstrapped phase as, otherwise it’s a bit like a rich man looking for a wife… you never really know if she’s around for the vision or just for the money / security 🙂
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).
Monetisation via ads would require a lot of use to be viable. I would start with the premium version first and see if people are prepared to pay for it.
Does the video need to be live, or could you start with short async messages in reply to the conversation starters that you create?
I’m wondering if you could use Circle (circle.so) for handling user authentication and signup, then create private channels or group chats to handle the connection between two people and Videoask (videoask.com) to capture video, upload from there to video host of your choice to embed in Circle. It would be a bit messy, a bit clunky, but if you can prove there is a real problem to be solved here and that people will pay to access it, you will significantly increase the opportunity to find a sticky cofounder and/or investors.
How complex are the interactions?
You’re expecting a lot in 2 weeks unless you’re asking for a barebones implementation in a no-code platform, and if that’s the case, why not spend the time to learn how to build it yourself?
If the idea is as solid as you say, why not create a very manual version first and test with your audience? i.e., you could pair people up and put them in a Telegram/Whatsapp chat with a bot or yourself doing the moderating/question creation?
Are you expecting people to pay for the experience or how would you monetise it?
Have a look at Circle (https://circle.so). Feels like a good fit based on your customers and can easily be hosted on a subdomain e.g. community.yourdomain.com
NFTs created before AI was capable of generating quality art 😄