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.
As a CTO i’ve noticed a couple of things in your post, which don’t sound good to me at all. I’ll try to explain them.
You’re complaining about being a female and POC, but being a POC myself. This has never stopped me from anything. On YC people only care about things like marketable skills, idea (no idea is preferred), connections, knowledge of industry, experience building businesses.
A CTO does way more than just “build” the product. One of the red flags you’ve shown is that you are planning how long it will take. We as CTOs will tell YOU how long it will take as we have the experience building things like that.
Looking at your idea it sounds like you are building some sort of social network and your business model is ads. Which means that the actual product is the people on your platform. Building a social network is one of the hardest if not the hardest thing to build. It will take a LOOONG time before you will see any profits from an idea like that.
Personal rule i’ve made for myself, I won’t build anything if there’s no potential customers. I want to see a need in the market and there should already be people that want to use my product and are even willing to pay for it regardless if it exists or not. I will find these people myself or talk to people to see what they actually need in order to validate the idea. As a matter of fact i’ve seen people get funding with just a validated idea and without a single line of code written.
As a sidenote for you, it might be good to get some experience building tech products or learning how they are build first. The reason i’m saying this is that it’s also an important skill to reasonably estimate how long it will take to build something. If you’re going to be hiring contractors you are going to be screwed/disappointed with the results, because you have no idea how long something should take.
Please take this as advice on how potential CTOs might view your idea. It’s not meant to break you down.
Silicon valley veteran here.
- First 10 at Eventbrite ($1 to $700m valuation).
- started and led Instacarts growth team.
- Founding engineer at reforge ($0 to $500m valuation).
- Recently Solo founder of a couple microsaas companies doing $1m ARR.
I’m a “CTO” who not only writes code, but does product management, marketing, analysis, sales, design, and can hire and lead teams up to 50 people (my limit).
When I look for a cofounder, I look for qualities that I don’t have, like extremely good connections in the industry I want to be in, a strong following, or someone with an unfair advantage in a market.
What do you bring to the table? What makes you the best person to build this gen z game?
I spent a whole year trying to understand the market I’m targeting and their psychology, and not to mention being a gen z myself. Aside from studying the consumers themselves, I studied all the viral platforms that Gen Z are always using, from tiktok to to Omegle to all the live-streaming crap like Bigo… I know what they do to have fun! And I know these kinds of apps run on Ads (which seems to be a turnoff for most) but they are all worth billions now, aren’t they? I can literally see a clear road map of how I can make my startup like that in less than a year, but I can’t get anything done due to lack of funds and technical necessities.
For someone like you (I really admire your achievements btw!), of course I wouldn’t be bringing anything to the table. But for a regular CTO, I’d literally be carrying the whole business on my back aside from the technical stuff. From generic (free) marketing, to scalling and selling the company.
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:
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You could have done focus groups and explored different metrics to measure engagement with different social media elements.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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This will sound harsh, I’m sorry.
Market research is not good enough. I would not invest my time or money into a founder who has only done market research.
You will have to take it a step further, as /u/NWmba described in their post.
You don’t know what kind of tech would go viral. That’s a rookie statement. A statement like can will filter out any humbled/experienced founders
I’ve been trying to find a co-founder for 4 years. It’s basically impossible. Your’e doing a trial project together which is a great move but make sure you’re prioritizing for skillsets that you don’t have.I replied to this in another subreddit but I’ll add another thought I didn’t mention -
As a nontechnical cofounder and product manager I’ve found that the single worst thing you can go to a dev of any level is to believe that you as the nontechnical know better, and start saying things like -
It shouldn’t take that long It can’t be that hard Just get it done it’s easy How come (insert whatever post series d startup name) can do it so quickly I know the market better than you
I could probably build your idea with a no code platform (like bubble), I don’t know about 2 weeks, most people have full time jobs/schooling/family obligations. Maybe in a month or two though.
But I don’t think I would work with you based on this post. You sound like the type of person who is absolutely the problem. It’s possible that two people blew out on you, it happens all the time. But to assume you are in no way part of the problem and that your idea will go viral are two very big red flags for anyone with any experience.
My suggestion to you is to start doing the marketing, build a waitlist. And if you get enough sign ups people will be throwing money at you and begging to build this for you. If you have some spare time go on bubble.io and learn to build whatever you want for yourself. The marketing can be pretty low cost (if not completely free) if you build a brand on social media. If it fails, don’t go around casting blame on everyone and everything except yourself like you did here. Learn why it failed and use that knowledge to do better next time.
The red flags in this post are alarming af, that I don’t even feel like writing feedback because the OP will end up playing the victim card anyway.
Anyway, all the best. Please introspect.
I stopped reading when I saw MVP and 2 weeks in the same sentence.
That is why it is your fault before it is anyone else’s. Period.
And all I ask of them is to just finish a damn MVP in 2 weeks
Depending on the actual specifications, setting up an MVP can take months. Also, you being the non-technical co-founder does not mean you can just ignore all technical aspects and lump them on your partner. It means your partner knows technical aspects better so they call the shots. You are still expected to contribute there. Your partner is unlikely to code the whole thing anyway, they are more expected to manage your hired coders, and you can help with that too.
What makes you think these two co founders are not taking your idea and building it themselves without you?
My guess is you are not NA/EU, and if any of these cofounders are, they may have more access to resources to get to market before you.
Any contracts (if any exist) would be hard enforce because it is international and it would take a lot of money from you to enforce a contract internationally.
Because ideas are worthless by themselves. It’s about executing your idea giving some kinda value to your customers. If this person can build, market, sell, and service it themselves then they can damn sure think of an idea as good or better than yours. You’re also going to be marketing your company for anyone and everyone to see. What stops anyone from stealing your idea?
OP can’t execute the ideas. The other founders might be able to in NA and Europe.
Learn coding. Come back and read this post.
Stop hunting. Problem solved. Next.
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.