Ask HN: How to find a non-technical cofounder?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9100089

by vhf • 11 years ago

18 15 11 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

There has been a lot of stories on how to find a technical cofounder, but I don't recall any on how to find a Marketing or Sales cofounder, for example.

pskittle• 11 years ago

work with them on a small project based on the challenges u are facing

sarciszewski2• 11 years ago

That's a good idea after you've found one, but finding one in the first place is what the OP was asking.

austinhutch• 11 years ago

I think asking for help in some of the aforementioned subreddits and websites with a small project like the OP suggested would be a great way to garner interest.

cat9• 11 years ago

In the same way that finding developers is easier if you go where the developers are, finding sales & marketing people is easier if you go where the sales & marketing people are.

E.g. frequent community sites like http://inbound.org, check http://meetup.com for relevant events and participate there...

notahacker• 11 years ago

A lot of the advice is the same as for finding tech cofounders

- People with aptitude for business development and marketing and an interest in found tech startups attend the same meetings and hang around in similar forums to developers with similar aspirations, and quite possibly overlap with your personal network.

- Personal rapport, the ability to learn quickly and ideas about how to take your product to the next level matter more than years of experience or lists of accomplishments, and so your smart friend might actually be a better fit than someone with apparently good credentials

- Potentially good cofounders will want their fair share of vested equity, and/or cash compensation

That said, sales and marketing aptitude isn't as readily tested as software development competence, so some more specific ones on how to find the right sales and marketing cofounder below:

- If you're looking for a single cofounder, then whether you need someone specialising more in sales or more in marketing (obviously they overlap, but a good specialist is like to 10x engineer) depends to a large degree on the revenue you're looking to generate per client. Your cofounder using their time to sell by telephone and email costs more per sale than your cofounder optimising website clickthroughs, but products with a certain cost or complexity will struggle to sell without the human touch (services costing upwards of, say $2000 per annum will tend to yield more with human input into the sales process even after factoring in the cost of that person's time)

Sales

- pretty much any salesperson will have an story to tell about how they were "430% over target in Q4", "hit quota every month", "brought in $1 million of new business" Ignore this: you're cofounding a business and don't have targets, and you don't understand their targets or how tough they were. Pay far more attention to what they say about how they approached it, and how they see that as similar and different to what they would do working for you.

- Experience at Google or Facebook might mark someone out as a high-calibre engineer, but BigCorp badges don't mark them out as a high-calibre salesperson; if anything it says "this person's sales accomplishments at that particular company may have relied upon established reputation, relationships and process" which is the exact opposite of what you're selecting for. Big name clients in a vertical you're targeting might mean a little more, but only if the candidate can offer a plausible description of how their contacts or understanding of the company's internals are relevant to your product.

- good salespeople rely far more on being able to quantify benefits to an individual customer than charm or persistence, so don't be impressed with Mr Slick or rule out the guy who's geekier than most developers

- a surprising number of high-earning salespeople are sufficiently dissatisfied with their jobs to switch to the "right" opportunity without the same short term reward.

Marketing

- Marketing is a broad term covering a wide range of activities. Several years' experience in managing display advertising budgets for a big corp and ensuring subcontractors' work meets brand guidelines might sound impressive but is almost worthless when it comes to assessing whether they can minimise your cost per conversion.

- depending on what you expect them to spend most of their time doing, your marketing cofounder might actually be a developer with a passion for a/b testing or front end creative stuff.

Edit: I suppose it would be remiss of me not to mention that I fall into the "would consider right cofounding opportunity: sales experience" category

Varlski• 11 years ago

Some great points here especially the point of getting lured in by big names like facebook and google as a benchmark for great salespeople. You want to hire someone you know can build from nothing and not rely on reputation alone.

What i will add however is those companies can be a great educational ground point early on in ones career to develop good habits and processes.

Gustomaximus• 11 years ago

Several years' experience in managing display advertising budgets for a big corp

Absolutely. Large corps, especially respected brands, look great on the CV but typically you're a project manager with a marketing title. With the exception of the incredible comms experience big corps give I would say better to go for someone with small company hands on experience for a start-up. Ideally someone with both.

NinaLevin• 11 years ago

Growthhackers.com is a killer resource for finding scrappy, metrics-driven marketers.

Meetup, as someone mentioned below, is a decent resource, but truthfully I think it requires a lot of time/energy and can often be a bit fruitless.

A friend actually used TaskRabbit to find a co-founder. He posted a task for an intro to someone fitting his requirements and offered to pay $75 for a valuable lead. His inbox was filled with intros and awesome folks from a variety of backgrounds.

marketingadvice• 11 years ago

Growthhackers.com

Inbound.org

reddit.com/r/entrepreneur

reddit.com/r/startups

Those are most frequented by marketers with /r/entrpreneur + /r/startups also frequented by sales/business focused people.

If you post something on any of those communities with some details (I recommend posting to all 4), than you should get some candidates that are well qualified (depending on the project).

BorisMelnik2• 11 years ago

all very good resources. the key is to pitch to people without pitching them, and without giving away your idea to the world!

guinness74• 11 years ago

I can vouch for /r/entrepeneur and /r/startups. It's my first time visiting both inbound.org and growthhackers.com, they look like excellent resources too. From a quick poke around they seem to be proprietary CMSes \ community software, anyone know if I'm wrong about that?

BorisMelnik2• 11 years ago

If you are just missing a small piece of the pie, consider being the sole founder and just hiring a commission based sales rep in the beginning. I tried and tried to find a non-tech co-founder and couldn't find one, hired a sales team and never looked back.

bhayden• 11 years ago

Is it feasible to hire a guy and say "I won't pay you anything but you get 20% of the revenue you refer"?

snowman0797• 11 years ago

like everything else it just seems that you have to be in the right place at the right time.

I am in the opposite situation and as you said there are a lot of stories on how to find a technical cofounder but its not as easy as it sounds..finding someone who believes what you believe and can stand with you to make it happen is the important part...or you can just hire them which seems to be the easy answer

Ask HN: How to find a non-technical cofounder?

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