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About Me
Hi there, I'm the co-founder of CoachOasis. This is my blog on entrepreneurship, web startups and user experience.
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Finding A Technical Cofounder
Cheat Sheet
Don’t spend your time looking for a technical co-founder, it’s not an efficient use of your time. Instead, either:
1. Learn to code
- Step needing to rely on others for execution
- Meet technical people
- Managing technical people becomes way easier
2. Get an external team
- Don’t offer equity
- Weekly useful versions of the product
- Pay weekly or hourly
- A successful project doesn’t ‘end’
- Peanuts ==> Monkeys
3. Avoid a ‘tech play’
- Use white-labeled ‘off the shelf’ services where available
- Fake your back-end: launch with only a pretty design, do hard work manually
- License the tech from a company in a different vertical or geographic location
4. Other takeaways:
- No NDAs
- Get a technical advisor
- Ask for advice, not employment
- Co-founders are looking for competence and traction
More Startups - More Jobs
Source: startupvisa.com“StartupVisa.com was created by Eric Ries, Dave McClure, Shervin Pishevar, Brad Feld, Paul Kedrosky, Manu Kumar, & Fred Wilson to raise awareness and change policy re: the EB-5 visa, which enables investors from other countries to get a visa in exchange for starting a business in the US with $1M in capital (or $500K for economically targeted areas) & the creation of at least 10 US jobs.
We aim to represent the interests of entrepreneurs everywhere— in Silicon Valley, in the US, and around the world. We have been inspired by posts on the Startup Founder Visa Movement by Paul Graham and Brad Feld, among others. We want to make it easier for entrepreneurs to come to the US, start new businesses, and most importantly create more jobs.”
"Startups are like an Emotional Roller-Coaster:
In a startup, things seem great one moment and hopeless the next. And by next, I mean a couple hours later. The emotional ups and downs were the biggest surprise for me. One day, we’d think of ourselves as the next Google and dream of buying islands; the next, we’d be pondering how to let our loved ones know of our utter failure; and on and on. The hard part, obviously, is the lows. For a lot of founders that was the big surprise: How hard it is to keep everyone motivated during rough days or weeks."
Paul Graham: What Startups are really like.
In tough times, when I don’t know if our startup is gonna succeed or not, when I’m lost, when I lose faith, when I feel alone, I read Paul Graham, and I feel better!
Source: paulgraham.comBusiness Model Canvas - Innovation through visual thinking.
A 2 minute overview of the Business Model Canvas, a tool for visionaries, game changers, and challengers. This method from the bestselling management book Business Model Generation is applied in leading organizations and start-ups worldwide.
I’ve been reading the book again and again without tiring. This video is the best way to understand quickly how the model is designed. Being able to get the big picture of your whole business plan into a 1 page document is not only wonderful, but also a very efficient way to develop and implement new business ideas.
"Success does not come from Getting Real, or from Lean Startups, or from any other business book. It doesn’t come from sitting in your room reading Inc. Magazine or Joel on Software. It doesn’t come from great typography or presentations worthy of Steve Jobs.
It’s about the story. Sitting around the campfire telling stories."
Joel Spolsky in Hacker News.
Interesting piece of advice. People like stories, indeed. The story you present them has to be worth it, though. Two great books about telling good stories are Purple Cow (Seth Godin) and Made To Stick (Chip & Dan Heath).
Source: news.ycombinator.com"When you start a company, it’s more an art than a science because it’s totally unknown. Instead of solving high-profile problems, try to solve something that’s deeply personal to you. Ideally, if you’re an ordinary person and you’ve just solved your problem, you might have solved the problem for millions of people."
"The best way to do something ‘lean’ is to gather a tight group of people, give them very little money, and very little time."
