I've added a campaign monitor subscription form to the site for anyone who's interested in potentially using an idea like this. I'm not sure where I'm going to take it, but if you'd actually use okcofounder for real, then I think we should keep in touch.
You seem to have gotten many positive comments already but just to respond to this point specifically. If it was a site as the audience was expecting i would have signed up and could have done with something like this a couple of months ago.
I come across people quite often looking for co-founders. They don't necessarily need them, but that's their choice.
Unintentionally neat idea, but I'd be wary of the legalities behind using that name or any other variation of a popular dating site.
They'll be onto you as fast as you gain popularity.
If you are sick of co-founder dating and looking for that perfect match, are ready for something serious, why not consider:
eCofounderHarmony.com
(I just made that up. But perhaps the "eHarmony" approach to cofounder matches makes more sense than OkCupid. Since, ya know, you're "married" to your cofounder.)
I want to find a match-- but nothing too serious... I'm really just looking for a good time. I want to be someone's interim technical co-founder with benefits for a while. Just temporarily. And not for equity (you see, I have a problem with commitment), but for cash.
Just long enough to get their idea from conception to climax.
And then we can part ways and I can find someone else who could benefit from my expertise.
I need a high-end co-founder matchmaker service, and okcofounder was not that.
I'm going to be frank with you, Anthony. I checked out okcofounder.com and read about you. Then I checked out your project, residen.se.
In my humble opinion, I think you should abandon residen.se and work full time on okcofounder. This is not something I'm saying lightly. Consider it this way:
1. You designed and created okcofounder with a clear need in mind. I don't "feel" the same sort of inspiration and personal connection with residen.se
2. There are at least three comments at the time of this writing in this thread that express disappointment at okcofounder not being for finding cofounders and being applicable to their lives. You just got user feedback.
3. Residen.se looks like the perfect web 2.0 model of what a tech startup should be, but okcofounder is something that is immediately relevant and comprehensible on the front page. I had a little trouble figuring out what residen.se was for immediately. Not so with okcofounder.
I'll come out and say that I'd pay for a service like okcofounder. I live in NYC and it's harder to find people than it is in Silicon Valley.
okcofounder satisfies true entrepreneurial need - despite the odd fact that it's a meta-project, you created it trying to solve a problem for yourself. But there are users saying they'd love the idea on a wider, open scale. So do it.
I'd never heard of any of those sites, I checked them out none made me want to sign up right now.
I clicked through on okcofounder here wanting and expecting to be able to sign up only to be disappointed.
Ideas are essentially worthless without effective implementation. This roughed out one page implementation was effective for me and I'm clearly not alone.
Well at least he has the best name out of the ones listed. Am I missing something though, his site seems to just be a description of what he's looking for a link to a contact form? Do we consider this a product now?
You're right. But the fact that he received so much disappointment so quickly means that those venues aren't working - yet...so yes, room for innovation.
I really, really want to reiterate Recoil's point above.
The rental market is massive and real and worth a shit-ton of money. Handling the pain of repairs and stuff? it's not even been vaguely tapped! That's a fucking good idea that's going to be hard to sell but it's a domino thing. When one major rental agency starts using it they'll all start using it. 'Your flat doesn't have residee.ce? How lame!'
Finding a co-founder is a tiny market.
Your advice is well intentioned and dog-fooding and all that lovely bullshit nonsense and really, really terrible.
Oh please, a site for other prospective entrepreneurs on budget of $0 vs a site aimed at a fixing a very real problem in the vast and lucrative world of property?
My comment is based on how easily I understood the two projects at a first glance and user feedback I saw. I'm not claiming one is more financially viable over the other, I'm just saying one seems more inspired by the other.
Inspiration through need is organic and genuine - he needed something, he built it, and other people want it. That's been the essence of startup culture from the beginning.
> My comment is based on how easily I understood the two projects at a first glance and user feedback I saw.
You understood the cofounder project because of your background. But for the vast majority of people, residen.se would be easier to understand.
And besides, how easy it was to understand from the site is something that can easily be changed with a few hours of work. What you really want to know is the viability of the underlying business model. And I find it difficult to see very many situations in which serving entrepreneurs tight on cash is better than trying to take a cut of the (very large) real estate pie.
Couldn't disagree more. I think I know the co-founder market quite a bit: I ran the co-founders meetup in Silicon Valley for a few years, and ran foundrs.com to get people to work together on startups.
1. As a business, targeting broke founders is not a get-rich-quick approach. I did it for love of entrepreneurs.
2. Finding a co-founder is hard. Over the years, I became convinced that personal chemistry is very important (that's why I moved from an online site to in-person meetups). And it takes time. Think 1 month of working together, minimum, before you even should consider someone as a co-founder.
After ~3 years of effort, the one very successful result fro my efforts is the co-founders equity calculator. That is something that a lot of people use, learn from, and solves an immediate issue. If you are curious, it's now the only content on the home page of http://foundrs.com
Thanks man. I... kind of built it as a joke, yeah. I got bounced back from an incubator because I didn't have a co-founder and wanted to build something slightly ironic. I didn't think other people actually really had a need for something in that respect.
Great response & bounce back after not getting into the incubator. Residen.se is a excellent idea trying to solve a problem in the lucrative real estate sector. I'm helping out Anthony, who is a good friend of mine and I use to share a house with him in Melbourne.
Couldn't agree more - focus on OKCoFounder - great a novel idea, could potentially be a thriving community of tech talent seeking on another. You're onto something here
Cute, but think twice about making this the focus of your time as people have advised above. Finding a cofounder is a pain point for many people (myself included) but the market can't be very large. You will also have to address a challenge that regular dating sites have, namely that those who successfully find a match will no longer use your service. Unlike regular dating sites, cofounder-matching sites seem stacked with people looking for help with their idea, perhaps because those willing to work for someone else already have a job and aren't as driven to get involved. Are there really an equal number of people who think "I'd love to work on a startup but don't have an idea of my own that I am passionate about"?
That being said, none of the cofounder-matching sites I've used have solved my problem so I suppose there is room in this space. If you did take a cue from OKC and institute a system of curated user-generated Q&As you might be on to something. The services I've used were primitive in their matching ability (e.g. I am a developer looking for a designer, which tells you nothing about values, principles, working style, etc.) so hey, maybe you could make it work.
anthony, just a note, you should also buy the domain residen.ce for the other half of the world that uses a bastardization of the english language :) you can just redirect to residen.se
good luck with your venture. some thoughts on okfounder:
1. where is the return value of the site, in other words, if i found a great founder on the site and am happy with him/her, what incentive do i have to revisit? maybe your idea is that most people will start something else up, but that number won't necessarily be high. perhaps of more value is to find startup people, not just founders, but initial employees, founders, consultants, advisors, etc.
2. personally i don't feel some of the content are that relevant, such as your favorite artists/people, books you've read, there's a much better place for this information (facebook, twitter), you should link to those. you should put more things along the lines of what you're trying to build, personally, i don't think ideas need to be secret, that's what will really draw in a cofounder or employee, not whether or not you both like catcher in the rye.
Hey Anthony,
If you do pivot and take okcofounder forward as your primary venture, can you do all us solo founders a favour? Can you NOT take on a cofounder for okcofounder? That way the irony of it all will make the startup scene a better place for solo guys like me. All the best!
Piling on the comments that say you should consider developing this as a general service.
One constituency to keep in mind is the person who has a job but would quit it if they had the right cofounder -- ie some form of anonymous or semi-anonymous matching until both sides choose to reveal.
I like this concept and I too was disappointed I couldn't sign up to check it out. I have a co-founder but I would love to try a service like this to bring on early employees.
With OKCupid, I thought it was implying the selection process is "just OK" -- as in it's a sort of effective but not perfect matching system. Not that the people found are only OK (I personally only ever found crazy people, but I know a few people who got married from OKC...)
I actually don't have an OKCupid account. I deleted it a few weeks ago.
I've heard of other people getting married and a few of my best friends met through a dating website, but yeah. I think that it's not necessarily because of it.
