

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

There has been a lot of stories on how to find a technical cofounder, but I don&#x27;t recall any on how to find a Marketing or  Sales cofounder, for example.
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cat9
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](http://inbound.org),
check [http://meetup.com](http://meetup.com) for relevant events and
participate there...

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marketingadvice
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).

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guinness74
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?

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NinaLevin
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.

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

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snowman0797
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

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

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

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austinhutch
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.

~~~
sarciszewski
Err, maybe.

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

This doesn't really have any of the details you mentioned. "Work with them"
implies there's already a "them" to work with.

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notahacker
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

~~~
Gustomaximus
> 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.

