

Looking for CoFounder / 2cents? - wmandrell

My name Will. I am 23. I live in LA. Going to school for marketing but also thinking about dropping out to join a startup or CREATE a startup. Im in the process of gathering advice. Im an aspiring entrepreneur! Not the "idea man". I dont have a get rich quick idea. Looking for someone who is willing to hear out my ideas and work with someone who believes in them or meet someone to tell me im a f<i></i>*ing idiot. Anything works.<p>So, read below to check out projects I've worked on in the past or are currently working on now.<p>I am constantly thinking of ways to better the world and make certain things in life less complicated or constructive for the mass.<p>Ive been passionately trying to start a business since I was 18...and failed or pivoted many times. This is the order in which they have originated from. 
I am still working on a few of them! Looking to hash them out more with other Entrepreneurs that believe in my vision or engineers that would like to assist in wire framing or designing beta sites/apps.<p>1st idea - MealDealz: Dining deals. Coupons and discounts for all the popular restaurants and fast food places. Now there are many alike.<p>2nd idea - MiServices: Directed toward younger individuals trying to make money on the side walking dogs or putting up christmas lights, etc but would like to be accredited through ratings. Something better than Craigslist but you're not licensed so you can't technically be on Angies list or Yelp.<p>3rd idea - Readr: Discover and share books you love and start a book club online. Have authors start a book club for their new releases, or fans start one. Now alike Goodreads.<p>4th idea - Betsy: make bets online and through our application with others on any topic from the Tech world, Entertainment, Sports, Politics, etc. Earn points, humblebrag and use the points to get cool rewards.<p>5th idea - standUP: organize all the online campaigns into one place. Enlighten people on common issues and how to take action through either petitions to congress, sharing the message or supporting the cause, etc. Show all the trending topics currently going on: Occupy Wall Street, GunControl, Internet Control, Oil Spill, Education, War on Drugs, etc. Then the main objective would be to help people establish their standpoint on the issue by showing all the different points of views and how they could easily take action all in one simple organized application. The app would be like the One campaign app.<p>Plus many other ideas! But these are the ones that I've either already worked on or are currently working on.<p>I am fascinated with the concept of building businesses, the surprises with successful marketing, and the power of social media and how much impact it has on the world.<p>I can assist in creating a business model. Assist in product design. Make Logo. Talk to potential customers, test design hypotheses. Figure out sales and marketing strategy, find beta users, warm up early adopters, performance tracking, online profiles, help create a blog. Research. Checking up on competitors and how they do business. Or help collectively create a meaningful mission statement explaining why we give this service/product.<p>Any advice works. Contact me:
wmandrell.iv@gmail.com<p>https://twitter.com/WLMiv<p>http://www.cofounderslab.com/will-mandrell
======
dlf
I know you say you're not the idea guy, but that's basically how this comes
off. Kudos for putting yourself out there to get advice and feedback though.
Not knowing much about your background, here's everything I would tell a non-
technical person who wants to do a startup (as a non-technical person doing a
startup myself):

Ideas are worthless until they're validated. Get out, talk to customers in a
market that you think you can make an impact in. If it's something that you
care about, are knowledgeable in, or if there's a problem that pisses you off
that you think you could solve with your startup, those are good places to
start. Still test in the market though, because you're only one data point. In
the words of Steve Blank (go read everything by him), get out of the building!
...or at least get on the phone to start.

If you're trying to build something that appeals to the general population,
just go stand at a subway or bus stop where people are just waiting and have
nowhere to go and ask them questions. People are usually bored there anyway.
If you're building a B2B product, call business and set up appointments to
meet them. Learn customer development.

Put up an Unbounce "coming soon" page and start engaging with folks that care
about the problem you're trying to solve. Start a blog on Tumblr (better
sharing features, but any blogging platform would do). Link the blog to your
"coming soon" page and vice versa. Get your social media pages in order
(Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest if it makes sense, Quora etc.) ...with
a marketing background, this should be your bread and butter. Use all of these
to be authentically helpful. This will drive traffic back to your site.

Eventually, you should have generated a bit of a community if you're solving a
problem that people actually care enough about. Use this to keep testing ideas
and iterating on what you already know. Ask if this is an idea that these
prospective customers (whether they know they are or not) would pay to have
solved. If so, ask how much they think the average person in their profession
spends, in time or money, to deal with the problem with current methods. Ask
how much they think the average person in their profession would spend to
solve the problem.

Try to learn to code (CodeAcademy & Udacity are good places to start). If you
learn enough to build a prototype, fantastic. If not, you will at least have a
new respect for the art. Start with HTML and CSS... this isn't the hard stuff,
so you should learn it anyway and, if you're handy, you might turn into a
serviceable front end dev. Read dev blogs, poke around on GitHub and
StackOverflow, and even read documentation. This stuff won't make any sense at
first. Take it slow and after awhile you'll develop an understanding of how
all the pieces fit together. You don't actually need to be able to build
anything with it, but having an understanding of what language or tool is used
for what sort of task will help keep you from getting completely lost in
technical discussions.

Learn stats cold, and learn tools to do it well (R is all the rage, but even
Excel will get you far). As a marketer, knowing how to handle data will give
you solid insights into how to tailor the experience to users and will put you
on solid footing with your technical cofounder. It's hard to argue with data.
You can even go ahead and start calling yourself a growth hacker.

Learn design, or at least try to learn a bit. This will help you better
understand what makes one UI better than the other and is an important
component to UX.

Go to meetups at first to bounce ideas off people, crystalize everything
you're learning, and tell folks about what you're working on. Don't let it get
in the way of actually getting things done though. These things can be
productive and sometimes lead to chance meetings with people who can really
help you or know someone who can, but they can also be distracting.

Wireframing isn't hard. You should at least learn that much. In fact, you can
do a lot of work to validate your idea just by talking to prospective
customers. There are ways to build wireframes and run usability tests that
don't require coding. If you're creative, you can even use things like
Mechanical Turk to fake backend processes (ex. Testing an app that aggregates
real estate listings. Someone submits a request on a form you put up on
Wordpress. You take that and turn it into a Mechanical Turk job... this may be
a bad example. I just came up with it now.)

Here are a couple of things that will help you get started:

<https://www.udacity.com/course/ep245>

<http://nathanbarry.com/finding-ideas-project/>

[http://steveblank.com/2011/09/22/how-to-build-a-web-
startup-...](http://steveblank.com/2011/09/22/how-to-build-a-web-startup-lean-
launchpad-edition/)

<http://businessmodelgeneration.com/>

<http://theleanstartup.com/>

[http://assets.unbounce.com/s/images/noob-guide-to-
marketing-...](http://assets.unbounce.com/s/images/noob-guide-to-marketing-
infographic-1800.png)

<http://blog.kissmetrics.com/infographics/>

[http://www.slideshare.net/dmc500hats/startup-metrics-for-
pir...](http://www.slideshare.net/dmc500hats/startup-metrics-for-pirates-long-
version)

If all of this seems overwhelming, don't worry. You don't learn it overnight
and it's easier to learn in the context of actually doing a startup. Get
around some good people who are working on startups as well, and make sure to
spend time with people who aren't to defuse once in awhile.

I think a decent path would be to leverage the strengths that you have now
around marketing by getting a firm understanding of statistics and how to
measure growth. Start working at a startup that's big enough to be able to
take on a junior employee and use that time to learn everything you can, work
on side projects, and try to find mentors among the founders. They've already
done it, so they'll be able to guide you in your journey.

~~~
dlf
Also, do one thing really well, but be serviceable in a lot of other things.

~~~
wmandrell
Wow! Thanks for the insurmountable advice lol and links. Much appreciated!
Seriously. I have not stopped reading/researching since!

~~~
dlf
Happy to help.

------
orangethirty
#1 Overdone.

#2 Legal issues. Stick to craigslist.

#3 This can easily be replaced by a blog. How would it make money? Sales of
books?

#4 Legal issues.

#5 Been done. Small niche. Not so much a business, but a charity.

I think you are getting ahead of yourself because you lack a very basic
understanding about businesses.

    
    
        Business that are profitable sell things people want.
        Not things people need.
    

Look around. Talk to people. What do they want? But don't listen to their
voice. Listen to their money. What are they paying for? How can you improve
upon that product?

 _Then_ you can start marketing it (without building it). If you get enough
interest (say 100 people with money on their hands) then build an MVP. But you
dont need a co founder for any of this.

~~~
wmandrell
Thanks for the input! I believe the first four ideas derived just from the
fact that I wanted to start a business for profit and if I acted upon them at
the time they would have been lucrative but Im searching for something that I
would be more passionate about. Potential profit in the future doesn't
necessarily drive me. I want to make an impact.

Thats why Im currently working on standUP. It hasn't technically been done
with the business model and structure I have plus all the features my
competitors dont have. There is: <http://demandprogress.org/> But they focus
solely on issues of civil liberties, civil rights, and government reform.

But I appreciate the advice! Im working on a landing page right now with the
option to sign up on waiting list or help fund! Thanks!

------
BayRacer
Hey, I am around the same age as you and in the process of establishing my own
business. Despite the fact that that you have a lot of ideas, What is your
basis for creating these? why not start with something your passionate about?
That is the difference between a brand and just a regular company. Just my 2
cents. If you have time check out the book, Start With Why, by Simon Sinek.

~~~
wmandrell
Thanks for the input! I appreciate it! I believe the basis for my first four
ideas in the past was to make a profit. The reason why I never followed
through with them is because I couldn't persistently work on something I
wasn't passionate about. I want to make an impact. Thats why I am currently
working on standUP.

I have watched some talks by him online, I'll check out his book. Thanks!

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codenesium
Why do you need a co-founder? I'm assuming you're looking for a technical
person based on your summary. You should learn to code. It's not nearly as
hard as people think and it gives you one of the two skills a technical person
is looking for in a partner. The other skill is the ability to raise money.
Just my 2 cents.

~~~
wmandrell
Im thinking about taking this class, thoughts?

[http://generalassemb.ly/education/85/front-end-web-
developme...](http://generalassemb.ly/education/85/front-end-web-
development?where=los-angeles)

~~~
codenesium
The overview is what you should be learning but 3k is way way too much. Every
topic they are covering can be found on google or a decent book from Amazon. I
suggest buying a cheap hostmonster account and learning some PHP. This
tutorial is pretty good [http://devzone.zend.com/6/php-101-php-for-the-
absolute-begin...](http://devzone.zend.com/6/php-101-php-for-the-absolute-
beginner/)

Don't just focus on front end skills and think you don't have to learn how it
works on the backend because a frontend is just something to look at it if
doesn't have the server side component.

------
sunflowerjane
You can refer to the coupon sites below to start a successful coupon site:
<http://retailmenot.com> <http://couponcabin.com> <http://www.promodigg.com>

------
codyguy
Keep searching but don't wait for your ideal cofounder.

[http://www.theprotoshop.com/blog/stop-waiting-but-keep-
searc...](http://www.theprotoshop.com/blog/stop-waiting-but-keep-searching/)

~~~
xijuan
Oh my god..This reminds me of finding a husband..

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mhhughes8
Good to see you on CoFoundersLab, www.cofounderslab.com. Hopefully we can help
you find a good partner! Good luck!

