My day job is managing a UX team at Intuit's global division. But I've had an idea bouncing around my head for the past few months that won't go away -- a B2B Web application that will dramatically improve the quality of life for anyone has to regularly attend meetings as part of their job. Everyone talks about hating meetings (especially people who work in companies with more than 500 employees), but meetings can be productive and even enjoyable, if the person who sets it up actually knows what they're doing. This idea of mine will quickly help companies uncover its employees' bad meeting habits -- isolating the individuals and functional teams who need coaching on how to set up effective meetings.
I work remotely from my home office in Victoria, British Columbia, and I am finding it impossible to find anyone in my immediate circle who would be suitable as a technical co-founder for this B2B project. So I decided to take a different approach than just 'asking around'.
As a person with a vision for what will hopefully become a very large business, it's frustrating not being able to build it yourself. And with each passing day I grow more and more impatient to get something into the hands of potential customers.
I know my strengths (designing user-friendly Web sites and applications, analytics, A/B testing, user research) and I also know my gaps/weaknesses (data modeling, coding, performance tuning... and all the things that go into taking something from an idea on paper to usable pixels on a screen).
So in an effort to demonstrate my passion for this idea and passion for finding someone with the skills to help me build out a vision, I set out to build something on a much, much smaller scale... with the help of my 11-year-old and 8-year-old sons.
I already had a good understanding of HTML and CSS, but I had to seriously brush up on syntax and proper formatting. The last time I wrote anything resembling code was in 2000, when I learned PHP to build a stock tip Web site (remember when everyone you knew was buying technology stocks?). Together, my sons and I learned how to design a data model, set up a cron job, incorporate open source code into our project and make it work, use the Facebook Open Graph protocol, and bring everything together into what we're hoping is a fun and useful way to look at your life.
Over the past 4 weeks, I have visited many of your Web sites, reading how to build an application quickly... as a minimum viable product. I've read your recent blog posts and posts going back many years. It has all helped immensely, including your tips on handling steep learning curves and overcoming coding roadblocks (of which there were many!!).
The result of our efforts is called Moodalytics (http://www.moodalytics.com), which is a Facebook application (well, in so far as you need to sign-in using Facebook credentials) that lets you create a 140-character daily journal entry and associate an emoticon with your mood -- and share it out (your emoticon; not your comments) with others in your social network. It's a visual record of your mood... designed for people who want to look back and see the interesting patterns that emerge. We expect that it will be more popular with teens and women (i.e., people who are more prone to writing down their feelings).
Once we have enough users, we can do some cool things like graph the daily mood of thousands of people... or just those people in certain countries or regions.
I'll continue to help my sons add new features to Moodalytics, but I am definitely no hacker -- and now I need to turn my attention to finding someone with outstanding application design and coding skills to build out a real business, likely with the addition of outside funding.
MY ASK: I want a technical co-founder for my B2B idea, called Meetalytics... someone who is looking for an opportunity to use their ideas, skills, and passion to change how people experience meetings at work!
I sincerely hope someone from this community -- who is as passionate about building things that companies will pay for as I am -- will emerge and we can begin a cool journey together.
Thanks,
Lance
Also - keep in mind that a cofounder is, well.. a cofounder! It's not a "de facto employee, who you pay with shares instead of cash". He will want to influence the overall project direction, and he will want to change all the things you planned so far into the product. I've met plenty of business people who told me that they were looking for a tech cofounder, but in reality didn't want to hear my design suggestions.
The tech-business partnerships work well, but only in some cases. It's usually two people who knew each other, who developed the idea together, and who were in a similar situation. Otherwise you're up for a tough start, because you will feel a lot of pressure to work (it's your idea, you spent a lot of time planning it), but your newly found partner will not. Even worse - if the partnership fails, it will not be easy to fire him.
There are plenty of routes that may be a better fit for you. You could do a proof of concept by yourself, sell it to a corporation and use the money from the sale to hire a tech guy. You could hire a student to do the first version, you could get some angel money and start a team... Really - desperately looking for a tech cofounder is not always the best option.