Ask HN: Any successful stories of finding co-founders online?

[aristofun]

If you have a successful or at least growing startup, and your founders work 100% remotely from each other from day 1 — please share your story in as mich details as you can.

I’ve seen a few examples of moderate to highly successful fully remote and “remote by design” hi-tech companies.

But never have I heard of core founders found each other online or even working remotely from each other.

It made sense before covid times, but how about now?..

[joshuabaker2]

I met one of my co-founders (we are now a Series A startup) originally via LinkedIn, and together we met our third co-founder also via LinkedIn. The first co-founder and I are in the same city, but the third one was in a different country - so it was almost a year later and many months after we'd raised our original seed round that we ever met the 3rd co-founder in person (we started during COVID lockdowns).

Overall it's been pretty good, the geographic diversity of our founding team gives us different perspectives on hiring and fundraising, and it means we had multiple "locations" right from the get-go.

[olegp]

I met my co-founder as a result of him posting a Show HN and my comment on it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1262380

We've been working remotely together on Toughbyte, our second venture, for more than seven years now: https://www.toughbyte.com

[lakotasapa]

[EDIT] for grammar.

Ive tried by answering posts and direct DM. Never get answered. Not sure what they're looking for but it doesn't seem to "co-founders."

I'm finding that it harder to find a cofounder than it was to find my wife!!

I mostly want to leverage the fact I need motivation rather than an actual cofounder. Wish there was a forum/social network where ppl like me can find more emotional support and camaraderie to finish my projects. Finding that using my wife to keep me accountable..doesn't work :)

The side bonus of a social network like that would be then to "test drive" potential partners in crime rather than to jump right in blindly. Doing it "blindly" is almost like a setup date / blind dating. Or a box of chocolate...you never know what you're going to get next.

[HAL9OOO → lakotasapa]

I also feel like I'm in a similar boat on finding a partner for motivation. Always found it easier to work on projects with friends back in HS/College and now it's a lot harder to stay on track/motivated. I think part of it is bouncing ideas back and forth and kind of hyping each other up.

I've used https://www.focusmate.com/ before, might help you. Not exactly the same but sometimes I find just having someone else on a video call with you is a motivational push.

[lakotasapa → HAL9OOO]

Thanks! I'll take a look. I think this is prime area for a biz. Not just sw devs but projs in general. I'm procrastinating on my son's very elaborate busy board (I have EE background :) ) and countless other projs. One doesn't neccessrily need to expose every aspect of the proj but maybe share at a high level what they are making and where they are at could be publically tracked. Everyone has a bit of showman in them and nothing wrong with that. Outside of self esteem, it could very well not only motivate others but give others ideas.

Humm....

[EDIT] Sadly one of the biggest company in the world was made just by that kind of motivation; FB. Watching Social Network when he hacked the original face book. He was coding while friends came and motivated him to do more. I sincerely think if he didn't have that circle of friends, it never would have happened. Me thinks.

[bitxbitxbitcoin]

Some reads here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15491739

[nickfromseattle]

Non-technical founder that found a cofounder on Reddit.

Story

1. 22 year old college drop out. Wanted to launch an app. Learned that in order to find a tech co-founder, I had to do as much work as possible on my own.

2. I did as much as I could as a non-tech. Wireframed the app, built UI, developed business mode, got an internship within the industry, etc.

3. First app idea (mine) didn't work because it was a B2C webapp that really should have been a mobile app, before smart phones were prevalent. Also, I didn't understand marketing (yet).

4. We pivoted to another idea (his). B2B product. Cold called my way to $6,000 MRR.

5. Hit tech scaling issues, couldn't sell and generate new revenue when we couldn't handle our existing customer workload

6. We eventually split.

Because we had no shared history / adversity, when things got hard, it broke down pretty quick.

Anyways, these failures were enough to land a position as employee #8 at a B2B SaaS that would bootstrap to 200 employees in 4 years.

The CEO liked the hustle and saw past the failures. I was his special projects guy for the first year, and then the remaining 3 years I owned our most complex partnerships (F100). Basically, I was an individual contributor with the blessings of the CEO to align our entire company (product, biz dev, legal, sales, support, marketing, and solutions engineering) to execute on these partnerships. Everyone in the org I depended on to execute did not report to me (IC), so I had to get good at getting people who didn't work for me - to work for me. Also, when they were busy it was often times easier to just jump in and do support, legal, product, etc.

At the time I was 26, all my peers were 20 years older than me at the top of their game, and I was able to learn from them and work at a scale that I would never achieved on my own.

Side note - this company was recently acquired and my options paid out. They were 10 year options, 6 months away from expiration. I didn't get FU money, but it was really cool to see a years salary show up in my bank account 5 years after I left. When I create an ESOP for my team, it will likely be 10 year options too.

Anyways, when I left this company 5 years ago I decided that while the skills and experience I had accumulated were significant, 'enterprise biz dev' wasn't very useful to me as a founder - because I didn't know how to build an enterprise product, support team, legal team, etc.

So I took a huge paycut (below poverty line for my city) to work at a local marketing agency in a sales role, assuming that in order to sell marketing services, I had to know how to do marketing. I didn't know marketing at the time, so that means I would have to learn.

Well, it worked.

Since then, I've

1. Founded my own marketing agency and hit $1m in year 3

2. Launched a B2B SaaS with 3,000 signups including some awesome brands like Fiverr, Thinkific and Mayo Clinic, 400+ paid customers and $100k in revenue in the first ~12 months

Just launched a private beta for a 2nd B2B SaaS and have generated $13k in annual subscriptions pre-launch. Hoping it's successful enough to focus on full-time, but we'll see.

It doesn't really matter if your startup doesn't work if you learn the skills and build the relationships to do something even higher impact next.

Careers are measured in decades, not months or years.

/rambles.

[aristofun → nickfromseattle]

Amazing story. Thank you.

Could you name the SaaS #1 of yours please?