September 9, 2010 at 18:17“A lone developer wants to meet you.” cofounder.ru: a dating service for startups
Let's say you are unlucky, you are not studying at a normal university, you have no familiar investors, and most of your friends are too busy playing a fun farm. And you have a project idea, you are a good developer and you want to find a partner or even assemble a team. You can go to free-lance.ru, where you will find many excellent professionals who are ready to solve any of your problems, but ... of course for the money. Few ordinary freelancers will agree to work for a share in the business, for free, without any guarantee of success. Among the general list, you will have to search or create an ad for a long time and wait until someone finds you on his own.
What will you do? Everyone knows the word networking: you talk on thematic forums, write on habrahabr, start a blog, come to meetings, conferences, meet new people, your social circle expands and with it the opportunity to choose increases. The more connections you have with people from your area, the better. For example, in the United States, conferences are held for startups, a ticket for which can cost from $ 2000 and up, although the value of the content is not particularly great. What is valuable there is the opportunity to meet someone. Petya introduces you to Vasya, Vasya to Fedya, and once you create a company with Fedya. Well, or just drink beer on Fridays - that's how lucky.
Here I will be bold and make a statement that, compared with the sphere of ordinary romantic dating, we still solve these problems as in the Stone Age. The process of finding and choosing business partners is more likely to be random in nature, as before people wandered through parks, libraries and clubs in the hope of meeting a “soul mate”. Now if you look at services such as mamba.ru, the dating process there is automated just on an industrial scale. A huge number of profiles, sorting by interests, the ability to get an idea about a person before talking to him. If you don’t look at all your 10 years of Java / PHP / Perl experience, then with a minimum of effort, you can always arrange a date for yourself on Saturday night.
Why not find the same model as the basis for finding business partners? Say, instead of me: girl / guy you will choose: I am a developer, I’m looking for a developer (or investor, or designer, or manager) from Russia (anywhere else) and see a list of people matching the parameters. You can see their profile, experience and start chatting. After looking at a few examples on the English-speaking Internet (I did not find normal examples, although there are similar ones), I decided to try to make such a service for RuNet.
So, I invite you to cofounder.ru
Who is this service? It is suitable for anyone who is interested in creating startups from scratch and who would like to find partners. So far, the following professions are presented:
What functionality is there now:
In the plans:
But, of course, first you need the first users and your feedback. Therefore, I invite you to test and criticize. I hope you enjoy the idea, and we’ll finish the implementation slowly.
What will you do? Everyone knows the word networking: you talk on thematic forums, write on habrahabr, start a blog, come to meetings, conferences, meet new people, your social circle expands and with it the opportunity to choose increases. The more connections you have with people from your area, the better. For example, in the United States, conferences are held for startups, a ticket for which can cost from $ 2000 and up, although the value of the content is not particularly great. What is valuable there is the opportunity to meet someone. Petya introduces you to Vasya, Vasya to Fedya, and once you create a company with Fedya. Well, or just drink beer on Fridays - that's how lucky.
Here I will be bold and make a statement that, compared with the sphere of ordinary romantic dating, we still solve these problems as in the Stone Age. The process of finding and choosing business partners is more likely to be random in nature, as before people wandered through parks, libraries and clubs in the hope of meeting a “soul mate”. Now if you look at services such as mamba.ru, the dating process there is automated just on an industrial scale. A huge number of profiles, sorting by interests, the ability to get an idea about a person before talking to him. If you don’t look at all your 10 years of Java / PHP / Perl experience, then with a minimum of effort, you can always arrange a date for yourself on Saturday night.
Why not find the same model as the basis for finding business partners? Say, instead of me: girl / guy you will choose: I am a developer, I’m looking for a developer (or investor, or designer, or manager) from Russia (anywhere else) and see a list of people matching the parameters. You can see their profile, experience and start chatting. After looking at a few examples on the English-speaking Internet (I did not find normal examples, although there are similar ones), I decided to try to make such a service for RuNet.
So, I invite you to cofounder.ru
Who is this service? It is suitable for anyone who is interested in creating startups from scratch and who would like to find partners. So far, the following professions are presented:
- Developer
- Designer
- Manager
- Investor
- Team (if the profile is registered on behalf of an existing team)
What functionality is there now:
- Profiles, search, selection by countries, regions and cities.
- Private messages - correspondence with other members
- Ideas - a public list with the ability to add and discuss ideas
- A wall is a kind of collective blog, where you can write and comment on anything
In the plans:
- personal statuses (like on twitter) and the ability to add to friends
- categorization and tags for ideas
- more developed profile pages. For example, for investors or teams.
- more developed messaging system. Converting it to Ajax with automatic updates. Reverse Ajax.
But, of course, first you need the first users and your feedback. Therefore, I invite you to test and criticize. I hope you enjoy the idea, and we’ll finish the implementation slowly.