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My Startup: A place for potential founders to meet

13 points by sanswork ↗ HN
This isn't so much a new business as a new side project of mine. I've noticed a lot of people here and on other blogs and news sites saying how much they would like a place to find business partners. So in my spare time I put together http://www.FounderLink.com to fill this space. I've tried not to make just another social networking site and I am trying to keep the features as few and focused as possible while still being useful for the core functionality(Meeting potential business partners).

Any feedback or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

15 comments

[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 44.1 ms ] thread
chaostheory
there's already a couple out there:

http://cofoundr.com

http://partnerup.com

like yours, they have various strengths; but a consistent weakness is that there's no inherrent reason for anyone to come back unlike say yc news or meetup.com

sanswork
Thank you for the links.

I agree that there is very little reason for people to keep going back once they have found a business partner which is why I'm keeping this firmly in the side project area.

I think the biggest issue is that unlike other partner matching sites(dating sites) you're not likely to get many people looking for casual short term business partnerships. :)

Thanks again for the comments.

hooande
partnerup asks for money before you can do anything useful
craig-faber
Thanks. I'll use it.
sanswork
Great I hope it's useful for you, let me know if you find any issues or have any suggestions.
truebosko
My suggestion: - Fix your site in Firefox - Don't ask me to login / signup right away without giving me more info.

Here's your intro page for me btw: http://www.simplebucket.com/p/mdeymdg.jpg

sanswork
Thanks for the tip. Which OS are you using if you don't mind me asking? I do all my development in Firefox(latest stable release) in Leopard.

I agree with the login part and I am working on a demo/walkthrough for new users as part of an overall redesign of the landing page which is pretty blegh at the moment. But I'm not a very good designer, so if you know one perhaps recommend them to the site. :)

truebosko
I'm using Windows XP and Firefox 3 Beta 5 at the moment.
sanswork
Thank you, I'll get Firefox updated on my desktop and see if I can fix the display issues.
jaed
I was going to do a similar site like this last summer but decided not to. I'm looking to ditch the domain CoFoundMe.com for cheap if you're interested.
jeroen
The css for #tabnav li could use a cursor: pointer. And the min-width: 970px for #content makes the site scroll horizontally for me, while it has an awful lot of whitespace. You could easily remove some whitespace to prevent the horizontal scrolling.
tx
Man I am so tired of "Sign Up!" buttons... Pass.
sanswork
Any recommendations on how to get around requiring users to sign up?

You can put in your OpenID url and receive full access that way but how else can I authenticate users without requiring them to sign up?