Looking for a technical cofounder

2 points by jlsnyder 15y ago ↗ HN

Hey All,

I've recently come up with what I think is a fun/interesting idea for an iOS/Android app. Its not something that will make us billionaires - but I think it would be fun to build and would very quickly become profitable. The app/idea solves a problem for a large and growing market and has a definite built-in audience. There are already competitors but they aren't very good and don't really capture/display the information in a functional way. I'm sorry that I'm probably sounding cagey/shifty, but truthfully I think its something that would be really easy to build and a great, marketable product. With some of the programmers here I have little doubt that we could have it built and live in a month after a couple of hours a week of work. Enough of the preamble, here's the idea.

On the backend: We extract location and timing data from schedules or twitter feeds -> We use locations to "pin" those things on a map.

As for the app: On startup we check the user's location then display (on the same map) the pins closest to them.

There's a bit more I've worked out as far as design, implementation and extra information that we would want to provide, but essentially thats it. I'm looking for anyone with great skills/experience and an interest in food (of any type), slight preference might be given to folks in Boston and/or LA but thats only so that we could chat/work in person. Everything else can be done from wherever and on whatever schedule you'd like.

If you'd like to chat, drop me an email (joshua.snyder(@)gmail.com) or post a comment, I'm looking forward to it. I think this project could be pretty interesting, a lot of fun and rather quick to complete.

Josh

mattmiller 15y ago ↗

You forgot to give any information about you, or what you are bringing to the table. Have you lined up any customers? Do you know how much you will charge?

Did you read the 10 customers post yesterday? http://blog.asmartbear.com/customer-validation.html I would do something like this before getting a co-founder to build the app.

You should say:

"I have a dozen costumers lined up willing to pay $x. It cost me $y in marketing (like ad-words) to get these costumers leaving us $x-$y in profit. Estimated market cap is $z"

It isn't too hard to get all this data, and it will get you a much better response.

jlsnyder 15y ago ↗

Hey Matt, thanks for the advice. Some of this stuff, I've done, and some I'm still working on. As for me, I'm a former management consultant, my experience was primarily in strategy, operations and sales/marketing. For the last year I've been consulting and advising startups bringing some of things I learned over the last five years to help out. Those projects have ranged from building pricing/marketing strategy, customer segmenting, product differentiation, etc. - basically everything non-technical from UI to customer service.

I have talked to potential customers either friends, friends-of-friends, or random people over the weekend and with an app price of around five bucks, the first 30-40 have been interested. That didn't cost me anything except time at an event I would have went to anyway. That may work for initial sales, launch or testing, but that isn't longterm. For that I've put together a list of vendors and 3rd parties that I can reach out to when we have a better mockup (most of whom I know are already looking for this) about advertising, publicity etc. Long term I think its more about getting in front of the right people and less about ad-word buys or marketing.

I had read that post, and put quite a bit of work into testing the idea to be sure it wasn't just solving a personal itch and you're totally right that work didn't come through in my initial post, thanks.