Ask HN: How did you find someone to team-up/work with?

4 points by mrusme 4 years ago | 3 comments

Hey there,

I've been struggling with this for a very long time and I'm looking for actual, practical suggestions here.

What has been your secret ingredient for finding someone to team-up/work with, be it on either open source projects, small side-gigs/-ideas or maybe even actual startups -- especially when money won't be the number one motivating factor and a full-time gig might be taking a big chunk of time off your days.

Over the past few years I've been meeting people who work in similar areas as I do and who share similar interest. I sometimes worked alongside them for significant periods of time on paid gigs and, most of the time, team-work went very well. Yet, only a few opportunities presented, where it was able to team-up with them, in order to pursue an idea either of us came up with. And in most cases, the undertakings dried up very quickly due to various reason -- most of the time this being the lack of the commitment that would have been needed to actually make something happen.

A significant discrepancy for me has also been the work-life-balance. The people I worked with usually valued personal time differently than I did for myself, leading to a disproportionate amount of invested time and hence commitment. I'm far from being someone who'd enjoy a 100hr work week (thinking of a submission by someone that I recently saw here), yet I do believe investing less than 16hr/week into a side-gig might not be enough to actually pull something off in a reasonable amount of time. And even short "sprints" of increased commitment usually ended up in dissatisfaction over a the work-life-balance on someone's end, eventually leading to frustration on all ends.

What are your experiences and how did you end up finding your team mate/business partner/co-founder, who you shared a vision with and where everyone was committed to walk the path at a similar pace in order to successfully realize the idea you both/all pursued?

Thank you.

holler 4 years ago |

Haven't found the person(s) yet! What type of project are you working on or hoping to start?

mrusme 4 years ago | |

:-) High five then, I guess.

It's not even so much about the actual ideas or projects, because these are usually very much related to the setup that I've met the person(s) in. Everyone has ideas and at some point there was something were multiple people were (at least initially) passionate about. However, it never really stuck.

I've read about the afterpay guys and found it pretty fascinating, so maybe it might not even be the best idea to look for team mates in actual team mates, but rather somewhere totally different?

However, just checked your profile, I find it fascinating that you nevertheless pulled something off and launched an idea on your own then! How was it going and has this maybe helped with making connections to people that might be interested to work with you?

holler 4 years ago | | |

> Everyone has ideas and at some point there was something were multiple people were (at least initially) passionate about. However, it never really stuck.

That's true. I experienced that with Sqwok where some years ago when the idea first came to mind, I was joined by two other people (one I worked with and one was existing relationship) and we began building an mvp. But life happened and that original setup didn't pan out, which was a hit to the ego but a good thing in the end because it forced me to really choose whether I wanted to pursue it still, and I had to learn a bunch of new tech I hadn't used before.

> I've read about the afterpay guys

I haven't read about that, do you have a link to what you read or was it a book?

So far I've had the really neat experience of meeting quite a few people directly through the site (I've only posted it to HN so far but planning to start growth effort very shortly).

I've had people from many different corners of the Earth talking on there, and so in my own mind it's already a success!

I quite often think how it'd be great to have one or two cofounders to work with but so far haven't met those people. I also haven't put in a concerted effort and chose to build it out as far as I could with my own knowledge... but realistically for an ambitious project it just becomes very difficult at a certain point.

Have you worked on a startup in the past? Also if you're interested to check it out, feel free to create a post or just drop in a chat and @guac to get my attention! :D