I am a non-technical co-founder who after a year of building product, has acidentally become a full time software engineer (as our product was horrendously complicated - not always a good thing). Now I am going back to doing biz dev and market development.

At the begining, I literally crawled, begged and did anything and everything under the sun to convince technical people to join me. The waterfall looked like this:

- Say I contacted through events/linkedin/accelerators/friend-of-friends/facebook/CS-professors about 100 people (number was definitely larger than this)

- Something like 50 even bothered replying

- Something like 20 bothered having lunch with me

- Something like 10 sat down for a second meeting to look at whatever code I already had

- 5 I had maybe a week of work done together closely, discussed the challenges and arrangements closely etc.

- It didn't work out with 4 of them for various reasons - simply didn't click in some way

- 1 eventually quit their job and saved my ass. We are all full time now though of course.

When I was presenting to technical people, I had a friend doing a PhD in CS who cant quit his PhD but wrote some serious c++ code (as our work dealt with large matrices) while I wrote a web python backend to serve the cpp code. And I had a deep background in industrial engineering and finance. So I think the 50 evaluated our work and bothered replying took a reasonable guess that my chops were "not bad".

Then 6 months later it was intern season and I did the same thing again. Then I did the same thing to get funding. Then to get customers. Getting full time staff that is proverbially "ninjas" is even harder than getting investors or customers. One is committing their lives to you and another is just a procedural budget decision. Then it follows that it should be even harder for someone to co-found something with you.

After a while I started using a CRM and a systematic funneling for everything that has a 80%+ fall off rate. Which is literally everything in a startup, from newsletter opens to fundraising to good interns.

You should do all the things adviced in this thread, then assume that if there is an 80% to 90% fall off, how many of them you should do (more accurately: NEED TO DO) on a per week basis to hit your final target. Because of the last 10% who didn't fall off, you still have to reject the 9% who you can't work with, don't like the business idea personally, don't think it is a viable idea etc. If you use an accelerator's services to shortcut the process above, remember you have to pay them 6% to 8% of your eventual company and its 50-50 whether they can perform the search service well - so its cost is approximately 3% to 4% of equity.

Good luck!

user:	pinkgodzilla
created:	March 21, 2018
karma:	31