Ask HN: Who's looking for a co-founder? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Who's looking for a co-founder?

#161

Post by halfeatenpie » Tue, Jan 05, 2021, 6:09 PM UTC

dabreegster wrote: post #60

Hi, I'm Dustin, and I've been working on abstreet.org for about ~2.5 years to fight car dependency in cities. Aiming to explore and advocate for short-term transportation changes like creating low-traffic neighborhoods and fleshing out bike and bus networks, and moonshot ideas like congestion charging zones in city centers, superblocks, and zoning changes. Targeting the general public, rather than planners who've alr…

Hi Dustin!

I saw your work on Hacker News last year and I forwarded it to a colleague of mine working in the academic side of Transportation Engineering. They found your work interesting and complemented on your visualizations.

If I could suggest something, it might be useful to reach out to professors at your local university whose research interests coincides with your software's application (you can shop around as well).

They can probably help you with the following:

1. Provide cutting-edge technology and ideas related to transportation engineering

2. Offer a method/connection to the local DOT or other agencies who may be interested in this as a decision support system (DSS).

3. Maybe even find a partner or... (and I think this might be a better option) help you establish a steering committee or a group of advisors who can then make recommendations to supplement your skillsets.

You might even be able to temporarily support your open source model through grant funding and application to different "cutting-edge" applied projects and, if you can, develop those technology in a generalizable way (a framework) to be used as a shiny feature for your application. Grow it up to be a one-stop-shop with the latest and greatest.

I'd be happy to discuss a bit more to help you navigate these waters.

Cheers,

Don

P.S. regarding finding a partner for the business side, what might be useful is to reach out to the local universities in your area and see if their business college/program has a "founders meet-and-greet" program. At our current institution we have programs in place to connect founders with a business counterpart which has resulted in establishing some growing companies. In addition, you can probably take this opportunity to network with a few professors and (as an advisor) be willing to put their name to the product for technical knowledge/support.

Re: Ask HN: Who's looking for a co-founder?

#162

Post by JimWestergren » Tue, Jan 05, 2021, 6:10 PM UTC

cyberfart wrote: post #159

JimWestergren wrote: post #102

I have been working on a card game as a side project since mid 2018 that in my opinion plays better than Hearthstone and Magic: https://thespacewar.com/ Looking for a partner really like these kind of games that can take care of the marketing of the game and help push the project forward. Also maybe that can do technical work on the online browser version (Vue/Node). The online version is playable (alpha) and maybe 8…

> Enter username to play for free directly in your browser I was so happy after seeing this thinking, "so amazing of them to let me check it out without having to register" only to discover that it led to a register form :(

I hear you. You can play it as guest here without registering https://play.thespacewar.com/

Re: Ask HN: Who's looking for a co-founder?

#163

Post by riantogo » Tue, Jan 05, 2021, 6:11 PM UTC

I’m the maker of https://discoflip.com where anyone can start a quick forum. My skills are on Product side of things. I’m realizing that growing a user base is extremely challenging for me. The project might benefit with someone in expertise in that area.

You can contact me on twitter @riantogo or email me heyriantogo at gmail.

Re: Ask HN: Who's looking for a co-founder?

#164

Post by bmitte » Tue, Jan 05, 2021, 6:13 PM UTC

Tech founder from Berlin (Mitte) here! Background both in tech & business. Not looking for a cofounder but always happy to meet new like-minded folks. Ping me!

Re: Ask HN: Who's looking for a co-founder?

#165

Post by eg312 » Tue, Jan 05, 2021, 6:15 PM UTC

nickelcitymario wrote: post #151

eg312 wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great advice! The printing quality & shipping will be a problem and I was thinking to offer the print on demand just as a 'secondary' option, not a feature. Probably it would be more profitable to create custom widgets and designs for companies or exporting the layouts as standalone, mini-apps - something like an UI/app editor (what you see is what you get) - that are also printable :)

> Probably it would be more profitable to create custom widgets and designs for companies or exporting the layouts as standalone, mini-apps - something like an UI/app editor (what you see is what you get) - that are also printable :) So under this model, you'd be banking on printers to pay for the software? I could be wrong but I think that would be a mistake. I've worked with a lot of printers and I've never met one…

I'm not targeting printers and I don't want to depend on them. If a user wants to print on demand his notebook, there will be that option (if possible).

Also, I'm not targeting consumers. Since the engine is already opensource, I don't have a problem making the whole app open.

"I would personally pay for is the ability to have my custom designed notebook printed and shipped to me" -> I think the core feature is how easily you can design your custom notebook. There are already p-o-d services and you can just use Photoshop or Word for editing. But they are too complex.

What I was trying to say is that, maybe, some companies would pay for custom widgets that hook to a db and display nice graphs & tables to quickly create business reports. But I don't think those companies care about p-o-d because they already have their own providers.

So far, the business model is: free everything except for the cloud storage (if any) and premium widgets & layouts. I would not add a premium over the p-o-d price since I have no control over the quality and I would offer it as a 'bonus', like an option to link the app to a 3rd party printer of your choice.

Anyway, thanks for the input, it really helped me! If you want to keep in touch, let me know.

Re: Ask HN: Who's looking for a co-founder?

#166

Post by tobyjsullivan » Tue, Jan 05, 2021, 6:17 PM UTC

Hi, I'm Toby and I'm trying to build a platform that allows people to build SaaS without having to write code.

I started a couple years ago before I'd ever heard of the #nocode fad. I simply believed (and still believe) that the next popular social network will be built by someone who doesn't know how to code. I've become a bit obsessed with trying to figure what a platform might look like that makes that possible.

For the curious, here's a rough demo of what I'd built in April. https://youtu.be/MV7Eo_18KqA Normally I have a demo server online but it runs on a laptop in my living room and my power went out this morning.

I can only take this project so far on my own. I'm decent at writing code but decidedly terrible at product and design. Having someone to hash ideas out with would be incredible.

I'd love to spitball ideas if you're up for a chat. General feedback is also always welcome. toby@koala.codes

Re: Ask HN: Who's looking for a co-founder?

#167

Post by mmmateo » Tue, Jan 05, 2021, 6:17 PM UTC

thaumaturgy wrote: post #124

Alright, how about an honest-to-goodness new search engine? I've been working on this piecemeal for a while. I want a completely new alternative in the search space. I think a lot of other people do too. I want to focus on highly personalized results from personal data sets: ingest people's bookmarks, crawl them, crawl their second-order links, and so on. I want discussions from HN, Reddit, and other publicly-accessi…

That sounds amazing, best of luck. I’ve always wondered why “a billion search results” is considered valuable when nobody looks past the first page of google.

Re: Ask HN: Who's looking for a co-founder?

#168

Post by nickelcitymario » Tue, Jan 05, 2021, 6:18 PM UTC

eg312 wrote: post #165

nickelcitymario wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Probably it would be more profitable to create custom widgets and designs for companies or exporting the layouts as standalone, mini-apps - something like an UI/app editor (what you see is what you get) - that are also printable :) So under this model, you'd be banking on printers to pay for the software? I could be wrong but I think that would be a mistake. I've worked with a lot of printers and I've never met one…

I'm not targeting printers and I don't want to depend on them. If a user wants to print on demand his notebook, there will be that option (if possible). Also, I'm not targeting consumers. Since the engine is already opensource, I don't have a problem making the whole app open. "I would personally pay for is the ability to have my custom designed notebook printed and shipped to me" -> I think the core feature is how e…

> maybe, some companies would pay for custom widgets that hook to a db and display nice graphs & tables to quickly create business reports.

That's an interesting angle. I have no sense whatsoever about the demand for it, but I wouldn't be surprised if there's a sizeable market for that idea.

> If you want to keep in touch, let me know.

I'd love to be kept in the loop for any updates. If the email list on your site isn't the best list, please add me. My email is my HN username @ google's email platform.

Re: Ask HN: Who's looking for a co-founder?

#169

Post by francoisp » Tue, Jan 05, 2021, 6:19 PM UTC

leesalminen wrote: post #36

ISL wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would you prevent the Mom-and-Pop business from, eventually, becoming essentially a franchisee of the Not-Amazon system? If you list everyone's inventory with one-click ordering (assuming that order fulfillment is solved somehow), it is going to be an immediate race to the bottom on pricing, perhaps accelerated by arbitrageurs. Consumers will initially be happy, until service suffers, but vendors will be hit hard…

I don’t think the app would do fulfillment in a traditional sense. Consumers would go to the brick and mortar and pay for / collect their item. Maybe there’s a DoorDash type deal where drivers can collect the item from the store and deliver to the consumer. Doordash for consumer goods? Interesting point on rural areas- I’m also in the same boat. Amazon only delivers USPS, and any package that won’t fit in my mailbox…

I think Amazon and covid (semi and full lockdowns, local shops closing etc) have exposed an idea that you touch on, decoupling the last mile shipping from amazon/doordash/etc; a market/depots/etc for peered-powered distributed shipping/delivery. I would guess the bulk cost of shipping is the fist and last few miles.

Re: Ask HN: Who's looking for a co-founder?

#170

Post by tunesmith » Tue, Jan 05, 2021, 6:19 PM UTC

I have an early prototype of a site that allows people to chain together reasoning in a visual sense, which also propagates truth so that people can know if a conclusion is asserted to be valid/proven. This contrasts from the current definition of "argument mapping", and platforms like Kialo, in that it's more constructive, with logical machinery underpinning it. For instance, if someone has a conclusion that "Earth's atmosphere should stay below x anthropogenic GTCO2", or "SpaceX will be able to reach Mars by 2030", other people can then drill down through the argument until they get to simple axiomatic facts and values. The idea is that by doing so, people would either educate themselves if the argument is valid, or have the opportunity to specify exactly where they disagree (which would in turn propagate truth/proof state to the therefores that depend on that part of the argument), which is a respectful way of engaging with and perhaps strengthening the argument. In a social sense this could be useful for polarized communities to better understand each other over time. In a private sense (revenue opportunity) it could help organizations document the reasons behind processes, or make collaborative arguments for change that rely on deep first-principles reasoning.

This project is a little insane, as it relies on some optimistic assumptions about human nature that might just prove to be false - at worst, it is an opportunity to deeply explore an idea that requires some fun distributed-systems technology. I'm very much a tech/backend guy but it could evolve in a direction where I'd have to hire phd-level people. Anyway, I have a long list of features to develop before I get to real business planning, assuming I don't just eventually release it for free wikipedia-style, but what I'm mostly looking for now is a small group of people that are highly interested in following along (please explain your background and why you are interested if you contact me). I have a read-only prototype already pushed live, which allows exploration of existing arguments/conclusions, so as I make releases and update the changelog, I would like people that would like to follow along and make comments, and also perhaps give free U/UI advice, since there are a lot of challenges there in making a "new form of communication" feel intuitive. I'd imagine any possible cofounder arrangement would inevitably rise from that.