Ask HN: Wanted, non-technical co-founder

I'm looking for someone to come in at a 50% split for a company, Court Bell, that already has its product ready. The initial product: Each year, millions of Americans fail to appear in court for low-level offenses, & arrest warrants are issued. Studies indicate that text message reminders reduce failure to appear rates by up to 21%[1]. For courts, the costs associated with missed hearings and arrest warrants are quite high but the cost to defendants resulting from missed court dates is even higher. HearingReminder.com will provide email and text message hearing reminders nationally, free to users, for millions of Americans.

I'm the head of data and application development for a state supreme court. The National Center for State Courts loves this product but the problem is that getting it into each state/county nationally requires a lot of communication. Courts have the money and this saves them more than it costs. The code will be open sourced (MIT) and the organization non-profit, but that doesn't mean you can't "do well by doing good." Let me know your salary expectations and we'll factor that into the pricing.

Let me know your questions. My email is in my profile. Thanks.

[1] https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2020/10/07/science.abb6591

I can see getting a court system hooked with a long, free trial to do YoY comparison - for the first half dozen forming the core of the snowball.

How will you protect the personal information of defendants, both technically and by policy?

What's your pricing model, and does it differ for a court vs. attorneys (I could see public defenders wanting to load up their portfolio into this service)?

What's your plan to deal with the various data formats in each state/county system?

What happens if you miss a date and the defendant gets a warrant anyway?

I’m using a throw away account. I will contact you via email as well.

You’re offering 50% of a nonprofit and open source project. So 50% equity has no value. I like the mission but as a non-technical co-founder I think my value will be building a sustainable business as quickly as possible…so I think you should make it clear, you’re looking for someone that can build the business side of things for you?

Did you develop this software yourself?

What is to prevent a company like Tyler Technologies from using their existing relationships to offer this service?

> You’re offering 50% of a nonprofit and open source project. So 50% equity has no value.

Not if this was the only project; it's the first project.

> you’re looking for someone that can build the business side of things for you?

In a nutshell, yes. There's a lot of clamoring for something like this from within the courts but also a lot of feet dragging. I need someone who is relentless and can "close."

> Did you develop this software yourself?

Yes, all four applications (Data Replication Service, Configuration Manager, Notification App, and the web lookup app).

Tyler Tech does offer this as part of their Tyler Notify product but, like all of their products, it's very expensive and complex to implement -- and is missing features this has. This is vendor-agnostic, simple, at-cost and national.

You're embarrassingly confused; my best guess is that you're thinking of gifts.

We're talking about licensing, and MIT-licensed open source projects as well trial periods are both absolutely fine and used.