jimg makes a GREAT point. Your approach depends greatly on "funding, market research / validation, and experienced leadership." If you have all these in place it is easier to get a tech to sign on. However, of the start-ups I've seen it is a rare case where each, or any, of these attributes are in order.

One option I’ve seen work: Seek out your competition. If they used an outside development company or they’ve downsized you’re in good luck to pick up a cofounder. Interview like mad. Follow up on all recommendations and then hire/sign. One last suggestion: Because the product you’re interested in today will certainly be a distant memory once you hit the market look for tech with diversity in your niche…but start with your neighbors.

There's a few companies trying to crack the co-founder dating problem:

http://startupSQUARE.com http://partnerup.com http://techcofounder.com http://kofounder.com http://startuplinkup.com http://founderdating.com

Cheers, Tristan

you might check out techcofounder.com

I assume we are talking about founders, and not outsourced / "by the project" developers.

I think many techies are not too interested in startups that don't have funding, market research / validation, and experienced leadership. To get involved with a startup requires a tremendous leap of faith - one cannot guarantee that the effort will turn a profit (yet there is a absolute guarantee of hard work).

Suggest that the non technical founder focus on defining & presenting a compelling reason to join him / her on developing the business rather than engaging them with "speeds & feeds" type discussions. Sure, you need to validate skillset, but you shouldn't be talking to someone about your idea without already understanding their capabilities.

I'm running into this problem as well. I've met with a few developers who are interested in my startup, but my gut is telling me they aren't a good fit. So my search continues ... I'm wondering if you could give me any advice on which MeetUp groups in the Boston area would be good to attend? I have gone the PHP MeetUp but most of the guys there weren't too interested in an early stage startup. Other groups seem to be too business minded ... haven't seemed to find a good mix. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

There was a recent thread on Hacker News which had a running list of folks looking for co-founders - quite a number of solid technical folks standout.

Here's the posting for co-founders.

All the best!

Well.. you're gonna need a skill of your own to bring to the table. otherwise, it's gonna be lop sided and that technical person is gonna think you're just using him.

Here's an interesting view on this matter:

http://www.techwankers.com/2010/02/07/top-10-silicon-valley-bullshit-pitched-to-geeks/

I second Van's answer. Even trying to do the tiniest bit himself would teach him insanely great lessons. Even if he's terrible at it, the knowledge would go far in helping him hire people who are actually good at it.

Jason Fried at 37signals tried to cobble together some PHP and it helped him tons when he actually went out looking for a PHP programmer to do things right and found David.

My analogy is have you ever seen a good football coach who has never played a single game of football?

One of the users on this forum has a startup called FairSoftware and it looks like it'd be a perfect place for you to find help and share revenue for a new idea. I haven't used it personally but it looks interesting.

Alain Reynaud (http://answers.onstartups.com/users/502/alain-raynaud) is the founder of FairSoftware (http://fairsoftware.net)

Might be worth your friend learning the skills and becoming a technical [co-]founder himself. It is extremely hard to measure what you don't yourself already know about. Not that you can't get lucky and find someone. But you can minimize risk and maximize gain.

Finding a co-founder (= business partner) is like finding a life partner, albeit, on a little smaller scale. Try starting your search with LinkedIn. I am an all rounded technical person with few startup experience under my belt and trying to use linked to find someone with a solid business idea supported by extensive foundation to support the idea to partner with me.

You can ask your friend to contact me and do his due diligence on me starting with my LinkedIn profile!!! Do point me to your friend's LinkedIn profile so that I can do the same.

http://www.linkedin.com/profile?viewProfile=&key=2203561&trk=tab_pro

Cheers, Paresh

you can get in touch someone on linkedin.com

One word of warning, if the concept that you wish to create is only just that at this stage be very careful with whom you share your secret sauce. Ideally, you would have wanted a technical founder to be someone you've known for some time and can trust as you stand the risk of being "Zucked" (see Winkelvos brothers and Mark Zuckerberg regarding Facebook).

There was a recent PHP group meetup event in September and one of the presenters were two marketing and sales guys that had an idea that could work but there was no real way to defend against any of the techies in the room just stealing the idea and coding it themselves, so unless there is some aspect of your concept that makes YOU personally invaluable to its implemenation, engage a long search and trust cycle for your hunt. You can mitigate against the urge of people you share your idea from wanting to "borrow your idea permanently", you can offer a big chunk of equity up front, as they will make your engine go, (heck build the engine!) it is important to make them feel like an owner, you don't want to get Zucked!

Much success.

David Saintloth Founder Apriority LLC and numeroom.com

One thing to try would be local tech entrepreneur meetups or other events in the area. I participate in several in the Boston area, and they're a good way to connect to other startup fanatics (be they technology geeks or business geeks).

One of the things that makes these connections hard is that tech folks and business folks often don't hang out in the same circles. Startup events often pull in both kinds of people.

He should look EVERYWHERE actually, machine gun the search from Craigslist to LinkedIn to his local Newtech Meetup, to Twitter, to other trade events. I met my last co-founder on Craigslist, and he's survived with me to a 2nd term at a new company.

I found startuply.com VERY useful

lol I would ask the same question but in the reverse!

I think ultimately what matters (at least for me) is chemistry and complement. It shouldn't be forced and there should be a strong line of distinction in terms of my responsibilities and the more business oriented co-founder.

A lot of technical people find it tough to listen to pitches about working for equity, so I would advise your friend to have some short term financial upside for the developer.

If he knows what technology he wants to work with, I suggest he network in the user groups around those technologies (Ruby on Rails, PHP, .NET, etc)

I don't think you can discount the amount of time it takes to find a co-founder, regardless of whether they're technical or business oriented. Find a connector in your network to line up meet and greets with some technical people w/ startup success under their belt.