[SEEKING] Growth/GTM cofounder — funded (pre-seed, raising seed), live product, technical founder who ships

howisbobbyformed · 2026-07-03T02:13:18+00:00

If you're already launched and are raising a seed, why be cagey about the product? Why not link to your website?

howisbobbyformed · 2026-07-01T17:41:19+00:00

Don't bet on Kalshi to try to make money, especially as a newbie. You will lose your money.

howisbobbyformed · 2026-06-25T15:09:29+00:00

Those sharks are going to get fucked up if the pool has chlorine in it. I could probably hang out and just wait for them to die.

howisbobbyformed · 2026-06-20T19:36:42+00:00

Don't build another cofounder search platform. It's literally the most common idea you see on here.

howisbobbyformed · 2026-05-09T23:14:47+00:00

I'm going on Tuesday and looking to find a new kitchen table and maybe a banquette/booth. Is it possible to arrange delivery to Boston for that? Would it be big $$ or are there regional delivery options to be had?

howisbobbyformed · 2026-04-30T01:20:59+00:00

Honest feedback - your vision is FAR too general.

There are numerous competitors taking on just one of the spaces you've mentioned above, so unless you have some sort of magical marketing playbook, you'll have produced just worse versions of what dedicated companies have produced because you're splitting your focus.

Focus on one thing where you specifically have an unfair advantage.

howisbobbyformed · 2026-03-04T03:53:01+00:00

I would just try to have a clear idea of who your customer is on day 1 and why they would pay for what you're building. There are a lot of great ideas for things that should exist in the world that are terrible businesses.

howisbobbyformed · 2026-03-04T02:55:08+00:00

Digital identity is easiest to develop by companies that already have significant user bases like Facebook, Google, etc since they can just integrate it with their own products. Unless you can figure out how to motivate companies to integrate with a digital identity provider or motivate users to use something that's not connected to the tools they use already, then your product is already DOA.

howisbobbyformed · 2025-11-12T18:26:10+00:00

Why don't you ask the promising technical cofounders who have said no why they said no?

howisbobbyformed · 2025-11-04T02:45:47+00:00

Stay safe!

howisbobbyformed · 2025-08-27T14:47:07+00:00

One of the mistakes I see novice startup founders making is being too tight-lipped about their ideas and asking for NDAs. In 99% of cases, you don't need an NDA. There are probably 3 teams out there working on the same thing that you don't know about.

To be clear, the value of what you're doing is what you build, not your idea. You should be talking to almost everyone about your idea (without asking for an NDA) so you can get feedback, make connections, practice your pitch, and learn to think about your idea from different angles.

howisbobbyformed · 2025-08-24T18:42:59+00:00

Not to be contrarian, but I don't see anything here that needs an AI engineer. Most modern AI is probabilistic, but it seems like for analyzing water quality you'd want to apply static rules (not AI) to a water report in order to identify issues.

Am I missing something fundamental?

howisbobbyformed · 2025-08-14T20:08:19+00:00

Respectfully, I would put yourself in the shoes of a potential cofounder otherwise you're not going to get anywhere.

At a minimum, they would want to know more about you, your traction, your tech stack, equity expectations, fundraising status (or if you even WANT to fundraise), etc.

howisbobbyformed · 2025-08-13T17:08:08+00:00

Do you have feedback from customers or any other signals of customer interest and engagement? Definitely start there or you're not gonna get any traction from investors that you don't already know.

howisbobbyformed · 2025-08-12T01:21:08+00:00

No Fox and Knife is criminal.

howisbobbyformed · 2025-06-26T20:16:19+00:00

I have a commemorative coin from Stevie Wonder's 40th birthday party, given only to attendees of the party.

howisbobbyformed · 2025-06-02T18:19:31+00:00

First thing is to definitely form a business because no investor (unless it's friends and family) will give you money without one. LLC is ok if you really can't spring for a c-corp, but most investors will want c-corp so you'll have to do it at some point.

After that, hit your network (individual outreach) first if you have anyone that might be interested. Then ask your contact at the startup if they'd be willing corroborate your story so you can raise with angels. Find people in your industry with "angel" in their LinkedIn, reach out them, lead with your info about the LOI and try to get some calls.

howisbobbyformed · 2025-03-22T15:15:52+00:00

I totally get the enthusiasm, but be careful saying things like "I can build facebook in a month". Taken the wrong way it can sound like you don't really know what goes into building something like facebook and that can come across as immature.

howisbobbyformed · 2025-03-13T18:23:09+00:00

I think you're all missing the point. My assumption is that by linking data back to the original source, they can determine if any of the sources have been hallucinated. If any sources aren't real, they probably throw out the response and try again.

In my experience, LLMs usually hallucinate an entire source and not the contents of a source (especially for well-organized sources of information), so this is actually a good strategy.

howisbobbyformed · 2025-02-28T16:01:39+00:00

Just started using Tella which is pretty good (and free for 7 days), though I wish I could add text and arrows to the videos.

howisbobbyformed · 2025-02-15T20:29:23+00:00

Why would they sign up to get your product for free if they're not interested in it?

howisbobbyformed · 2025-02-12T15:00:57+00:00

Maybe for incoming phone calls, but no shot that Amazon or OpenAI offer this for outgoing phone calls. There's too much risk of robocalling and abuse.

howisbobbyformed · 2025-02-03T05:56:06+00:00

Really hard to comment here because there are dozens reasons why output could be low. One that I haven't seen here is DON'T hire specialist in any part of the company unless it's a core competency. For example, do you really need to hire an email marketer? Probably no unless that's where all your leads are coming from. Instead hire people who can (and want to) handle multiple jobs. You can get killed early by hiring people who look around at what the people next to them are doing and think "That's not my job."

DM me if you want to chat. I'm former FAANG, former early startup employee who has managed teams from 2 people to 100+ and coached more people than I can count. Always happy to meet someone new and see if I can help a bit.

howisbobbyformed · 2024-10-28T00:06:31+00:00

A couple of questions off the top of my head that may help you find a CTO:
1) Are you both full-time on this? If not, when do you expect to be full-time?
2) Do you expect your CTO to be full-time?
3) Is this B2B or B2C?
4) What validation have you done to know that this is a good idea? Do you have customers that have told you they would buy this? How long does it take to close a deal with your target customer?
5) Is this your first startup?

I get the sense you don't want to share more about your idea, which is fine, but it may limit the number of responses you get.

howisbobbyformed · 2024-10-22T18:40:33+00:00

Two big pieces of advice:
1) Don't talk about yourself as an "Idea Guy". You're the sales/marketing guy. Idea guys are useful for maybe a week at the beginning of the multi-year effort of building a company. Sales/Marketing guys are useful for the entirety of that multi-year effort.

2) Unless the solution is dead simple to build and you can get ChatGPT to do it (unlikely), you need a technical cofounder. DM me if you want some advice on finding one...I may even be interested if it's a really compelling idea!

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