I am about to start my search for the right marketing co-founder for Day Optimizer (DO), a time management web app I developed that helps solopreneurs more effectively plan their day.

I am documenting my process and research here, to help clarify it in my own mind and to help others who may want to go through a similar process.

As I go through this process, I will be editing and adding to this document. To subscribe to updates to this document and my search process, enter your email on this page. To see the co-founder landing page I launched, check out this page.

Table of Contents

Overview

Context

All advice, processes and frameworks are context-sensitive. What works in one context may be wrong in another. So I believe it’s important to understand the context upfront.

I am a 49-year old, serial entrepreneur looking for a co-founder for an existing bootstrapped company. While I am a technical founder, I have learned marketing over the years and played the role of CEO in my last company.

Much advice you’ll read elsewhere is how to find a co-founder for new, venture-funded companies, often geared toward people in their 20s.

While I have drawn on those as resources, I tried to filter out the irrelevant advice from those. I do link to my original resources at the end of this document, in case those contexts apply to you.

Why Do You Want a Co-Founder?

Though Day Optimizer (DO) continues to grow, its growth is slow. The strategies I’ve used thus far to grow DO have not worked, and the strategies I believe might work, like partnerships, exhaust me when I think about implementing them.

While I’ve been toying with finding a co-founder for a while now, and gave up on it after Dan Martell said they were hard to find and told me I should just continue on my own, I believe a co-founder is the right choice for two reasons:

  1. Joy in the Journey After working with my dance partner to create swing dance classes last year, I experienced the joy of having a working partnership. While we both worked together on the class creation, I focused more on the “product” side, developing the curriculum and preparing the classes for us, while she handled the business and relationship side: coordinating with the university and students. I want to experience that same joy working in DO with someone.
  2. Desired Destination I’ve come to realize that my goal is not to own a business, but to create things that improve people’s lives. While I need a business to realize some of those things, like Day Optimizer, I don’t want to be the one running it. I want to lead product development, and work with someone else who will sell those products. In the ideal world, this wouldn’t be restricted to DO, but would include my books & future software.

Defining a Process

How will you approach finding a co-founder?

I plan to use a process similar to the one my M&A advisor and I used to sell my last business.

From studying decision-making, I know it’s better to evaluate multiple options against each other, than to evaluate those options sequentially. So I plan to use a “launch” strategy, where I do a big announcement to gain visibility and get as many candidates into the same stage of the pipeline as possible, in roughly the same timeframe.