FounderMatchup (Acquired)

What I Did

One of the hardest problems of a startup: starting. One of the most difficult parts of starting: finding co-founders.

I had always been interested in entrepreneurship. Ideas were aplenty, but having very few engineering skills, I knew I would have trouble executing. As I started to have conversations with people at entrepreneurship events at this problem, I received confirming input. At one of these events, I happened to meet Marsh and Smit who were equally frustrated by this problem and were willing to take a stab at solving it. Marsh had a lot of great contacts and relationships in the Boston community, so he took on most of the strategic partnership work. Smit was a great relationship builder, so he took on the community work. That left me to focus on the operations of the business: everything from finances to product.

The Result

A platform to help entrepreneurs find their other half

We decided early on that we wanted to bootstrap the business as much as possible. We knew the business could be built in a way that would allow us to generate revenue while we gathered the data and resources that would make this platform successful. We started with in-person community events, collecting data about the participants, structuring pitch and network opportunities, and tracking the results of our efforts. After many failures and some success, we believe we had the beginnings of an online platform that would enable co-founders to find each other, similar to dating services like eHarmony. We were thrilled to have partners like Microsoft, Dog Patch Labs, and WilmerHale in this effort. We were equally thrilled when we were approached by Shahab of CoFoundersLab.

We were excited about Shahab’s mission and quickly realized that if we wanted to accelerate the scale of our efforts, CoFoundersLab represented a strong opportunity. After much discussion, we agreed to be acquired and were thrilled to see new customers like Techstars come onboard.