The search for a co-founder for your startup is much easier said than done. Its pretty much like trying to find a mate: you look for someone who can bring things to the table that you cannot, the stakes are high, and with the fast-paced nature of this business, time is often not always on your side. Not only are you searching for your perfect professional match, someone who has the strengths and skills that you don’t have, but you also must hunt for someone who is or who could be as passionate and invested in your company as you are. You are about to give them an equal stake in your company after all, so passion is a non-negotiable.
SheTrusts.com is up and running with a functioning site (what I consider to be the “minimum viable product”), has a healthy amount of content with a fantastic stable of contributors, and it has a following that is steadily growing. To many, all is going well and is under control. So why take on a co-founder, you ask? Simply put, I have big ambitions for what I want the site to do combined with a broad and detailed vision for what SheTrusts as a company will be, all involving steps that cannot be taken without a potential accelerator involvement and healthy rounds of funding. Suffice to say, SheTrusts needs a high functioning, well-rounded team to get there.
Sure, I can market and pitch this company all around town until I’m blue in the face, but is it going to be worth my time learning to write code and to engineer a site? No way. I know my strengths, and I’m the first to acknowledge that I’m not what you would call a “techie”. Yet with my background in business development I was determined to establish this company because of my passion for providing a solution for a problem in my own life and that of others, whereas many other tech founders are driven by the technological skills they have and look for ways to apply their know-how to relevant services and ideas. It is an individual who is propelled forward by the other half of this puzzle that I’m looking for to complete the SheTrusts.com executive team.
The fact that SheTrusts is a company whose whole premise is based upon providing a platform for fashion quality and durability reviews from the lives of real women, does narrow my qualifications down significantly. In order to live and breathe this company with me, the ideal cofounder for SheTrusts must be able to emotionally relate to the site’s target audience by having felt the pain themselves of investing substantial amounts of money into supposedly “high quality” fashion products only to have them not be durable enough to hold up to the tests of real life. Ultimately, SheTrusts.com must be a solution they feel a need for in their own lives in order to correctly conceptualize and construct the right site to provide a place for women to learn from one another about that items they can, and cannot trust to invest their money in. Is it essential that the right co-founder be a woman? Sure, it would help, however I’ve met plenty of men who are very into the ideas behind SheTrusts (some even inquiring about a potential HeTrusts.com) so I’ve found that its not an exclusive requirement.
So, do you think that you may be the right person to join me as a co-founder and fill the role of chief technical officer for SheTrusts.com? We’d love to meet you! Get in touch with us by emailing [email protected].
