Are you on the hunt for a cofounder? - **Finding a good cofounder match can be difficult. These tips** can help you get started on finding your perfect fit! Hint: Don't ignore red flags. - **The number of metaverse job postings has enjoyed a meteoric
Are you on the hunt for a cofounder?
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Finding a good cofounder match can be difficult. These tips can help you get started on finding your perfect fit! Hint: Don't ignore red flags.
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The number of metaverse job postings has enjoyed a meteoric rise in the US and the UK since November 2021. Here are new opportunities to build solutions for employees, freelancers, and businesses in the metaverse.
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Founder Matt Dabrowski has sold over a million copies of his video game, Streets of Rogue, and has hit $8 million in total revenue. Below, he shares more on his 4 year journey to complete the game, and advice for founders looking to break into the gaming space.
Want to share something with over 100,000 indie hackers? Submit a section for us to include in a future newsletter. —Channing
🤗 Finding Your Perfect Cofounder
by Neuro Futuro
When I launched my startup, every attempt to find the right cofounder failed in some way. I'm a creative director and strategic marketing expert turned founder, and I've launched two startups. Both failed. Since my background isn't in tech, I knew that I needed to figure out how to find the right person to help me successfully launch my next startup.
But how do you find the right cofounder? Here are a few tips!
Mission: cofounder
These steps can help you get started!
Set up meetings:
Setting up meetings with multiple candidates is worth the effort. Don't go with the first or second person that you talk to. Talking to several people can help you get an idea of what you like and don't like, and who seems like a great fit. A startup is a long game, so it's worth taking the time to find and communicate with the right people.
Do your homework:
Homework is crucial. It involves learning the fundamentals of the business that you're running. You need to understand the market, its current state of events, your preferred method for company development, and your roadmap. That way, you can have a solid understanding when communicating with potential cofounders.
The other part may be more tricky. It is about understanding yourself, defining your values and motivations, assessing your resources, evaluating what the business requires now and in the foreseeable future, and determining what type of cofounder you should seek.
Vet potential matches:
This may seem obvious, but you should conduct a thorough review of each potential cofounder. What is their background? What is their skillset? What are their values? You need to know how they communicate, what circumstances they work best under, how they react to specific events and changes, their expected degree of involvement, and how they see the roadmap.
Hard skills can be difficult to assess for a non-technical founder. There are various services that you can use to help you find tech talent based on your needs. You can also hire a freelance tech advisor to help you assess whether a potential cofounder can take care of what you need, or ask potential cofounders to create a small project, then run it by a technical person that you know.
Don't ignore red flags:
If there are any signals that cast doubt on a person, their qualities, goals, intentions, or values, do not ignore them! Sometimes, founders tend to rush things along just to get a product out. But you don't want to compromise your overall business by ignoring these warning signs. Ignoring red flags is a ticking time bomb in business and relationships.
I don't think that a cofounder is absolutely necessary for everyone. However, I think that launching a startup is similar to climbing a difficult mountain; having the right partner motivates you to move forward, find better ways to do things, express your best qualities, and learn new things. In other words, it greatly increases your chances of reaching the summit!
Forum friends
Solomon Oyemade decided to start building with no-code before searching for a cofounder, just to get started:
When I get stuck, I reach out to people in forums. I schedule a call with generous folks who are interested in what I am building and respond to me, and that tends to help me get unstuck.
Finding a cofounder is so similar to dating! Having a set criteria and measuring everyone against it hasn't worked for me, but knowing what I bring to the table has. My main skills are selling things, designing things, and understanding customer needs, so the best cofounder for me is someone who builds things. My process unearths people who love building things so much that they are willing to help others in their spare time.
For more information, check out this Indie Hackers post on how to find a technical cofounder, or this one on how to add a cofounder to your business (founders agreement, splitting equity, etc.)!
What are your tips on finding a cofounder? Share your experience below!
Discuss this story.
📰 In the News
from the Volv newsletter by Priyanka Vazirani
👋 Instagram is bidding goodbye to its shopping page.
🚫 The US has banned "advance tech" firms from building facilities in China.
🏛 Twitter lawyers allege that Elon Musk wanted out of the deal because of WW3.
🍎 Brazil has ordered Apple to stop selling iPhones without chargers.
🎸 The piano was linked to marriage, but the guitar is for seducers.
Check out Volv for more 9-second news digests.
✨ Real Job Opportunities in Virtual Realities
from the Hustle Newsletter by Julia Janks
The Signal: A couple months back, we wrote about NFTs getting jobs in the metaverse. It's a hard pill to swallow, especially in light of layoffs and hiring freezes for those of us living in the real world.
The good news is that there are jobs for humans in the metaverse, too. The number of metaverse job postings has enjoyed a meteoric rise in the US and the UK since November 2021.
*Source: Revelio Labs
Although not immune to industry wide hiring freezes, the number of new postings is still more than double what it was just six months ago.
While full-time metaverse jobs might be dwindling in light of a looming recession, freelance jobs are easier to come by. The term "NFT art" experienced the most growth in the last six months on freelancing platform Fiverr, jumping 3,504%.
*Recovery may be on the horizon: Metaverse adoption and investment is growing, despite the economic and crypto downswing. Source: McKinsey
If you're inclined to believe that the metaverse is here to stay in some form or another, there are opportunities to build solutions for employees, freelancers, and companies navigating uncharted waters.
1. Job board:
Not long ago, many people would have scoffed at the idea of a job board dedicated to remote jobs. Now, thanks to COVID-19, one-man-band sites like Remote OK bring in $1M+ ARR with fat margins: 93% gross profit and 77% net profit margins. Not bad.
Remote OK enjoys 1M+ site visits every month, and Cryptocurrency Jobs is not far behind, with 500K+ per month.
*Source: Remote OK
Metaverse jobs could be poised to enjoy the same type of growth as companies enter the fray. The list of companies that have already hired a Chief Metaverse Officer (CMVO) include:
Opportunities are not reserved for developers and the C-suite. According to a recent McKinsey survey of execs, the capabilities needed to deliver a metaverse strategy are diverse:
*Source: McKinsey
2. Talent marketplace:
We recently spoke to Matt Alder, a Trendster and host of the Recruiting the Future podcast, about the biggest opportunities in HR tech. Here's his insight:
One area of opportunity is marketplaces of talent. For example, there's a marketplace for nurses called Incredible Health that has just become a unicorn.
It's like the job boards of old, but slightly different in approach; a bit more full-service.
You could replicate the model to create an AI-powered platform that matches permanent and freelance metaverse talent with relevant projects and jobs.
3. Training and education:
Advertising behemoth and multinational holding company WPP recently teamed up with Epic Games to provide metaverse training programs to its employees. The curriculum has separate tracks for executives, creative professionals, and media experts.
There are plenty of B2C metaverse courses on platforms like Udemy, but you could launch a B2B curriculum that provides corporate training programs. Large companies like KPMG are already putting aside millions to train their employees in metaverse knowledge, and others may be set to follow suit.
Would you consider building in the metaverse? Let's chat below!
Subscribe to the Hustle Newsletter for more.
🚀 The Spector Report
by Josh Spector
I'm sharing growth tips for creative founders! Here's this week's:
Focus on output, not outcome.
Output is 100% in your control, but outcome is never in your control.
Example: Publishing 50 newsletters is an output. Getting 500 subscribers is an outcome.
Focusing on what you can control is the best way to get what you want.
Subscribe to Josh's For The Interested newsletter or I Want To Know podcast for more.
🎮 Matt Dabrowski Sold 1M Copies of His Video Game
by Bobby Burch
Founder Matt Dabrowski has been building video games since the late 1990's. When he was laid off in 2015, he decided to try his hand at indie hacking, and began building a video game, Streets of Rogue.
Between 2015 and 2019, Matt invested hundreds of hours into the game, and spent over $18K hiring contractors for music and art. This strategy ultimately paid off. Since 2019, Streets of Rogue has sold around 1M copies across a variety of platforms, generating about $8M in revenue.
In 2021, the company through which he published the game acquired the intellectual property for $6.5M. You can learn more about his exit here!
Indie Hackers spoke with Matt about his journey, what he’s learned, and his advice for aspiring indie game makers.
How did you get into gaming?
Game development has been my dream career since I first played a video game as a kid. While I’ve taken jobs outside of the gaming world, my intention was always to return to games. There’s really been no other serious choice for me.
How did you navigate the risk of building Streets of Rogue?
To be honest, there wasn’t a massive risk involved in creating and releasing Streets of Rogue. I started developing it in my free time as I was earning a living at a full-time job. By the time I was laid off, I had enough savings to live off for quite some time. It helped that I tend to be pretty frugal.
I managed to keep development costs low by doing just about everything myself, with the total amount of money paid to contractors being a little under $20K. While I would still consider this a large investment, I had faith in the game that I was making, and was fairly certain that I would recoup what I had spent. The marketing costs were covered by my publisher.
The idea that I could earn a living by creating my own work wasn’t something that seemed remotely viable until recent years.
Any advice for founders setting a million dollar goal?
Doing a bunch of market research before embarking on a project is pretty essential. A lot of decisions that are made early-on in a project can either potentially doom it, or give it a fighting chance. While technically, any game release has a shot at being a hit (see Flappy Bird), you can improve your odds dramatically by choosing a project that has hooks and features that are known to capture people’s interest.
You are probably capable of more than you think you are, and it’s possible to gain a working knowledge on game development that might seem completely out of your reach at first. That said, very few people are complete jacks-of-all-trades, so it’s important to recognize when it may be worth it to hire someone to help you.
On outsourcing tasks
If you’re absolutely terrible at art, you could either spend a bunch of time honing that craft to create a game that looks attractive enough to garner people’s attention, or you could hire an artist. Both are viable paths, but the latter will speed up development pretty significantly, and will likely result in a more attractive end product. Personally, I started Streets of Rogue with the intention of being an army of one and doing everything myself, but my collaborations with contractors ended up being absolutely essential.
What did you learn through the long process of building this game?
It’s easy to get overwhelmed working on a large game where every single programming and gameplay-related task falls on your shoulders. Breaking everything into very small tasks has been very beneficial, as completing smaller tasks tends to be satisfying and motivating.
As a solo founder, how do you balance your time?
I’ve been fortunate in that the vast bulk of my work time has been spent on game development, as opposed to other aspects of releasing a game (namely marketing!). This is largely because my publisher handles most of the things that I don’t particularly want to do.
In the absence of a publisher (or even with one, depending on the publisher and their role) achieving success will likely mean spending a good deal of time on marketing.
On common pitfalls of building a game
One of the common things I see on Reddit about failed game launches is a lack of awareness about the game’s actual prospects. Some people are surprised by a game’s poor reception, when one look at the game’s store page from an outside observer, and some harsh (but necessary) feedback could have sent things in a completely different direction.
I lurk in a bunch of gaming communities online. This gives me a good sense of what qualities are attractive to people in a game. With Streets of Rogue and its sequel, I tried to make something that stood a chance of connecting with a lot of people, while still being the sort of game that I’m personally very passionate about. While I have a lot of ideas for games, I recognize that many of them are too niche in their appeal to be hits.
For those just beginning their career in games, your first release is probably not going to be a hit, and that’s okay. Start small, keep your expectations in check, and use what you learn to power your next project!
Discuss this story.
🐦 The Tweetmaster's Pick
by Tweetmaster Flex
I post the tweets indie hackers share the most. Here's today's pick:
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Special thanks to Jay Avery for editing this issue, to Gabriella Federico for the illustrations, and to Neuro Futuro, Priyanka Vazirani, Julia Janks, Josh Spector, and Bobby Burch for contributing posts. —Channing
