🗞 What's New: A blueprint for finding your ideal cofounder

Looking for a cofounder?

• Finding the right cofounder can be make or break for your business. This 5 step guide can help you ask the right questions to identify the best person to build with!
• If your website is outdated or slow to load, check out the tips below for actionable insight on improving its performance.
• Founder Gwendal Brossard hit over $2,300 in sales just one week after launching PaletteBrain, a ChatGPT-based productivity tool. Here's how he built and promoted the product, and the biggest issue he faced during launch.

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🤝 Finding Your Ideal Cofounder

by Joseph Lee

Having founded multiple startups across various industries, I firmly believe that having the right cofounder(s) is one of the most significant determinants of startup success.

After transitioning from my last startup, I spent over 100 hours going through cofounder matching with 30+ potential partners. While this was a time-consuming process, I learned a ton about transforming the art of cofounder matchmaking into a science. So, I sat down to formalize the steps that I took to find, assess, and partner with cofounders.

Ultimately, this five step process helped me find my cofounder for Supademo, an interactive demo platform. Below, I'm sharing the process with you!

Identify and target the right communities

Start with your network, identifying the people you would love to work with. Who in your network has the capability to create a successful company? Who can you best learn from? These are the folks you should be starting with.

If you have a limited network, no problem! There are tons of established communities where both repeat and aspiring founders regularly come together:

• Indie Hackers is a great place to connect with other founders. Check out the Looking to Partner Up group.
• YC Cofounder Matching is a free online platform for finding a high-quality cofounder based on your preferences for interests, skills, or location.
• Reddit (r/SaaS, r/Startups, r/Entrepreneur) or Hacker News.
• Startup Weekend is a worldwide, three day event where founders pitch, validate, build, and demo their prototypes.
• Slack communities like ProductLed and Product School are great places to start. Here's a list of 400 Slack channels to check out.

Alternatively, you can build top-of-funnel cofounder leads by proactively reaching out to:

• Founders or operators of previous Techstars or Y-Combinator startups.
• Established founders on Twitter.
• Founders featured on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list, or equivalent.

Conduct an initial screening call

Jump on a video conference to introduce yourself and get to know each other. During this call, you should discuss your motivations, making sure that you both align on the fundamentals:

• The ideal problem spaces where you would like to explore ideas.
• Problems you’ve encountered that you’d like to solve.
• The type of company you’d like to build (i.e., timeframe for an exit, bootstrapped, etc.).
• Your ideal time commitment and threshold (i.e., side project? Full-time?).
• Working philosophy (remote, in-person, hours, etc.).
• Topics beyond work. This is your opportunity to determine if you’re okay with spending 40+ hours together in a high-pressure startup environment.

If you align on the fundamentals, move on to the next step. If not, end the discussion here to save yourself time and energy!

Build and complete a cofounder questionnaire

If you’ve made it to this step, congratulations! You now have an opportunity to build both depth and breadth into your mutual assessment.

The best way to do this is to create and share a cofounder questionnaire that dives deeper into your collective motivations, ambitions, and skills.

You can get started by using a popular questionnaire like First Round’s 50 Questions to Explore With a Cofounder, taking pertinent snippets from different sources on the internet, or mixing and matching all of the above (which is what I did). Here's a link to my personal cofounder questions and answers.

Meet to discuss answers and conduct reference checks

Set up an hour or two to sit down and review each other’s answers in person, or via a conference call. This is important, since asynchronous review can lead to misinterpretation or misconstrued answers.

A big part of communication is nonverbal, so it’s critical to observe each other’s level of excitement, fear, or sincerity beyond the written text.

During the call, probe deeper and request concrete examples that support your potential cofounder’s written answers.

At the end of the meeting, ask for one or two work-related references from a previous cofounder, manager, direct report, or advisor, and get in touch with them over a quick call.

Ask them questions to reaffirm answers listed in your cofounder’s questionnaire, like:

1. Would you hire or launch a company with this person again? Why or why not?
2. If you had to rate their competency in [critical skill] out of 10, what would it be? Why?
3. How would you describe what it’s like to work with this person?
4. What is the most impressive thing this person has built?

If you’re satisfied with the references, move on to the next step!

Schedule a build sprint

A build sprint is a time-boxed, controlled environment where you can emulate aspects of company building.

You’ll work with your potential cofounder(s) over a 2–4 week period to establish a sprint milestone, assess problems, and ship experiments to validate your hypotheses with real customers.

A build sprint is an effective tool for the following reasons:

• It simulates a cofounder relationship, without the costly commitment.
• It helps define personal preferences regarding how and when you like to work together.
• Roles are quickly established through actual output and results.
• It’s a barometer to weed out founders who don't deliver actual value.
• It allows both parties to see how they thrive under pressure.

Are you searching for a cofounder? Share your experience below!

Discuss this story.

📰 In the News

from the Growth Trends newsletter by Darko

📱 Twitter plans to purge and archive inactive accounts.

🤖 50 AI prompt examples for marketers.

🎼 TikTok is testing a new process to help musicians maximize their exposure in the app.

🤔 Is your organic traffic eroding?

🏝 Burnout retreats are the latest wellness trend, providing hardcore rest and relaxation for the stressed.

Check out Growth Trends for more curated news items focused on user acquisition and new product ideas.

👩‍💻 Tips to Improve Website Performance

by Cem Ozcelik

If you're looking to improve your website performance, you're in the right place! Here are 24 tips for leveling up your site.

Site insight

1. Optimize images: Large images can slow down website loading times. Optimize images by reducing file size without sacrificing quality.
2. Use lazy loading: Lazy loading delays the loading of non-critical resources until they are needed, reducing the initial load time of your website.
3. Minimize HTTP requests: The more HTTP requests your website makes, the slower it will load. Minimize HTTP requests by reducing the number of resources on your web pages.
4. Use a content delivery network (CDN): A CDN can improve website speed by caching content on servers located closer to the user.
5. Minimize redirects: Redirects can slow down website loading times. Minimize them by removing unnecessary redirects.
6. Enable browser caching: Browser caching can improve website speed by storing frequently accessed resources on the user’s device.
7. Minimize plugins: Too many plugins can slow down website performance. Minimize them by using only essential plugins, removing any that are not in use.
8. Optimize CSS and JavaScript: Optimize your website’s CSS and JavaScript by combining them into a single file to reduce loading times.
9. Use a fast web host: A fast web host can improve website speed and performance.
10. Use a lighter theme: A lighter theme can improve website speed by reducing the number of resources needed to load your website.
11. Use a faster slider plugin: Slider plugins can slow down website performance. Use a faster slider plugin, or remove the slider altogether.
12. Optimize your database: Optimizing your website’s database can improve website speed by reducing the time it takes to retrieve data.
13. Use a CDN for images: A CDN for images can improve website speed by delivering images from a closer server.
14. Use a faster e-commerce platform: Use a faster platform or optimize your current one.
15. Optimize your website’s code: Optimizing your website’s code can improve website speed and performance.
16. Use browser rendering optimization: Browser rendering optimization can improve website speed by prioritizing visible content over non-critical resources.
17. Optimize your website’s fonts: Optimizing your website’s fonts can improve website speed by reducing the time it takes to load fonts.
18. Use Gzip compression: Gzip compression can improve website speed by reducing the size of resources before they are sent to the user.
19. Use a lightweight framework.
20. Remove unused code.
21. Use faster advertising networks.
22. Optimize your website’s server.
23. Use a faster content management system (CMS): CMS platforms can slow down website performance. Use a faster CMS or optimize your current one.
24. Regularly update your website.

For more tips, check out the list here!

How have you updated your website's performance? Let's chat below!

Discuss this story.

🔥 Landing Page Hot Tips

by Rob Hope

Strengthen your landing page with these design, development, and conversion tips:

Replace old content when new content arrives.

Your landing page with eight testimonials does not need a ninth. Kick out the weakest of the bunch.

The goal is to persuade your landing page visitor with as little as possible.

Subscribe to Rob's One Page Love newsletter for his favorite UI, design, and development finds.

🚀 Gwendal Brossard Hit $2.3K in One Week

by Gwendal Brossard

Hi, founders! I'm Gwendal Brossard, and I launched PaletteBrain, a ChatGPT-based productivity tool, on April 24. By May 1, I'd hit over $2.3K in sales!

PaletteBrain allows users to use ChatGPT across all their applications using a shortcut. Users can create their own custom templates and assign shortcuts to them.

Now that I have some free time, I want to share my experience about this successful launch!

Why did I build PaletteBrain?

I've been a ChatGPT user since its launch, and I upgraded to ChatGPT Plus as soon as it was made available. It quickly changed the way I was working, and became the tool that I was using the most throughout the day.

Though it's a great product, it is super annoying to manually copy and paste text, and write the same prompt every time. I decided to build a product that would fix those issues, so I started building PaletteBrain. I initially built it for my personal use and didn't plan to sell it, but I figured if it was useful for me, it would likely also be useful for others.

How long did it take to build the product?

In total, it took me less than three weeks to fully build the product and release the public version. Before releasing it to the public, I made a beta version that was accessible to a select group of users for about a week.

How did I promote PaletteBrain?

• Reddit: I wrote a few posts on different relevant subreddits, including r/ChatGPT and r/SideProject. The posts were simple, one minute videos showcasing how PaletteBrain works. You don't need to write a 10 page essay for your post, as a picture or a video will always have more impact than text. Some of them became the top posts of the day, and brought a lot of visitors to PaletteBrain. It is by far where I got the most traffic to my website.
• AI directories: There are a lot of AI directories where you can submit your product and have it featured on their website. It is super easy to submit, it's usually free, and it's a great way to gain visibility and reach potential customers who are interested in AI.
• Twitter: Most of my recent tweets are about PaletteBrain, and include a link to the site.

How did the launch go?

During the first week, PaletteBrain received more than 3.3K unique visitors.

I was absolutely not prepared to receive that much traction for PaletteBrain right from the start. I quickly became overwhelmed by the amount of comments that I had to reply to on Reddit and Twitter, all of the questions that visitors were asking me via my website chatbot, and all of the emails. It was really hard to keep up with all of those notifications coming in from everywhere.

After a few days, though, I figured out a better way to handle it all, and now things are going really well. I am still making sales every day, and I am pushing regular updates to PaletteBrain!

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 Joseph Lee, Darko, Cem Ozcelik, Rob Hope, and Gwendal Brossard for contributing posts. —Channing