This article is written by Kirti Prakash.

How I Used Facebook To Find My Startup Co-Founder

If you wish to succeed in building a successful startup, then you’ll have to nail the hiring part in your business.

If you get it right, your startup will grow like crazy.

But if you mess this up, you will continue to suffer for a long time.

And sooner rather than later bad hiring will start impacting in every function of the business.

It will cost you a lot of time and money.

I think it’s close to impossible to recover from early stage poor hiring.

And if you get your core team wrong, then you are Doomed!

Over a period I have seen that the most significant hiring any entrepreneur can make is the co-founder hiring.

Because building a business is extremely hard. It is one of the most difficult things you’ll ever attempt in your life. You need someone who can support you in this journey of building and managing your company, someone who is there to help you in your day to day decision making.

And it’s not only a matter of finding someone who complements your skill set.

But it’s way more than that.

I think there is a lot that goes on when you have a smart business partner who is on board with you. You’ll have plenty of emotional, mental & psychological support which can help you in sailing through your bad days.

And that’s the reason why I am specifically writing this story because I wanted to tell you about how I found my business partner on Facebook using a simple approach and how you can do the same by applying the same formula and get your results in a matter of few weeks.

So let’s just dive in straight to my story…

Now I was almost 6-8 weeks deep into building my product.

I was working on my product day in and day out. And after working for long extensive hours one day, I realised that this is the worst approach I can take to building a company.

If I keep on working like this, I can not go far with this product.

I will need some extra help on this. Not just an employee but someone who can put his blood and sweat like me and dedicated himself to building this company.

Hiring a senior level employee won’t just make the cut. Because I couldn’t afford to pay high salaries. I realised having a co-founder would solve this issues of mine in the fastest way possible.

So I didn’t waste much time. I started reaching out to my GANG.

I started reaching out to my school friends, college mates and other acquaintances who were there in my network.

I tried a lot of ways so that I could get one person interested in working with me.

But it’s like one of those things where the needier you get, the more it repels other people.

But after investing some time in it, I came across few people who were interested in working with me, but but but….

There was a catch to it.

The ones who were interested in working with me weren’t ready to commit to me for full-time.

I heard things like “ I don’t know, I like your project, But I am not too sure about this. I don’t think I’d be able to convince my parents/wife. “

For me, it was a no-brainer, that if someone has to work on this, they’d have to come for full time with me and work on building this together with 100% commitment to it.

Soon it was becoming hard to convince someone to come with me for a full-time GIG.

I feel bad in telling this, but I even went to the extent of making those needy “ looking for co-founder posts “ on Facebook.

Now I don’t know whether you have seen such posts or not, but you can go to startup forums on Facebook, and you will find plenty of such examples of people desperately hunting for co-founders on these groups.

But even that couldn’t get me any solid leads.

Until one day I was casually browsing on Google. I got to know about this person Nikhliesh from HiringDecoder. Nikhilesh helps early and mid-stage companies in hiring co-founder by using his simple step by step approach.

Soon we got talking on Email and then later on the phone and I got to realise of all the mistakes I have been making till now.

He helped me in refining my pitch so that it attracts the right type of people for my startup. And within 4 weeks of my hunt, I got a crazy number of applications in my email.

By the end of the process, I had close to 200+ applications with me. All these people wanted to work with me and were happy to join me as a business partner.

Now the process that I followed was simple if I can pull off results like 200+ applications I am sure you can do it too.

But if I tell you that it all happened in this easy way, it wouldn’t be fair on my part.

Coming to this point wasn’t easy.

I wasted a lot of time in going to conferences, meetups & pitching sessions in the hope that I’d be able to find a good guy in those meetups.

But If I had to go in the past, and fix one thing, I would NOT go and waste my time in any of those events.

The BIGGEST problem with these methods is that you have to put in a lot of effort and results are very less.

Now when I say that, what I mean to say is that the kind of people who come to these events are usually wantrepreneurs.

So your chances of finding a good guy in these events are very less.

So it is better to spend your time in areas where you get high quality leads with minimal effort.

FOCUSING on too many low-yield channels is only going to get you BAD leads.

Instead, you should start focusing on high yield efforts.

A good idea to approach this problem is by approaching it like a marketing funnel.

You know how a funnel is? Right?

It has a bigger mouth on the top and a narrow one on the bottom.

Your idea should be to push as many people as you can in your funnel.

So that high-quality leads can keep coming in, and on the other end, you get high-quality hires on the narrow bottom end.

A good source to find high-quality leads is on Facebook.

Facebook out of all the social networks has the best reach when it comes to access to people. It is an excellent medium to source consistent applications for finding a co-founder.

So what you need to do is, you need to get your message out there and show it to as many people as you can.

But before you start spreading your message it is important to understand that you create the right job description for your co-founder.

Since it will take a lot of time, you can learn how to build a job description by clicking on the link here.

The more time and thought that you put in at this stage, the better you’ll have the chances of finding a co-founder.

Once you have created the perfect co-founder job description, then the next thing you need to do is you need to figure out all the startup and startup related groups on Facebook and join all of them.

Now, this step might take you close to 7-10 days to get accepted in all the groups.

Try to join all the startup groups of your country, don’t try to limit yourself to the same city or the state, seek to find the best ones in your country and make your postings over there.

Now back when I did it, I joined close to hundred plus startup and startups related groups on Facebook before floating my job description over there.

One thing which you should keep in mind is that you should only join groups that have more than 300+ members. Because if you try to HIT a number less than 300, it will difficult for you get some action from that particular groups.

So try to find those groups which have this kind of numbers.

Once you have been accepted in these groups, then the next thing you need to do is, you need to start posting your job description in these groups.

Post it in as many groups as you can because the more postings you make, the more people will view it, and it will increase your chances of getting more people in your funnel.

I followed the same formula, and my job posting became amongst the most popular job postings ever.

You can copy and learn from my method and see the kind of job description I had created back then.

Please don’t copy my script word by word because what has worked for me might not work for you, so try to seek inspiration from this and build your case on your own.

You can also run Facebook Ads and put $1 a day ad budget to it. This way will get you high quality leads at a much faster pace.

If you put in the effort to make these 2 techniques work the chances are that you will be getting your results in a matter of few weeks.

When I made my post, I got

• 200 + applications.
• 52 emails
• 15 calls/ meetings
• 2 shortlisted candidates for trials.
• 1 Final recruit.

(This is how my stats looked like)

But again getting up to this point where you get lots, and lots of applications mean you follow the complete process and build a crafty co-founder job description post.

And if you create a perfect post like this you can get access to high-quality people on facebook.

And if you want to learn through the complete process of hiring a co-founder, then you can go to my ultimate guide on how to find a co-founder (which has all the word by word scripts and examples in it)

Try to use this method and let me know in the comments section if you have any doubts about it; I’d be more than happy to help if you need my help on anything.

Feel free to write in the comments section.

See you soon.

Kirti

PS – I take one to one consulting client for hiring co-founders as well, if you need particular help, write me an email & one of my team members will get back to you on it.