For builders deciding whether to post: the recurring theme in developer retrospectives about joining early-stage projects is that the good outcomes started with evaluating the founder like an investor would — asking for users, retention, and personal commitment before discussing equity. We put a checklist version of that in the thread "My co-founder prospect wants to see traction first" (last reply). Bring that checklist to your first call; a founder who reacts well to being diligenced is the strongest available signal.
Find a Co-founder offeringtemplatepinned
Developers open to joining a project — post your availability here
The mirror image of the co-founder intro thread: this is the standing format for builders — engineers, designers, ML people — who are open to joining an existing project as co-founder or founding engineer. Same logic as the other side: structure gets responses.
The template
- Who I am: name or consistent handle, location, timezone.
- What I build: stack and specialties, with links — shipped products, repos, or writeups. Evidence over adjectives.
- Proof I ship: the one thing you're proudest of that a stranger can actually try or read.
- What I'm looking for: stage (idea / prototype / revenue), domain interests, and what role — co-founder, founding engineer for equity+pay, or contract-to-cofounder.
- Availability: hours per week now, and what would change that.
- Terms I'd consider: equity-only (at what stage), pay+equity, or paid trial first. Saying it up front saves everyone the dance.
- Dealbreakers: the honest filters — no crypto, needs revenue, must be remote, whatever they are.
A note on the market
Founders reading this category outnumber builders posting in it — that's the standing asymmetry in every community like this one. Practical consequence for builders: a specific post here has unusually good odds. Practical consequence for founders: builders who post get multiple approaches fast, so respond with specifics about your project, not a form letter — you're the one applying.
Disclosure rule
If you're primarily selling development services and open to equity as an upsell, that's welcome — in the Auditors & Security offering threads or with the "offering" tag and a plain disclosure line here. Presenting a services pitch as a co-founder search is the thing that gets removed.
Builders: what would a founder's post need to contain for you to reply? That answer is the most useful thing you can leave here even if you're not posting availability yet.
Replies (4)
A pattern I'll flag from moderating early responses: founders DMing every builder in this thread with identical pitches. Builders can tell, and it reads as spam — you're demonstrating your future sales quality to a potential partner, and mass outreach is the demo nobody wants. One tailored paragraph naming why their evidence fits your gap outperforms ten templates. We will remove posting privileges for copy-paste outreach reported by multiple recipients; that's the same rule as everywhere else on the platform, applied to DMs.
Follow-up from maker intake (builder side): "I'm a senior engineer who's never done the business side. How do I evaluate whether a founder is actually good?"
Four checks, mirroring how founders should vet you: (1) can they get customers — any evidence of landing users, pilots, or distribution, at any scale; (2) do they ship their side — the deck, the interviews, the pipeline should have the same cadence you'd bring to code; (3) how do they talk about previous collaborators — the pattern in their stories is your future; (4) do they make crisp decisions with incomplete information, or does everything wait for more research? Two weeks of a trial project reveals all four faster than any number of calls.
Follow-up from maker intake (builder side): "What's a fair founding-engineer package when a project already has revenue — say $3-5k MRR?"
Ranges from founder-community discussions, not gospel: a true co-founder joining post-revenue typically lands 10-25% (vested, cliffed), reflecting risk already retired. A founding engineer with market-adjacent pay plus equity: more like 1-5%. The dominant variable is cash — every dollar of salary trades against equity points. What to avoid: 'co-founder title, employee equity' — 3% with no salary and a co-founder workload is the package that generates the bitter retrospectives. Name the mismatch in the first conversation if you see it.
Threads here are permanent — locked, not deleted, once resolved. New threads start on GitHub Discussions in the same six categories, each with the structured format pinned in that category; moderation follows the community guidelines ladder.
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