henrik.angelstig@gmail.com +46 72-732 44 11 I am searching for a technical co-founder Are you great at web development and want to start a company, but need a co-founder who can handle all the business operations? I am planning to start a company and am searching for a technical co-founder. I can manage all the business-related aspects of the company – customer contact, marketing, raising capital, etc. But I can't code and build the actual product. Are you someone who: ● Is skilled at web development, ● Want to start a company, and ● Would rather focus on building a great product than all the business operations? Then I would be very excited to meet you and see if are a good co-founder fit! 😃 Who am I? My name is Henrik Angelstig. I’m a Master’s student at Stockholm School of Economics, and my long-term goal is to build businesses that will impact the lives of as many people as possible for the better. As a person, my friends would describe me as: ● Enthusiastic ● Hard-working ● Altruistic ● Mildly obsessed with entrepreneurship Possible business idea – A “Facebook” for groups Instagram is “Facebook” for images. And Instagram works because photos are so important that people actually prefer a separate app that just focuses on doing photos perfectly. Similarly, I believe people would prefer a separate app that just focuses on doing online groups perfectly. What are the problems with existing group platforms? ● Hard for individuals to discover groups they want to join. Existing platforms (Facebook, Discord, Slack) don’t let you filter on geography, school, or interests. ● Hard for groups to be noticed and recruit new members. ● Some platforms (eg Facebook) don’t let you create subgroups ⇒ the main group becomes too crowded when too many members join. ● Many useful features for organizing a group (events, group scheduling, task management, membership database, payments, etc) are missing. How would we get people to start using the service? Facebook started as a closed service only for Harvard students. Because colleges are so tight-knit communities, Facebook worked even when it only existed at Harvard. Facebook then expanded one college at a time (Stanford, Columbia, Yale). And only when they had enough active users did they open up the network so anyone could join. Similarly, the best place to launch this group platform would be at a college. We would create a closed platform only for a single college, so when students sign up, they can see all groups that exist at their college through one service. Any student can start any group, and that group is instantly discoverable by all students at the college. How could this business make money? ● Ads (like Facebook or Instagram) ● Charge organizations who need advanced features (membership database, payments, etc) ● Charge artists, influencers, and public figures who want to engage their community and sell products Why is this idea worth pursuing? ● The potential market is the entire human population Every person needs group interaction. ● Users are likely to spend a lot of time on the app Being with our social groups is a meaningful percentage of what we spend our time on. ● Users can stick with us for their entire lifetime Some services are only for a specific age group. But people of all ages need to be part of social groups. ● The large social group platforms, Facebook, Discord, Slack, etc, are actually not that big of a threat People use each social media for a specific use case: ○ Facebook: share personal updates with your social network. ○ Slack: chat with colleagues around work. ○ Discord: chat with friends over gaming. Once people start using a social app in a certain way, they keep using it that way even as new features are introduced. Because switching the use case would require a large percentage of users to switch at the same time. And the larger the platform is, the more difficult it is for them to get enough users to switch how they use the app simultaneously. Facebook also can’t clone our app and launch their own identical version. Because by the time they notice we are a threat, we will already have an established network of users. And while Facebook can copy our app, they can’t copy our network of social groups. Facebook’s clone will just be an “empty” app. To illustrate, this is how well Facebook has succeeded at cloning other social apps: ○ Facebook has tried to create a Snapchat clone three times. First with Poke in 2012. Then with Slingshot in 2014. Then with Threads in 2020. All apps have failed. ○ In 2018, Facebook tried to clone TikTok by launching their app Lasso. It was shut down in 2020. ○ In 2020, Facebook tried to clone Pinterest by launching their app Hobbi. It was shut down 4 months later. I think there is potential in this idea of an online platform for groups. But I am open to considering other business ideas too! Are we a good co-founder fit? Do you identify with these two statements: ● You wish to make an impact You want to start a company that changes people’s lives for the better. The company should of course make as much money as possible, but money is not the main reason why you want to start a business. ● You want to achieve impact at scale Your goal is that the business one day can have millions of people using the service. You won't be satisfied if we "only" get 10,000 users. Then we are likely going to be a good co-founder fit for each other! If you are interested in potentially starting a company with me, please reach out to me at: ● +46 72-732 44 11, ● henrik.angelstig@gmail.com, or ● FB Messenger – https://www.facebook.com/henrik.angelstig I very much look forward to meeting you! 😃