I recently attended an excellent event put on by a few people from BetaHouse and TechStars. The premise was to meet and network with other entrepreneurs in the Boston area to potentially find cofounders for your next venture. I’m primarily a technical guy, and I’m not married to any particular idea. Finding and enticing great technical talent to join your startup is hard, which is a big reason why I started the consultancy. We help startups get the technology they need, but sometimes founders desire a technical partner in crime. So, if you’re looking to attract solid developers or designers in your venture, here’s some perspective from a technical person who’s on the venture “dating” scene.

What’s your name?

At the beginning of the event, everyone had an opportunity to introduce themselves, their business, and state who or what they were looking for. I was surprised at how many people with ventures did not introduce themselves. They jumped right to the idea. The idea is important, but free agents want to know just as much about you as your business. Briefly state your name and a little of your background – it won’t take away from the presentation of your idea, and it will definitely help people to get to know you better.

What’s your idea, again?

This goes beyond finding team members. If you cannot clearly articulate what your business is all about in one minute, you need to practice your pitch. After many pitches, I had to ask myself what problems the team members were trying to solve. Technical people are naturally problem solvers, so they want to know about what pains you’re setting out to remedy.

Great idea. Tell me more about your team

Any idea can sink or swim based on the team’s capability. I want to hear about your executive team and their background. I want to hear about your board of advisors or your board of directors. Who inspires you? Who keeps you accountable? If I’m going to jump in the water with you, I want to know that you’ll help keep us afloat by surrounding yourself with great people.

I lost you at “Revolutionary” or “Web 2.0″

You’re in a room with about fifty other entrepreneurs that are just beginning to conceptualize their idea. Is your idea really that revolutionary? These terms really don’t mean anything to me right now. What market are you going after, and why do you feel your company can be disruptive in that space? What’s the market cap, and how much market share do you project over a 1, 2, and 5 year period? How much revenue are you expecting in these years? At what point do you anticipate becoming profitable? Isn’t the social media hype all about Web 3.0 now?

Technical people like substance, and some like hard numbers. Throwing around hand waving terminology doesn’t instill confidence in your idea or you as a potential cofounder.

It’s a Slow Romance

Perhaps it was because the TechStars application deadline is fast approaching, but founders were a bit eager to get your commitment. So let me get this straight, I just met you and learned about your idea, but you want me to come on board next week?

Joining a startup is not something I want to decide on overnight. Finding team members that you jive well with is a time intensive process, and it shouldn’t be rushed for either party. Have coffee regularly, jump on a few calls, then maybe pursue a short or part-time contractual relationship before everyone commits. You’re going to be spending a lot of time together, so chemistry is vital. Enjoy the courting phase, and pop the question when you know it’s the real thing.

Our design partner, Jon Follett will be conducting the workshop “Visual Design for Web Sites and Web Apps” for UPA Boston on Saturday, August 01, 2009 from 9:00 AM – 12:00 PM (ET). If you’re a developer looking for some design orientation, I think this would be a great opportunity for you to gain some knowledge.

If you’re a designer looking to refine your skills on the web, Jon is excellent at his craft in addition to being a great teacher.

So join in on the event. I’m sure you’ll take some learnings home with you. Registration

Jon Follett and I led a discussion on how designers can integrate with Agile development teams at a recent Refresh Boston event.

I’ve really come to enjoy and look forward to Refresh Boston events. The Microsoft NERD Center is a killer venue, and Patrick Haney (notasausage) does a great job in getting a diverse crowd and stellar speakers.

Of course, Jon did a tremendous job with designing the slides for the presentation

If you attended the talk, please rate and comment on us over at SpeakerRate. We definitely want to continue the learning and discussion around this topic.

Jon Follett and I did a lightning talk on swooping in to save projects from epic failure at Ignite Boston 5. It seems to be a topic that the audience had an interest in. We looked at our experiences and set out to provide some useful tips.

We had 5 minutes to get our points across. It was challenging but fun. It was a great event and there were lots of other great talks.

The slides are below.

To place further emphasis on the message – communication is a vital part of every project. We’ve inherited so many projects going wrong just because people aren’t being honest and open with each other. Communicate to educate, define norms, and demonstrate progress. These are not nice to haves in your projects – they’re requirements.

Do you have a project that needs rescuing? Contact us so that we can make your software idea a reality.

Fast and Easy Selling. That’s what we set out to make happen last quarter. Well I’ve been very busy over the last few months. I’m very proud to present Gazelle.com. The team has been working incredibly hard, and the development effort shows in the quality of the release. We’ve relaunched the service under a new brand (we were formerly under the guise of Second Rotation), and I can’t describe how pleased I am with the results.

I talk about it in depth on this blog – what makes a good Engineering team? After this effort, I would say balance, efficiency, and determination. All the skills of the team really came into play here. The group all went above and beyond to make sure that this release was a huge success. I’d like to thank Thos Niles, our product manager, Jason Wadsworth, our architect, Graham Babbitt, our front end developer, Catherine Headen, our graphic designer, Brian Kaney, our development consultant, Kevin Kardian, our data architect, and James McElhiney, our CTO. Their efforts exceeded all expectations.

We’re currently hiring and we’re always on the lookout for solid developers. Right now, we’re focused on finding a project manager and a release engineer. Take it from me, this is a stellar group to be involved with.

There’s so much learning in how this project went. When things calm down a bit, I’ll be sure to post more about the specific knowledge gained from a development process perspective.