I asked 20 founders where they’d look for a co-founder. Nobody named a place.
A few weeks ago I stood in NSTP in Islamabad and asked 20 early-stage builders one question: where would you go to find a co-founder today?
Nobody named a place. They named people. A friend. A batchmate. A cousin who “does coding.”
That answer makes sense, and it also explains why so many good ideas in Pakistan never leave a notes app. If your co-founder has to come from the 30 people you already know, your odds depend on who you happened to sit next to in university.
Why your network is a weak filter for a technical co-founder
Your friends share your city, your degree and your blind spots. If you studied business, your batch is full of business students. Looking for a technical co-founder is a skills gap problem, and people who share your gap can’t close it.
There’s a second issue. Friends say yes to be nice. A co-founder relationship can run for years, and “sure, I’ll help you build it” from a friend is very different from someone who has the skills and the hours to actually do it.
What a developer wants to see before saying yes
Most idea posts say “looking for a CTO” and stop there. Engineers scroll past those.
What actually gets a reply:
- The problem, in plain words, and who has it
- The stage: idea only, prototype built, or MVP ready
- The exact skills you need (Next.js, Flutter, UI design, not “tech person”)
- What you’re offering, whether that’s equity, hours or both
- What you have already done without a co-founder
You can see this structure on the public ideas feed on Grothiv. EdFleet, for example, is a school operations tool tagged MVP Ready with React, Node.js and PostgreSQL as the skills it needs. PakRide is an intercity carpooling idea tagged Idea Only, looking for mobile and UI/UX people. A developer can tell in ten seconds whether either one is worth a conversation.
Where to actually look
Here is where I’d spend time, in order of hit rate:
- Incubators and campus societies. NSTP, NIC, NASTP and university startup societies. Go in person. A 10 minute chat beats 50 DMs.
- Hackathons and demo days. You see people build under pressure, which tells you more than a CV.
- Open communities. Dev Discords, LinkedIn, X. Low hit rate, and you are competing with every other founder who posts “need a CTO.”
- A platform built for it. Where people are already there to find a team, so nobody feels weird about the ask.
Why cold outreach fails
Developers get the same DM weekly: “I have a million dollar idea, want to be my CTO for equity?” Most ignore it, and honestly, fair enough.
What works is a message that shows you read their profile and know why you need them specifically. Grothiv builds this in by requiring a personalised pitch note on every interest request, so a collaborator opens something that reads like a real pitch instead of a copy-paste.
How to test a match before you commit
Skip the long handshake. Before you agree on equity:
- Scope a two week project together and see how you both work
- Talk about weekly hours out loud, with numbers
- Agree on what happens if one of you leaves, and put vesting in writing (get a lawyer to look at the final version)
- Check that you want the same thing, whether that’s a venture-scale company or a profitable small business
Two weeks of real work tells you more than three coffee meetings.
Where Grothiv fits
My co-founder Usman and I built Grothiv because we kept watching this exact problem. You post an idea, filter for people by skills, commitment and stage, form a team, and work from a shared workspace with tasks, milestones and chat. The core loop (post, match, build) is free, and we’ve said publicly it stays that way.
We’re early. Grothiv has been live since August, and so far most teams formed on it were between people who already knew each other. Getting strangers matched into real teams is the hard part we’re working on right now. If you’re a founder with an idea or a developer who wants in on one, come see what’s being built and tell us what’s missing.
Finding a co-founder shouldn’t depend on who you went to school with.
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