Looking for design/biz cofounders! (Cleantech)

What Am I Missing
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I’m an engineer-who-cares-about-the-environment, currently bootstrapping a little SaaS tool for data cleaning while evaluating more ambitious ideas for a proper startup that will be dedicated to making manufacturing more sustainable.

As much as I like building, I am quite fed up with working alone and I’d greatly enjoy having at least one cofounder with a matching ambition and complementary skills (not to mention that startup incubators won’t even consider solo founders). How do I find one?

Adding to the puzzle, I’m an expat in Sweden and most of my friends here have nice corporate jobs, not to mention that most of them are either in tech or in science.
All of this means I’m trying to significanty expand my social network to even talk to the kind of person I’m looking for.
Not to mention the depressing lack of in-person events (meetups! I loved those) due to the pandemic.

Dear Internet, do you have some ideas on where to look for a cofounder in this day and age?

Thank you for reading this far!

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The good news is that, as I’m sure you know, technical co-founders are in high demand. The bad news is that the signal to noise ratio for finding great domain-expert co-founders is also very high!

I’m a technical co-founder and found my counterpart on an online community, Indie Hackers. We had a few meetings and followed that up with 3 months trial working together before we officially set up in business together.

My advice would be to talk, talk, talk. Meet as many folks as you can and get idea of the sort of person you’d like to work with.

You could also set up some “filtering” criteria. For me they had to have significant domain expertise and 1st hand experience of the problem they were trying to solve.

Good luck!

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