I was “Rejected” by FounderDating

I have yet to find a great platform for reviewing the plethora of tools I’ve run across in the greuling process of starting the tiny companies I’m currently incubating.

I, like many of you, have had some good experiences and some really bad ones. Thankfully Medium is here as a tool to relay our experiences and hopefully prevent other coders, makers, creators and entrepreneurs from making the same mistakes on our roads toward awesomeness. There’s a lot out there, and it’s tough detecting a useful tool from a glorified time-waste with a slick UI.

There are a ton of startup-focused tools out there that enable small teams like the ones I’m building to take ideas and turn them into something meaningful, discoverable and relevant. From marketing tools to design tools, and finance tools to team-building tools, lean teams are able to do more and gain far greater traction now than ever before.

I’m here to talk about my experience finding a CoFounder, and being blatantly rejected by the ever-so-exclusive FounderDating.

We’re a husband-and-husband team working on a mobile video platform that lies at the intersection of YouTube and Vine. (Vague, I know, but we’re in stealth mode.)

I’m a designer with a background in both human behavioral studies and Industrial Design (mostly hardware), and my husband is an ex-GE Healthcare programmer who specializes in writing 3D visualization software from the ground up to enable medical professionals to better diagnose cancer.

Though we’ve been able to bootstrap and make some great progress on our own, the time has come for us to find a CoFounder, so we tried out a few tools — one of which was unfortunately FounderDating.

I spent about an hour crafting my profile and poking around the network. I thought it was nice that FounderDating curates their network, since it seems to be a good way to relieve founders of the painstaking task of sifting through crap. And on the surface the user experience seemed a bit more polished and the content perhaps more credible than some of the other platforms I tested out before stumbling across FounderDating.

During the setup process, FounderDating requires you to gather a minimum of five “Vouches” from within your network to prove to the curators that be that you’re an entrepreneur. Seemed simple enough, and what harm could a vouch do? Turns out that the people vouching for you aren’t merely ticking a checkbox — they’re prompted to write a recommendation in support of your application to FounderDating, which takes at least a small amount of effort.

Little did I know that once you request a vouch, FounderDating continually spams these professional contacts until they finally take time out of their busy schedules to write a recommendation for you. Not a smart move, FounderDating.

A few of my friends responded to the request right away, crafting LinkedIn-esque recommendations that would be the key to unlocking this exclusive network and allowing my husband and I to move forward with finding a back-end database engineer with AWS experience to join our team and own our server infrastructure.

It had been about a week and I’d heard nothing back from FounderDating regarding my pending access to their network, so I took to Twitter to get some answers. (Keep in mind that the reason I turned to FounderDating was because, well, I needed to find a CoFounder — now! Not a week from now — the search had to start NOW.)

I asked what the deal was via Twitter, and the response was along the lines of we’re busy curating our exclusive network and we’ll let you know very soon whether we think you’re really an entrepreneur. Hold tight.

Well, it turns out I’m not an entrepreneur according to FounderDating. And neither is my husband. It doesn’t count that we both quit our jobs in product development to do this full-time. It doesn’t count that I’ve already started a company completely on my own, bringing in over $100k in revenue in my first 6 months of existence. (You can check it out here.) It doesn’t count that five of my professional contacts, from Apple engineers to fellow entrepreneurs, have indeed vouched for me, stepping up to the plate and taking time out of their busy schedules to declare that yes, indeed, I am an entrepreneur. It doesn’t count that I’ve come up with an idea, developed a solid user experience, created a thoughtful UI, and developed a functional prototype with my programmer husband on our quest toward becoming a full-fledged app design and development team.

Here’s the response I got from FounderDating after all the hoops they ran us through:

“Thank you so much for your interest in the FounderDating Cofounder Network. We were excited to see your application. However, this portion of the network is strictly for entrepreneurs connecting with entrepreneurs to start side projects and/or become cofounders.”

Honestly I could care less whether I get to use the tool or not. I have to admit though, I hate being rejected from anything, so my pride’s a bit hurt. (Yeah, you got me FounderDating.)

On a hugely positive note, my efforts in finding a CoFounder have not been crippled by my “rejection” from FounderDating. As luck would have it, while our application to FounderDating was pending, we found an amazing back-end superstar on CoFoundersLab, and he starts today! (No hoops to jump through required!) This guy’s an ace, and we couldn’t be happier with our success using CoFoundersLab. (Check it out if you haven’t already.)

You can keep your network FounderDating. Keep on judging people based on what you think you see. For those of us out there struggling, there are better tools out there that aren’t a time suck. It’s a shame we have to waste valuable hours testing out these new startup-focused tools to find out that our time could have been better spent on other platforms or out at a MeetUp connecting with real, live human beings.

One thing’s for certain — if you’re a Founder looking to build a team, you’re going to need to ask for favors. Don’t let that one favor get taken by FounderDating’s frivolous-at-best, marketing bait-at-worst “Vouches.” Keep that favor in your back pocket for when you actually need it, and in the meantime, check out CoFoundersLab.

(Hey developers, can someone please create a user-friendly Yelp-like platform for reviewing these startup-focused tools out there? We entrepreneurs could really benefit from being able to compare apples-to-apples without having to learn the hard way every time…)