I don’t need a business co-founder, I need an API broker.

It is this time of the year again, applications for Y Combinator are open and I can’t apply. I have a startup with traction, a 22% conversion rate from visits to sign up, some revenue, 9000 users growing every day and users love my product. But I am a “hacker” and I am on my own. According to the perfect startup team, I would need a “hipster” and a “hustler” or in other words, a designer and a business guy. I looked for a business co-founder for a few months but I gave up because nobody seems to be the right fit. There are many reasons why I can’t find anybody:

• I am a bit old (35) and teaming up with somebody younger (~25) would pose problems, and finding somebody my age would be quite difficult.
• I have a vision for my startup and my business co-founder would want to have his own as he would be the logical CEO.
• Finding a business co-founder that would have the right skills that I think I require makes it even more difficult.

Here are the skills of the business co-founders I have met (either to join my startup or being part of another )

• Knows how to pick the phone and sell a product
• Organise events to promote a product
• Write blog posts, promote the product on social media, newsletter,…
• Knows how to set up a google Adwords campaign or similar
• Talk to investors to raise money

But frankly, all these skills wouldn’t be helpful for my startup. Somebody that know how to pick the phone would be great but for a freemium model, is that really helpful ? How many users can you possibly get in one day using cold-calling , or cold-emailing, one? two? and they would use the free version anyway. Organising events would be great also but I am based in Australia, so the response rate would be quite limited as we are in a niche market. Content marketing is a good one, but can be outsourced so easily nowadays. And to set up a successful Google Adwords you need a big budget and a lot of skills in Adwords optimisation (I learnt that the hard way), and it is really a full time job. Raising money is the most sought after skill that I would need, but after all the work I have put in my startup (1.5 years full time) I cannot possibly give out a big chunk of equity, just to have a co-founder to raise money. And in Australia, having a co-founder is not a golden ticket to raise money because the startup world is still developing.

After having worked more than a year on my startup, I kinda know what works and what doesn’t. So my perfect business co-founder would have the following skills:

• Understanding growth hacking
• Understanding tools to convert more users to paying customers
• Having the skills to pick the most successful integrations to acquire a lot of users in a short period of time
• Finding new income streams with high profit margin and setting them up

All these skills can be summarised into one :

Understanding the World of APIs.

Only developers truly know APIs because they have mingled with so many of them. POST requests, GET requests, Oauth. All these terms that are only familiar to the developers and it is only the beginning of what APIs are. Here is my opinion on why APIs are so important.

From my point of view, startups that are not startups anymore,- those that have gone through the hockey stick (exponential user growth), now face growing competition, and need to open some gates to build an ecosystem around their product to fuel their growth. And the name of such a gate is called an API (Application Programming Interface). If you don’t understand what an API is, think Facebook login, Facebook App Store, Shopify App Store, … All these companies open some gates for you to access their huge user base. And it is a win-win, they build an ecosystem, in exchange for users / user information.

But nowadays, they are so many APIs available (12000+ according to http://www.programmableweb.com/) that we need some people who know which ones are worth integrating. It takes 2–7 days to integrate each API, and every time we do it our code base gets a little bigger, so we need to pick them carefully.

So I need somebody who knows the worthwhile APIs and is able to help us promote our integration (on various app stores or on the company’s dedicated page),- somebody that can negotiate on our behalf, for the exclusive APIs. In short, an API broker. This person would also help us create our own APIs and promote it, advise us on the the best way to monetise it and so on and so forth.

Finding such a co-founder is extremely hard and honestly I have given up so I’d rather give a share of revenue or pay a consultation fee to someone who has this expertise. But apparently, API consultants or brokers don’t exist yet, or I simply haven’t been able to find them, so I am forced to integrate APIs only to turn them off a few weeks later because they weren’t exactly the right fit.

Cyril.