When it comes to building a successful startup, having a good idea isn’t as important as having a good team. In fact, 23% of startups cited an inadequate team as a contributing factor to their failure (behind no market need and running out of cash). After all, an idea can’t execute itself — it needs a founding team that has the necessary skills and motivation, as well as the ability to work together in order to grow and implement the idea. Ideas evolve, whereas a successful team requires a cohesive group of founders where each key role is filled by someone with specific, complementary qualifications, visions, and values.
Evaluating individuals for each role requires an in-depth understanding of their past success, current skills, and future potential. Current platforms for finding co-founders in an early stage endeavor are disjointed and still require users to invest a lot of time and effort to make these evaluations on their own.
Entrepreneurs on existing platforms:
- Must do their own due diligence on others’ capabilities without any objective measurements or verification
- Must evaluate the relevance of a large pool of potential connections
- Have no control over who can view their own profiles or contact them, resulting in unwanted spam and wasted time
Entrepreneurs need a quicker and easier way to measure the competence and relevance of a potential co-founder online, while maintaining control over who they interact with and who can interact with them.
The Pond is a new matching app that gives founders control over their experience by allowing them to filter along the most important, verified metrics so that they are only matched with the most relevant, high-quality entrepreneurs.
Entrepreneurs on The Pond:
- Demonstrate competence and experience through professional history, technical skills, finances, etc. that are pulled from verified third-party sources or verified by our team
- Only get matched with potential founders who fulfill their requirements and are looking for a founder like them
- Have complete control over who they see and who can see them, as they are given the ability to filter along certain data points if they themselves have verified certain credentials of their own
Along with verifying common profile information such as employment and years of experience, The Pond can verify additional factors such as professional certifications and test scores to give founders a more comprehensive view of their matches. By limiting the number of daily matches and by restricting the connections based on filters set by the entrepreneurs, matches are guaranteed to be more relevant and high-value.
The Pond aims to save entrepreneurs time and effort in vetting new people by accelerating the process of building a relationship through providing a broad foundation of trustworthy personal information. Leverage your hard-earned credentials to build your winning team of founders today!
For more details on how The Pond works, visit our website here: https://thepond.app. The app is still in production mode, so feel free to subscribe to our mailing list to be an early user when it launches (Spring 2019)!
