tech-company, co-founderI live in a place where tech startups are non-existent, thus I have no physical access to people with skills who might be willing to co-found. Can you realistically find co-founders/partners online? How successful such a path would be - when you don’t have personal interactions with these people?
I absolutely believe, that nowadays a business could be entirely run from home. I am part of a remote-only agency and apart from a few downsides that naturally come from remote working, it's working very well.
For co-founders my only concern would be, that you should trust a co founder and in my opinion need to make sure, you have the same vision and balance each other out nicely.
This is usually in my experience better done in person. Relationships are also usually formed on a deeper level in person.
That being said, this not only makes finding a co-founder harder but also forming business relationships.
I do think it's possible, but I believe, a lot of people will tend to be a little "old-fashioned" about this still. So I would assume it's harder to co-found remotely.
EDIT regarding your comment:
I cannot quote any resources directly.
We try a lot as we go and usually don't spend much time on researching ways to change things.
One thing you could check out is the Buffer Open blog.
They have very big parts of their team work remotely, so they often cover how they do it and what works for them.
I try to just write down all the things that come to my mind that we found with a smaller team (3 core workers, remote clients and sometimes external workers).
We deal with 6-7 hours difference in our core team, which is manageable. If it's too far off, someone is obviously having to suffer from having to be up too early or late. So trying to keep the TZ difference as small as positive might turn out to be a plus.
Usually when you have an office, you also chat about private stuff or have some casual conversations about work in your break time or at lunch.
We don't have that at all. Or at least it doesn't occur as naturally as you would have it if you'd share an office or even a desk.
We found that if you only communicate through tools like Slack, Trello, Email or occasional calls, the work relationship starts to suffer and you tend to drift apart in terms of work flows, even tech stack and many other things. So we try to over-communicate. This doesn't always work and it can be annoying at times, because it might be a distraction when someone constantly posts seemingly useless stuff into slack.
But the benefits outweigh the downsides. Often this also means sharing ideas, sharing concerns and talking about small problems before they become big problems.
Also it's very hard to spot if someone under-communicates and needs some encouragement or if that person is just better when working more quietly.
So always try and evaluate.
What we do to counter the negative effects a little bit is, we try to meet up in person at least once a year.
Getting together in person really resets us and brings up a big vibe of motivation and creativity. We do workshops together, we discuss future plans for the company together or we just get some beer and talk about life.
Now as I said, we have a 3 person team and even there, we still sometimes hesitate because it can become rather expensive if you book flights around the world plus hotel and everything for a few people. But we know it doesn't work without it and if we could, we would do it more often.
Another thing we believe in is that when hiring for remote only teams you should probably prefer people you have a connection with and that you can trust more easily, than those who are perfect for the job.
That doesn't mean, that you should hire good buddies without skill over experienced people, but again you need to get the balance right.
Rather put some time into teaching them the last 20% they need to do the job than have someone who is best at ones craft and doesn't get along with you.
Skill you can teach, getting along with someone not so much.
This isn't only important when meeting in person, but also because remote working is all about trust. You need to trust the other person, that they'll do their work properly and drive the company in the same way as you. So taking a slice off their skill level and therefore having more company loyalty and deeper relationship is making up for lack of skill.
So that would be it for our personal point of view. If I can think of more like this, I might be adding to the list. Hope this helps.
If you are willing to found the company yourself, and hire freelancers / consultants for specific business tasks, you can succeed. For example, you may hire online:
You would be the one to envision the idea around which the business is formed. The business consultant would make sure the business is structured correctly, and the rest of your team would implement each of the aspects of the business. Your job would be to coordinate the activities of all the people and firms working for you, keep everybody moving in the same direction, hire new people as needed, let people go when needed (like the programmers after they finish the website/app), etc.
EDIT:
The book “You Call the Shots”, by Cameron Johnson, gives details of several successful online businesses Mr. Johnson started by working entirely with people he has never met. He has become a multimillionaire off of those businesses.
I’d go so far as to say it should always start from home, (absent serious funding, of course.)
My feeling is that “incubators” have become a hot trend, and rentable, shared spaces can be a profitable business. But I haven’t seen data that startups located in an incubator or office are more likely to succeed.
In some sense, utilizing a non-home environment can convey the sense of “doing it”. This may well spur some individuals to be more productive, but anecdotally, I know of a few cases where individuals continue to “pursue” non-viable businesses, utilizing shared spaces to give the impression of seriousness.
Passion should be the primary motivator in launching a startup (because startups will fail) and if passion is the guide, it doesn’t matter what the external environment is.
I’ll also note that most startups fail because they run out of money, so keeping overhead as low as possible is a very good strategy. Home-based business is the soul of low overhead, and profoundly facilitated by information technology in the current era. (Plus, you can often write off the portion of your home used for the business;)
In terms of partnering, you can find people online, but there is a much greater degree of risk in not working though a network of trusted peers. (In my own scenario, we avoided this route because the project involved proprietary Intellectual property.)
As dan_kaufhold notes, trust is the most important thing.
Good contracts are the way to manage this issue. You can tell a lot about a person by the type of deal they propose, or their reaction to your offer, assuming your offer is fair.
Good contracts will protect you, but it can still get expensive if money starts to come and things fall apart. (Certain people go crazy at the first hint of money, and some go crazy even before that, based on projections in a business plan;) The human factor is the trickiest.
My advice here would be to find people with a shared interest in the project, get to know them as well as you can remotely, try to gauge their character by how they conduct themselves, and forge a win-win deal that protects all parties but avoids common pitfalls.*
*A very common pitfall are deadlocks that require the dissolution of the partnership. This can be problematic in a two partner, 50/50 situation. If you go below 50%, you could also lose control of the company.
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