I think most technical solo founders know they need a co-founder with expertise in marketing and sales, the problem is actually finding them.
I definitely could use one but it's been impossible to find someone both serious about it and experienced at the same time. Especially if you're based in Europe.
Yup. All I ever found was freeloaders who don't put in nearly the same effort. Serious business people who will relentlessly try to get feedback, sell the product and make deals are pretty rare. But when you have one, it's worth gold.
I've tried to start multiple projects with non-developers, and NONE of them were willing to put in any work whatsoever.
Obviously, I might have been choosing the wrong people, but they seemed fairly accomplished.
I think people don't realize how much building software is boring drudgery (figuring out where to put a button). Maybe they expect it to be immediate wheeling and dealing.
Non-technical cofounders need to start out as project managers, and most people don't seem willing to do it.
It's the same problem with finding developers to work for your early stage startup. Actual good sales people and marketers are in high demand everywhere. Finding one that will be committed enough as you is hard when they are fielding offers from established companies that are much easier to sell.
Why not learn how to market yourself? You may not become the greatest marketer in the world but you almost certainly can be competent in less than a year.
Then if you grow whatever project big enough, you can then just hire someone. And you'd actually know how to manage them with insight into their job.
Specialization & experience are good. So are more people. If finding a marketing or "business" partner for starting your project is your blocker, just learn it yourself.
Sure you could get outcompeted but honestly, if one person gets outcompeted, in almost all circumstances so will 2 people.
A founding team usually doesn't cover all of the core responsibilities necessary to run a company. Between legal, sales, marketing, product, hr, accounting, and engineering, it's rare that the founding team collectively has all of these skills mastered.
I have witnessed this exact thing at several startups. It is demoralizing. Especially when they have >1% equity and you're lucky as a dev if you have >.1%
It’s funny to hear this from the technical side. It resonates so strongly, because I’m in the same but polar opposite boat.
Marketing day job for over a decade, but after spending far too long trying to find the technical partner I’ve built a functional MVP and got it in the hands of demo users thru TestFlight.
It’s 100% not efficient use of my time. I would always rather find a technical partner - but the alternative of standing still while you search is too frustrating.
Surely plenty of private/community slacks out there to connect the two..?
I had a (relative to my profession) decent understanding of web languages(HTML/Php etc) from years in the marketing world, had a decent technical understanding, watched parts of the Stanford CS courses, and a lot of guess and check.. Google and throwing ideas around with technically minded friends/devs helped validate the ways I was approaching it. In the end I went to the source - Xcode and swift.
In a fortunate way, moving to Canada right as the pandemic started meant I naturally had a lot more free time that I may have spent catching up with friends, travelling etc. Initially I was searching for local devs to work with but without a network and no one wanting to meet up with randoms I gave up and started to try do more and more myself.
I should add it took me far longer than I would have liked - or a real dev would have taken. But my hope is with a true MVP in the hands of potential real clients it might be more appealing to the right person to take it on.
Thanks, I really appreciate all the positive replies.
Mostly they have been arms length connections - intros from people I know. Tbh, so far minimal pushback due to the (relatively) warm nature, and in their profession (healthcare) they are clear value in the value being provided. The TestFlight system is actually reasonably easy.
While the private beta idea is good for today, plan to move past it once I validate a few more parts. There’s no fomo/network effects at play.
I second this. I tried to find a marketing cofounder for the past year. All I got is fresh graduates with little experience or skills. And covid does not help.
if you are an experienced marketer and interested in hosting business and serverless, please contact me
You mention sales. The OP is IMO perhaps overly focused on marketing, which is part of the mix certainly, but sales, setting up partnerships, establishing relationships with media (either directly or, more likely, by hiring an agency), etc. Marketing plays into all this but, depending on the needs, even an experienced marketing person may not have the right mix of skills by themselves.
This is amazing. My wife was just telling my I need someone to do my marketing and sales. And I am like, yes I know this, but it is way easier said than done. Thus why I am still grinding on it as a solo tech founder.
I had the same experience and gave up on trying to find a co-founder in marketing. The only ones that I found were freelancers that provided a questionable quality kind of marketing.
I thought so, too. But nowadays I believe you actually need a product manager. Because if you have stuff that people really want/need, they will actively google for it and find you. The big issue is that your opinion of what the market wants is most certainly wrong. So you need a product manager who will interview prospective customers, analyze the market, and advise you on which product to build. Once you have a value-generating product, marketing will be easy enough that you can outsource it.
Unfortunately, majority of "marketers" are hungry people who don't really know much about real marketing. This might offend the real marketers (hungry part) but it is true.
I worked with countless e-commerce companies who hired these "marketers" and failed miserably. I would say 1 in 100 marketers really knows what they are doing. Majority of these fake marketers think having Instagram their phone gives them the marketer status and posting on Instagram is what marketing is. They do not know, they keep using crappy buzzwords. It is much more (nearly impossible) to benchmark marketers' talent until spending $$$ for their 6-12 months salary. It is much more easier to find a developer because they do not need to lie about their talent, you can just check their work and see the quality.
Fake marketers can disguise their fakery so easily because it is just words until really working with them. When I say 1 in 100, I am really being optimistic. As a developer I had to teach maybe 100+ "marketers" how to use google analytics. That's how miserable they are. It is not my fault these ecommerce companies hire fake marketers because job market is full of them and they lie very nicely. Their career is job hopping every 6 months and find new companies to lie to them instead of really learning marketing.
If I can find someone like marcosaric to make my graphs look like theirs, I would happily give one of my kidneys. It is so rare. So rare.
>> "marketers" are hungry people who don't really know much about real marketing.
Funnily , good marketer just markets himself, not the product :) Whenever I pick up some marketing book and wonder all the great stuff they put in its description, I wonder, if the person is really good at marketing or they are just good at promoting themselves. Thus, I concluded that I can't learn much from these "great" marketers.
> good marketer just markets himself, not the product
This is why I don't think I can hire good marketers and always failed when I tried to do so. If someone is a good enough marketer, they don't even need a product to sell, they can just sell anything or nothing.
I’d add marketing for startup is not the same as marketing for big corp. And skills are rarely transferable. But if you’re looking to add a marketing specialist to your team, you’re inevitably going to look at someone with established history at a big corp marketing.
Also a lot of developers are really bad. They can maybe write specs if given to them, but not always. Let's say 1/100 devs can write good code and create ideas.
Sounds like we have a 1/100 x 1/100 chance of forming a good startup ;)
I think one of the biggest failures of developers is thinking that tech means anything when launching a business. Tech that works is table stakes. If nobody knows about your product then it may as well not exists, from a business perspective. If you want to start a business, the marketing and customer acquisition strategies are as important (if not more important) than the tech. Someone has to make sure your potential customers know your solution exists. It can be the founder or it can be a VP of Growth, but it is a job that must be done or else you may as well not waste your time writing the code in the first place.
This rings so true. My company has been involved in several tech products created from scratch (we did the majority of the tech work), but the party/ies paying for the product/s were not willing to put enough capital into marketing. All of them have failed, which (despite us being paid for the work) has been extremely disappointing each time - aside from losing the potential for further equity/royalties in some cases it just sucks to see your “baby” die off.
Tech does matter, though. The vast majority of startups fail because people aren't willing to pay the table stakes. Or even show up at the table.
Developers can learn how to business. But the problem the vast majority of startup ideas have is that no one ever ends up building it, and people quit two months in.
At one point I (as a bootstrapped solopreneur, profitable for a long time) decided the bottleneck in my career is not technical ability or features. I sorely lacked business depth, marketing and sales skills. In shifting my focus, I read a ton of books and learned about SEO, email marketing, PPC, lean startup, etc.
It turned out that I managed to fare even worse than before. Instead of having stellar products with lousy marketing - I spread myself thin by adding marketing on top of development, customer support, website maintenance etc. If I were able to find a cofounder I like, someone with deep knowledge of the niche we are in (databases), with great work ethics and presence in database communities, it might well be one of the best things for the business. I would focus on the technical side, that person would be the bridge to the community.
It's hard to find someone with deep database knowledge who wants to be a marketing and community building cofounder. These people are paid a lot for their expertise. With more money now, I am focusing on being the architect and write more, with my team handling the development more and more.
So yes, it would be good to have a cofounder. It may simply be too hard to find a person with complementary skillset to join, so we developers have to keep paddling until we reach a point where we have enough time to focus on marketing. Or, simply hire a great marketer with good track record in our industry. Money fixes many problems.
Developer, you also may need to learn marketing. Here's why. A co-founder is your first fanatical customer. Without that first fan, your work will go unnoticed. To gain that first fan, you need to learn how to do a few things well:
1. Create a One-Liner that tells the primary reason your offering needs to exist and be adopted by your customer.
2. Associate each Feature with a Benefit, all pointing back to the One-Liner.
3. Create a Landing Page that proves 1 and 2.
So, after your offering is ready for people (preferably before, TBH), get 1, 2, and 3 in place.
> 1. Create a One-Liner that tells the primary reason your offering needs to exist and be adopted by your customer. 2. Associate each Feature with a Benefit, all pointing back to the One-Liner. 3. Create a Landing Page that proves 1 and 2.
As an experienced marketer, all I can say is the above is very, very, very good advice. Just do that and you'll be ahead of most people.
Simplicity, clarity, benefits, and focus. It works.
Much of the work I do, in terms of marketing, is figuring out that "one liner" and then explaining how everything else fits under, and supports, that one-liner-umbrella.
Going through this exact same situation myself. No, developing the app is not the hardest part. If you build it, they won't come. Much better to hire/find a cofounder with a marketing background instead of YOLOing money into the advertising dumpster fire as you learn how it works.
To be honest both parts are pretty hard. Getting a startup or even just a small SaaS business working is like a series of AND logic gates, all of which are pretty hard and must be done to a somewhat decent degree for it to work
Exactly, "if you build it, they'll come" is the worst advice for startups.
Of course, if you don't build it, nobody will come.
But the real difficult part, and there's plenty of startup literature on the subject, is DISTRIBUTION. That's where the marketing & sales skills comes into play.
As someone that works as a marketing consultant for different eCommerce companies it's the same thing. The product might actually be really good but it's typically going to be crickets without some sort of distribution.
Same. It might also be that developers aren't great at finding co-founders either. I tried YC's Co-founder Match and connected with some amazing people who promised to help in some capacity. They all loved the idea, approved the pitch deck (and helped me improve it too) but none of them committed to being a business co-founder. I have no idea what's wrong!
My experience with cofounder match is mostly founders with an idea/startup and a cesspool of recent or in progress college grads looking for a job. Finding someone without an idea, real experience, and responds to messages is like finding a unicorn.
My experience was much better than that definitely. A lot of amazing business people, some requesting me to join them, some responding to my requests (about 30-40% response rate I'd say). Some former successful founders looking for something new, too.
I think the problem is that a startup is a far riskier proposal for a marketer than a dev. For devs we have a safety net in the most insane job market the world has ever known. Launching a failed startup is almost a right of passage for us.
On the marketing side, finding a job after failure is drastically harder, and you'll be set back years in your career since there's a lot more ladder climbing involved in marketing departments. By contrast launching a startup is a pretty solid way to jump your career from mid-level to senior dev.
I’m in the same boat. I’ve had several money and marketing oriented people reach out and that sounds nice but the alkalis heel is the commitment. Your deadlines are not they’re deadlines etc. That’s the thing about these marketing and people oriented cofounders, they’re jumpy.
Another thing is that with most people on YC match-mate is your most often being used as a listening post to whatever they’re working on not vice versa.
I was in the same situation. My co-founder and I split responsibilities and I moved into a sales role. It was difficult at first, but like anything, learnable.
I’d say that “sales” or “marketing” are indeed valuable skills that developers may lack, but I think you would be doing yourself a disfavor if you’re only looking for those skills.
In the end, what I myself realized, is that the real gap is not just sales/marketing; it’s about someone that figures out product-market fit. It’s somewhat sales, it’s somewhat marketing, it’s somewhat strategic. But an average marketeer or sales representative will have a terribly difficult time figuring out PMF.
yes, there are many skills needed to get a startup off the ground (and a whole heapin' of luck), and lumping them vaguely like "sales/marketing" doesn't help. you need to be able to recognize (first) potential customers, find them with leverage that far exceeds the labor input, study how/why they become customers, foresee market and other risks, distill all that into strategy and features, sell these distillations to others, including cofounders, investors, and customers, orchestrate a reasonable development plan, forecast the future reasonably, and do this over and over again.
As always it depends on a lot of things, but anyone with a background marketing should be pretty versed in product-market fit. It is a fundamental concept to marketing in the same way double-entry bookkeeping is fundamental to accounting... I'm sure there are a bunch of people calling themselves marketers who are really just sales drones, but there are also a lot of developers who are just spaghetti coders and accountants who are really just glorified filers and data entry specialists.
> anyone with a background marketing should be pretty versed in product-market fit. It is a fundamental concept to marketing in the same way double-entry bookkeeping is fundamental to accounting.
It isn't though, marketers aren't experts in understanding if a product is worth building. Some become experts at that, but it isn't a standard part of their job. Instead find people who are experts in product design or just regular business, they will likely be better at this than marketers and could do the marketing bits as well.
It feels as if developers do the same mistake here as they accuse others of. Even a developer can learn marketing, so why not make a product designer learn marketing? Its just useful to have another person on the team who takes care about product market fit etc, looking for a marketer for that role just limits who you can find.
Maybe, I would just look for qualities of finding PMF over marketing qualities. Getting a startup’s product strategy in the right direction is something entirely different than “just” marketing; it means understanding how to change the product based on lack of demand, and understanding it is, in fact, a product problem rather than a marketing problem.
I’m sure great marketeers qualify for these traits, but if that’s the case, why not just select for these traits in the first place, rather than marketing?
But geek profiles and marketing profiles have often huge differences in life styles, ethics, rhythm, objectives, etc.
It was visible at university, it's still is in social life and work life.
Diversity enrich your life up to a point, after which cost/ratio plummet. I rarely see those profiles going along and having fun sharing time together. It's not impossible, but it's not common, so you won't get a lot of co-founders that will match, or that did, but will last.
It's not that geek are completely oblivious to their shortcoming.
Optimise for picking a marketer that believes in the vision and uses the product themselves instead of someone who has a proven record of making sales and you'll get along just fine.
There are some of us out there... I've learned to write code for basic apps (web scrapers in Python, Slack integration in PHP) but I spend most of my days as a product marketer. I love working with software engineers but won't ever be one myself. I know what I'm good at but I can appreciate those other skills.
A marketer is of no use if nobody needs your product. This developer was lucky that he built something that people wanted. He just failed to reach them. He could have just hired a marketer with right incentives. No need for a co-founder in marketing. You need to talk to customers, which is not optional.
Yeah, in my personal experience, the biggest problem in very early stage startups has always been figuring out what the right thing to build is, and actually building a version of it that people can use. Customer development and product development. If you build the wrong thing or you never actually get the thing built, any marketing effort is wasted effort.
Nail those things first, then hire someone to do your marketing.
most products are things you don't need. look at facebook, you don't need that shit, yet you use it, and you want it. i would say that 80% of SV startups make things you don't need. they just think you need it, and throw a bunch of money at it to satisfy some ego or lifelong dream. a lot of things in life are things you want but not need. so the money is in making things people want, not need.
This might the the case in B2C but wren in B2B a startup can make a product that paid for itself, say, improves a process or removes frictions or automated something or any other business needs that are tedious… that is a gold mine! Been looking but haven’t found my gold mine yet…
I agree with that, and it depends on what you're building, but just having a second person to offload/distribute the marketing/growth work could be significant.
There is no marketing or growth work until product-market fit. Therefore, it doesn’t make sense to find a marketer as a cofounder. There could of course be a cofounder who is more focused on customer or business development.
An extremely hard problem . As you can read from the post, he had to approach someone directly based on what they saw about them online. This requires you to be constantly looking around and reaching out to people yourself instead of a usual job post. In other words, you have to be selling (yourself and your company) to attract a potential co-founder in general.
The challenge is that most good marketing people are either working at or running their own agency. The ones that you usually find either have no experience or are very raw which could be a gamble. Secondly, they have to really align with your vision and idea (a co-founder problem in general, not just related to marketing). All this makes it tough especially if you are bootstrapped and don't have a lot of money to play with.
Can relate so much to this. Noone will come once you have finished coding your product, you need a marketing strategy that is proven to work before you start coding a single line.
Ugh this one hurts. I'm a developer whose launched something I'm quite proud of but flailing at the marketing end. I've even been on the front page of Hacker News. I can write code till the cows come home but I've agonized over content and marketing and the proper way to market and promote the app.
FYI if you're at all curious the app is called Keenforms, it's a form builder with a no code rules engine.
Why get a marketing co-founder instead of a business co-founder? I feel as if marketing have marketed their own profession to such a degree that people believe they have super powers.
I've spent two years building a new social network idea that I wanted to use myself, and now that I'm finally feeling good about the site's development, I realize that the _real_ challenge begins - marketing. It's kind of daunting and I'm frequently thinking how I'd like to find a cofounder with business/marketing experience.
Building first, marketing later is a gamble. Marketing is an activity that is conducted after product-market fit. Before that, there is customer development or business development.
I agree, however in my case the motivation was to build something I myself want to use. It's been a long road to build it but I have found a small handful of organic users (almost entirely from Show HN post I did last Dec), who've said they really like it and continue to show up. However the dev process has been so long that I've frequently become disillusioned. I guess what I'm saying is that just the tech lift to build something can be immense, and yes there is then the gamble that you won't be able to find product-market fit. But sometimes you will never know unless you try.
a long time problem I've had as a founder, is that I have never encountered a prospective co-founder who could do marketing, who is willing to just work for equity. everyone needs to pay their bills, and equity is not enough. the only exception is ultra rich people who are in it for fun, and are already rich because of a previous startup or a family with deep pockets. and those people you won't find unless you are already very well connected, which only happens if a) you can spend all your time networking instead of building a product b) you have a family that is ultra well connected / rich. in europe, I could never find someone who would work for just equity. so I moved to the US. then, I came to the conclusion that it's the same situation in the US, and location actually doesn't matter even though I was told it's all different in the US.
You speak as if you would have any experience in that field to end up saying you never got any experience but someone told you the grass is greener elsewhere. Have you tried to actively network? I went to a few startup meetups in Germany, Taiwan, and Japan and always found such people, but usually they were involved in their own projects rather than looking for parters.
what experience are you talking about? I have the actual experience of trying to bring in marketing/sales co-founders. also, read my comment. networking requires spending your time going to parties. if you are building a product, you have no time for networking.
At the end of the day, technical solo founders need to have some idea of who is going to buy/use what they build and how they're going to get paid. The type of person you need follows from this.
Some businesses actually need sales more than they need marketing. While there's often a lot of overlap for many tech businesses, it's worth noting that the techniques mentioned in this post (blogging, posting on social media platforms, appearing on podcasts, etc.) don't work for all businesses.
The blog post doesn't reveal anything about how the marketing achievements translated to sales. Hypothetically, for all we know, a small number of customers could make up the majority of this startup's revenue and how they were acquired might have been totally random if not based on sales and marketing channels unrelated or only loosely related to these marketing achievements.
If you are bootstrapped, it is extremely tough especially in the early days to hire good talent in general. Hence the co-founder thing. But even if you are past initial stages but bootstrapped, it is tough to compete with VC money to pay big and attract really good candidates. That is the unfortunate reality.
Yeah, we saw the real start of our growth when we hired a dedicated sales and marketing person. They didn’t take any equity and they weren’t even that expensive (ignoring commission). I’m not sure it would have made sense to bring them on as a co-founder.
I am a solo tech founder. I am fortunate I suppose that my product is something that fills an actual need. I get about 125-150 people to the site organically every day, with about 25 people logging in, and then 1-3 people putting down their credit card for a trial. I feel like I did the real hard part and that while a marketing person might be able to hep increase these numbers, that if I keep on refining and bettering the product, I will solve for it myself. Maybe I am delusional, but at least I am having fun doing it!
I'm not a fan of how Plausible seems to straight up copy everything that Fathom does. From features to announcements to landing pages. I could imagine copy-cats are hard to deal with as founders, but man, it seems like Plausible copies every little thing Fathom does. That isn't to detract from Plausible's success, which is undeniable and impressive in and of itself, but it has always irked me.
p.s. I'm a Fathom customer, so take this as you will. Obviously biased.
I had 4 failed attempts to monetize side projects, before finally stumbling upon something that doesn't need marketing at all. However, it does require competing at the absolute top level, all the time.
What's the catch? You find these things almost exclusively in zero sum games. But since we are talking money here, as a solo dev I pick this over marketing, every single time.
The best technical people may consider the marketing more important than the tech. I'm quite certain I can build a great system for any needs, but no confidence I can sell it enough to support a business.
In fact I'd probably be skeptical of a tech person who greatly emphasizes the challenge of the tech effort over the challenges of the sales effort.
The good news is, with the dev side covered.. I have an actual product to sell, and have actual paying clients. Without dev I would have nothing to sell (reskinned sugar water I guess?). But I am seeing the limits of what a crappy $35 theme website can sell. Onwards and upwards!
If as developer you find a sales/marketing cofounder that’s really putting in the work, you are golden.
I have partnered a few times with sales guys but they all quickly lost interest once it became clear that they would have to put in a lot of work without any immediate payback.
Great read. If only finding a co-founder wasn't so hard. And also -- this website is great! Looks like Indie Hackers before it transformed into Product Hunt 2.0.
I don't agree. Using the argument of 'i need to have a sales guy' is usually just saying your product isn't good enough. Before you downvote me. I have 2 successful companies and many failures. From those failures I I initially had the same statement. Give me a good marketing guy and I will conquer the world. Nonsense. You can do it yourself if the product is good
Yep, the emphasis is on "may". Of note that Marko is very technical himself.
After almost 10 years in tech marketing, here is what I see, especially on the early side of things:
1. A lot of marketers are afraid of tech (yes, even if they've worked in tech for years). Or, they won't take the time to learn it, even at the most fundamental level. It doesn't help that in their always stressful first months there is zero room for this. Everyone wants results, but how do you actually learn the thing you are marketing = at a more fundamental level than "positioning".
It doesn't help that marketing leaders are not focused on this, even when their teams tell them loud and clear that they need a better understanding of the product.
2) Technical cofounders expect marketers to learn--I don't know-- by osmosis ?
IMHO, there should be a product/landscape training geared at the marketer for every new marketer joining. In the early stages, that means the technical cofounder spending a lot of time with their marketing cofounder, and the marketing cofounder taking the time to learn and absorb.
3. Technical cofounders put marketing on the back burner. They want results, but are not willing to put in the time. And of course, they have zero time with all other priorities. But this is the #1 priority!! You should forever be a core marketing team member, and the face of your company. Establish that trust and open the door for your marketers to come to you for hands-on help. Write (content is key), speak, check in.
I highly recommend one of my favorite reads about tech marketing:
"Here are some things I’d suggest you look for in your first marketing hire.
--wants to know how the product works
--is endlessly curious, and isn’t afraid to ask a lot of questions
--never has to be told the same thing twice
--will stay up all night while the engineering team races to ship
--is always thinking about how to simultaneously increase throughput and ROI, while decreasing operating expense (definition of “lean”)
--loves customers obsessively, and doesn’t have a cynical bone in their body
--knows when to be a bulldog
-- is humble – for example, they would clean the bathrooms when they can’t afford a janitor
--understands the tradeoffs of time vs. money, and values both
someone who is a logical decision maker and isn’t afraid to argue for what’s right, or back down if it’s not worth the fight"
Marketing is one of the most overrated functions. You don’t need a founder whose sole function is to hack marketing. It’s a deadweight. There’s a reason why there are so many unemployed MBAs. You’re much better off finding someone who can do finance/accounting and market as an added bonus. Buying into someone who can only market is same as buying into a ponzi scheme.
I've come to the realization that, no matter how much you try to share what you've learned with people, ultimately, everybody has to learn things for themselves the hard way.
A great example of this is stock marketing investing. No matter how much data and information is provided upfront, it will never be enough to overcome the classic noob belief of "I'm going to get rich day trading!" If I think back, 18 year old me could not be told otherwise.
It's the same with technical people (engineers, designers, etc) who start businesses for the first time.
No matter how much data you give them that market and distribution are the most important things in any business (not your code or your design), they will ignore it and say things like "Marketing is deadweight!"
Exactly what specialized finance and accounting knowledge do you think will come in handy during the first 2 years before you even hit $10k MRR?
Is this finance/accounting wizard going to conduct a Double Irish to save on the 73 cents in taxes you owe?
You’re assuming that “technical” people, as you call them, cannot be great at marketing. If you’re only “good” at marketing that means you have no skills and in fact you self-select not to learn anything. That is a deadweight in any organization. It’s 2021. You should be able to wear multiple hats as a founder.
Edit: by the way, I much rather find a founder with investment banking background than marketing background. 100/100.
I definitely could use one but it's been impossible to find someone both serious about it and experienced at the same time. Especially if you're based in Europe.