Why and how you should find a co-founder for your startup.

I have been working on startup ideas for a long time (close to ten years), and I've only seen significant change by working together with a partner (co-founder), someone with equal determination and vision as mine.

The co-founder is there to fill in your weaknesses and having one gets you through the lows as Sep Bishop said to Entrepreneur TV, "if you are looking to start your own business, from my experience, I've always felt that having a partner is a good idea. You tend to find that entrepreneurs usually have big egos and seem to think that they are good at everything and know the answer to everything."

He said " Daniel and I were quick to recognize that we have weaknesses in certain areas, mine was fund raising, Daniel had a huge amount of experience in that area and he particularly didn't have any experience in advertising which I brought."

He continued, " In startups, there will be incredible highs and incredible lows, and having a partner in those times when particularly the lows, you will need somebody to pick you up. At some point a lot of entrepreneurs are willing to give up."
Seb Bishop later sold his ad company Espotting for $186 million.

So many startups were started by 2 or more founders. Yahoo, Google, Myspace, Youtube, Facebook and the list goes on.

Having a co-founder with same passion and some set of skills or chracter that you may lack increases your chances of building a successful startup.

Look for people that are very good at what they are doing, open-minded, ready to learn and who believe in what you are doing.

They don't have to be people you know personally or in the real life. Micheal Cerda founder of Jangl met his co founder Ben Dean on Craigslist.

I met my partner in the Startup I am working on now on Spidgit. I went through some of his posts, I knew he knew what he was doing and he was good at it. I approached him and we exchanged emails.

Been busy lately, but will soon reap the benefits.

I am just squeezing some time to write this post. I don't want the blog to seem quite even if it's for a day. Sometimes you just don't feel like typing and even if you have already typed posts, you just may feel too lazy to copy and paste especially after long hours of work with very little sleep.

I have a long list of upcoming posts with lots of tips for the Internet startup guys like me. I haven't been writing lately but I have been reading and doing a lot, so look out for my latest tips on startup ideas and some stories too.

I love blogging and I won't hold out any thing to myself, I just feel free and write everything here, and most of the things I write here are those that I have tested myself. I am very careful at writing what I have not tried out myself.

Anyways, this blog is not meant for my personal news or news about my Startup, still I feel I should share this good news with you guys. I am about to close on my first partnership deal for my startup. The only clue that I am going to give here is that the company I am in talks with is from Kenya. It's going to be a great partnership, let's all hope that it will go through.

No reviews so far, only tips.

I wanted to build this blog around reviewing Nigerian Internet startups. There are many of them, this means I have so much to write about.

After reviewing Nairaland.com, I made a review of some online payment sites for nigeria and since then I haven't written about any startup reviews on this blog. Rather I have been blogging tips on how to create a startup.

I have a lot of tips that I feel happy sharing them with everyone. There will be more tips coming. So fellow Nigerian cybreprenuers and everyone, make sure you bookmark this blog. The best is yet to come.

Today's Startups Type (conclusion)

The 3 startup types we talked about in the just finished series, all signify one thing. the shift to cloud computing and that many large corporations and startups are betting on that.

We see many of the large corporations buy a stake in or aquire these startups. (Newscorp acquired Myspace and Microsoft has a stake in Facebook).

Theses Startups especially the ones in the recent post have been very successful and most Valued in the tens or hundreds of millions and a few like Youtube and Facebook valued into the Billions.

If you are interested in starting a startup or working on your own startup, you should take a serious look at these startup concepts, not the services but the model. They are all about user generated content, sharing, remote hosting (taking your desktop with you) and simplifying everything for the end user.

If your startup idea falls within these criteria, then with some hardwork you will surely realize your dream and you can also in the process create a market for your startup product or service even if the market doesn't already exist.

Now I want you to go back from the beginning of the "Today's Startups" series of articles and read them again till you grab the concept or the big picture behind all those startups combined. And you will surely figure something out for yourself.
Good luck! and don't hesitate to drop your comment.

Today's Startups Type 3: You run the show (and sharing is caring).

Many Startups of today are about you, the user. They are all about the users on the driving seat, running their own show while sharing everything they do with the general public or their firends.

Most of the biggest sites today all rely on user generated content, the content may be text, video, audio, or pictures.

flickr is an online album for user uploaded photos.

Twiiter is a micro-blogging platform where users add and share status updates, twitter asks "What are you doing now?" what ever your answer, it is shared with other twitter user and your followers.

Users upload and share everything from comments, pictures, videos and more.
There are Community built and user generated online encyclopedia like Wikipedia.
Users share their bookmarks on sites like Del.icio.us, simpy, blinklist, technorati and more.