Two heads are better than one. It’s an age-old saying that has particular poignance in the entrepreneurial realm, where investors are much more comfortable handing over wads of cash to a team instead of an individual.
A new betaworks-backed startup out of New York, CollabFinder, is banking on that very idea.
The service helps designers, developers, artists, and producers find each other to collaborate on projects, based on various groups. New York City used the service (while in beta) to power it’s NYCBigApps contest, the city’s largest technology competition, and Bloomberg said the quality of the apps produced this year was much better than previous years.
Why? Because CollabFinder made it easy for individuals with good ideas to find the necessary collaborators to make their project awesome instead of mediocre.
“If you give people interested in making apps a place to collaborate and make projects together, you’ll have much better projects and apps,” said CollabFinder founder Sahadeva Hammari. “We’ve seen teams make more and better projects than individuals.”
Here’s how it works:
Anyone can sign up through Facebook, which automatically shows all of your connections within the CollabFinder website. From there, you can check out various groups. A group is created by a company, organization or city. This group is essentially a community of people and projects devoted to a certain platform or API.
For example, Flickr is currently piloting with CollabFinder and sending developers interested in using the Flickr API to CollabFinder. This way, anyone who’s looking to build on top of Flickr data can meet with like-minded individuals to build something twice as nice.
Once you’ve found the group you’re interested in, you can then post a project. Projects are free to post, and can be any idea you’ve ever had for something you want to build. Other users can then browse through projects, perhaps stumbling on yours and thinking it to be the bees’ knees. You two can connect on CollabFinder and get cracking on the next big thing.
In terms of a business model, CollabFinder works a lot like Meetup.com. Group creators, such as Flickr, Harvest, and eBay to start, pay a base fee of $35 each month to foster their communities on CollabFinder. These group creators will often push traffic from their own API sites to their group on CollabFinder, according to Hammari.
But what about idea theft?
We in the startup world, after watching The Social Network one too many times, have a strange fear of idea theft. However, Hammari reminds me that most people with great ideas simply can’t build them into realities without telling someone. A designer alone does not an app make, and the same can be true for developers.
But as added protection, CollabFinder only lets creators on the website, including engineers, scientists, designers, writers, and artists.
If you’re interested in finding your professional soul mate, head on over to CollabFinder now and sign up.