Why I asked Martijn to be my Co-Founder

It was somewhere at the beginning of May when I asked Martijn van der Weide to think about joining Mbassador as a co-founder. We both didn’t need a lot of time to think about it 🙂

We have a very good personal ‘click’, we share core values, we have the same vision about how to build a  startup, we share the ambition to build a SaaS product on our own. Plus, we already had great working experiences with Co-Founder.co (my previous concept) and InvitesYou. 

Martijn will work on Mbassador as a side project. And in the next months, we will discuss how to formalize the co-founder part. We’re confident that we will work something out that is fair for the both of us. In this phase, we want to focus on building the MVP first. So we actually have a product/startup to talk about. 

So, Why do I want a co-founder?

By the end of April, I had an epiphany. I found out that I was chasing the wrong strategy (The Funding Path). The ‘right’ energy was not there. My gut feeling said something was wrong. 

I deleted my ‘Pitch Deck’ and started a new document called “Startup Strategy”. A moment to reflect on the company I want to build. Forget about the product for a moment. Focus on my needs. What do I want to create, other than the product?

‘Strategy is choosing what you don’t want!’. A quote that I remembered from my C7 time. And a perfect way of expressing part of my strategy.

So I made a page in ‘the Startup Strategy’ with this quote and 3 things came to mind:

1) Build Mbassador on my own

2) Build a company that I need or want to sell from the start

3) Build the next Unicorn and conquer the world

Since that epiphany moment, a lot has happened. If I know I don’t want to be a solo-preneur, so why not change this and give it the priority it deserves. Especially when you already know someone that fit’s the co-founder role perfectly.