Some other points: - The very odd location descriptions seem to exclude Cambridge, MA (MIT, Harvard, etc) - Skills: I'm primarily a C Programmer/Admin but there's nothing C programming, Cloud, Ops, or SysAdmin related - Search Results: They don't display the useful information (skills, location, etc). Focusing on showing pictures makes it feel oddly like a dating site. A dating site is definitely not how I want to find a co-founder. - The UI is lacking - Why collect any location information, like zip code, if you can't search by it? - The UI doesn't scale - It would be tedious to use this site if it had thousands of users.
Also, did you check to see what other similar sites were available first? http://cofoundr.com/ was set up a few years ago by a Google engineer (Rami Bitar).
I don't think you've hit a MVP with this site, yet. I would have waited to post it.
Sorry about the trouble with signup. Looks like we've got a bug. We'll fix it soon.
The location descriptions are pretty general for now because there aren't a lot of people on the site yet. As more people join the site, we'll add regions. For now, Cambridge falls into the Eastern US region. But, if you get more people in your area to join the site, we'll add a region just for you guys. We'll probably have to switch to a better location system to do radius searches in the future. But, the region thing was a quick hack to get something up and running that was better than just using zip codes.
I just added a C programmer skill for you. Please add a feedback item for any other skills you want added. http://cofound.uservoice.com/forums/98435-general
We may remove photos from the site, or at least make them less prominent. You only really need them if you are going to meet in person and you need to know who to look for.
You can browse by ZIP code on the people page. http://cofound.org/people
I agree that our current location search sucks, and we're going to fix that in the next month or so.
We did a little bit of research into other similar sites. The one you mentioned, cofoundr.com, doesn't appear to have any sort of location filter. Does anyone use that site?
It is early but I believe they're trying to get user feedback so they can iterate. As it says on the site this was built at a startup weekend event. They can't improve the UI and features without having users providing feedback.
I agree they could have more fine grained control of location, although I believe that MA would be covered by the Eastern US region.
