Lena Kovács — from solo founder to funded team of two

The problem

Lena had signed retailers, a working prototype held together with spreadsheets, and no one to build the real platform. Every technical cofounder conversation died in the same place: three coffees in, someone finally said the word "equity" and the numbers were a surprise to somebody.

What she did on Cofounder for Startup

She turned on cofounder search and put the terms on the card: must-have skills (logistics systems, mobile), full-time commitment, and the equity range upfront — 25–35% for a technical cofounder, vesting standard.

Matching on stated terms filtered out everyone who would have flinched at coffee number three. Her now-CTO matched on day two; they met on day nine.

The outcome

The equity conversation that kills most cofounder courtships took ten minutes, because both had accepted the range before they ever spoke. They incorporated a month later and closed a $2M seed eight months after that — through the same deck, with filters flipped to investors.