Cofounder - Gabriel Denoni

What I'm looking for in a cofounder:

Equal equity split

I believe in the power of incentives and since we both need to be equally committed and motivated to the company, our incentives must be aligned.

Willing to commit and go all-in

I'm at a phase in my life where my biggest priority is building a great company. So I'm willing to postpone almost all other life priorities. I need someone who is in the same moment in life.

Be curious and adaptable

I think this is a characteristic of all great founders and the only protection against a changing world.

Learn fast

I believe in the idea that Jensen Huang has about knowing that likely there are other smart people trying to do the same thing as we are right now. So moving fast is a necessity, and to move fast to the right direction you must also learn fast.

Be relentlessly resourceful

Not take no for an answer. Not to ask for permission. Not mindlessly obey. Not be passive.

Be cool :)

We all humans and want to have fun, so I want to do it on the side of people I admire and have fun with. Remember that God is watching us, so the least we can do is to be entertaining.

Have strong beliefs weakly held

Be able to hold contrary ideas at the same time in your head. To have strong beliefs and act accordingly. But also to change them fast when circumstances change or when you notice you were wrong.

Complementary skillsets/work (or the will to learn and do so)

I'm mainly an engineer/product person. I've had little experience selling and doing marketing. A sales/marketing person is a great fit with me. Not necessarily with experience in it, but you must be willing to specialize and become world class. I'm willing to specialize in it if we judge that it's a better fit.

Simplicity and substance over sophistication and credentialism

I don't believe generational companies are built with certificates on the wall, likes on X, articles on TechCrunch, VC checks on the bank, big offices and shiny coffee machines. But instead by making something people want.

Be mentally strong, willing to suffer and fail

In a world with so much comfort and ease it's harder than ever to be mentally strong.

Be radically open-minded and radically transparent

I believe that a great company and a great relationship must have radical transparency, that means being able to say what you think and to hardly disagree. And it also requires being radically open-minded, which means being mentally flexible and low-ego to change your opinions fast.

Have integrity and be reliable

A partnership is built on trust. Not having integrity is a fatal flaw that turns all qualities into negatives. The last thing I want is to have a partner that is smart, resourceful and unreliable.

Why I'm looking for a cofounder:

Why make things harder than they need to be?

Founding a successful startup is already a really hard task. So one day I questioned myself: Why make things harder than they need to be?

To have someone to bounce ideas off and call out the bullshit

Like in a rally race, when you are focused on building at max speed, it's easy to end up going to the wrong direction and only noticing it too late. Having someone with a different point of view really helps in spotting mistakes and adjust the route early.

To go deep and focus

There is an absurd amount of things to be taken care of in an early-stage startup. Being a solo founder makes it very hard to focus and go deep in an important area(e.g. engineering/product) while also needing to simultaneously go deep in other equally important areas(e.g. marketing/distribution).

If you want to go far, go together

One of the main reasons startups fail is founder/s giving up. When everything is going south and you are alone, it's much more tempting to give up.

It's less lonely and more fun

The freedom to do things as you want and having no need to give explanations to anyone else is great. But at the end of the day we are social beings and having someone to share, complain and celebrate with is even better.

Why you should (or shouldn't)

cofound something with me

I learn fast

I'm relentlessly resourceful

I'm technical and can ship fast

I can ship at scale (built and shipped to +50M users in critical banking features)

I have a good design and product sense

I can build in multiple layers of the stack

I'm adaptable and curious

I'm simple, loyal and easygoing

I have strong knowledge about startups (this can also be a negative)

I'm low ego and rational (as much as my palaeolithic brain allows to)

I hate to be normal

I like dogs

I (still) don't have experience scaling a product from 0 to 1

I (still) don't have much experience selling

I'm (still) bad at marketing and distribution

I'm (still) bad at storytelling

Sometimes I want to learn everything I can about a subject, instead of having a bias towards action

Sometimes I focus on small details and forget the big picture

Sometimes I self-sabotage for important things by feeling impostor syndrome (I've improved a lot in this area)

I am (was) too risk averse. And in the last few years I didn't had the courage to go all-in on my own things (I'll finally quit my job by the end of 2025, move out and go all-in)

My engineering philosophy

Move fast and break things.

Choose a tech stack that aligns well with AI coding.

Focus on the biggest bottleneck.

You can just do things.

Most of the time there are no solutions, just tradeoffs.

Don't build for the imaginary future, but for the concrete present and immediate future.

The team we build is the company you build.

My design philosophy

Design is clear thinking visualized.

Technology should either be invisible, or beautiful.

It's easier to see ugliness than to imagine beauty.

Design first with one customer in mind, make it the best experience possible for him.

Customers as design partners.

Progressive disclosure of complexity (start simple and the user opts in for complexity).

Make it useful, then usable, then beautiful.

My product philosophy

Clarity of thought → strong opinions → guiding principles → fast decision making.

Make every detail perfect and reduce the number of details.

Retention is the single most important metric about a product.

Good artists copy, great artists steal.

Short feedback loops.

If we find product-market-fit almost nothing else matters, and if we don't nothing else matters.

Don't just be better, but different.

Nobody buys a product for 5 reasons, at the core people buy a product for 1 reason.

Start with the customer experience and work backwards.

Dog-food.

Marketing is sales at scale; Design is empathy at scale; Engineering is solving problems at scale.

Do things that don't scale.

It's better to have a few users who love us than a lot of users who just like us.

Don't just be data driven but also talk to users directly.

Asking the right questions is more important than having good answers.

Our biggest competitor is the back button.

Customers have functional, social, and emotional forces at play in decision-making.

Every great product has a product hook (the one action that retains users).

Remove friction at all costs.

Projects

SnapRead

SnapRead was an app I created at the end of 2024 / start of 2025 that allowed people to add their information sources (blogs, websites, newsletters, ...) and AI would periodically read, curate and aggregate the content published in these sources into a TikTok-like vertical feed with bite-sized insights, creating a single feed with all the user sources.

It was the first big app I built outside my job in a while and I learned a lot building it. It was also the first time I've built a backend handling complex AI integrations. Overall it was worth building it for the amount of things I've learned, but I've made lots of mistakes along the way.

The main mistakes were: taking too long to launch; not talking to users; half-assed marketing; lack of clear product goals (trying to appeal to a broad audience from the start).

GoalLock

GoalLock is an app I created at the start of 2025 that combines a screen time manager with TODOs. It blocks user selected apps until the user finishes his task goals for the day.

It has a simple and unique layout with a drag bar separating the tasks for today and future dates.

I built it because I wanted it for myself and couldn't find any other apps with this specific feature. It's a fully local (+ iCloud) app, and I was able to build it much faster than the previous app.

It currently has a bit more than 100 users (although I'm not working actively on it), and it was the first time I created short-form videos for marketing , they generated a few thousands views.

For this app I fixed a few of the mistakes I did in the previous one. But also, I've made important mistakes, especially: losing interest in the project early; not trying different marketing formats; not monetizing since the beginning.

HairHero

HairHero is an app I created mid-2025. It uses AI to analyze the user's hair and identify signs of hair loss, track progress, establish trends, and to organize and remind the user about his treatment.

I learned a lot about complex AI workflows, marketing, ASO and product management. This time I talked to users and had a few people trying the app and giving feedback before launching, learned about marketing with bulk creation of short-form content in multiple accounts.

I also discovered and used the Design Sprint for making decisions about the product and moving much faster. I'll definitely use it in future projects as well because it proved very useful and applicable to early-stage startups.

This project is active (as of Sep. 2025) and my main with it is learning about short-form video marketing in practice, so I'm managing multiple TikTok/IG/YT accounts for posting content in bulk across them in multiple devices, the so called "content farm".