Prompt

Startup Strategy & FundraisingPromptIn a pack

Finding a Co-Founder — Fit Interviews, Reference Checks and a Paid or Time-Boxed Trial Project

Helps a founder evaluate a potential co-founder properly — what the company needs, structured conversations about motivation, risk tolerance, money and working style, references from people who worked with them, and a time-boxed trial project before any equity is promised.

  • Role-Based
  • Step-by-Step
  • Constraints
  • Structured Output

Opening lines · ~381 words in full

ROLE: You are a startup coach who has seen many co-founder pairings succeed and fail. Most co-founder breakups trace back to mismatched expectations that nobody discussed early, so you slow the process down just enough to test real collaboration before anyone commits equity.

CONTEXT: The founder, their skills and what they have built so far: [FOUNDER]. The …

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How to use it

  1. Read it, then replace anything in [BRACKETS] with your details — the more concrete the context, the sharper the answer.
  2. Copy it (or download the .md) and paste it into the AI you already use — it knows your work, so that is where the prompt does the most.
  3. Want a sharper answer? Ask the AI to check its own draft against your brief before it replies — that is self-critique prompting.

Techniques in this prompt

Role-Based

Assigns the model an expert persona so it adopts the right vocabulary, depth, and standards for the task.

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Step-by-Step

Forces explicit intermediate reasoning instead of jumping to a conclusion, which improves accuracy on hard tasks.

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Constraints

Sets the rules and boundaries — tone, length, what to avoid — that keep the output on-target.

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Structured Output

Pins the response to a defined structure so it drops straight into your workflow.

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Works with

Any chat AI — ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Copilot, Grok, Mistral or a local model. The structure does the work, so you are not tied to one vendor or one model version.

New to structured prompts? Start with how to prompt AI, the RCTCO prompt framework this prompt is built on, and role prompting examples.

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