My path to finding a partner - I will not promote

I have been working solo on my startup for 9months. Lots of learning, building, and burning myself out. Two months ago, I shifted a chuck of my time to finding a partner. Best investment I made so far, here is my quick experience, hopefully to motivate those feeling similar. I was looking for people with experience in marketing, product, or clinical work (building in mental health). I probably reached out to 200 people and had 20 or so high quality meetings. I ended up finding a clinical partner though my person network. Here are the channels I searched: - AI: was amazing for finding the right profiles, terrible at outreach. I wrote my own personal thoughtful message. Don't send ai slop! I had about a 30% response rate - Linkedin: waste of time for search, decent option for outreach if email failed. - Reddit: Lots of Larpers, poor engagement. Great for feeling product :) - YC matching: high quality people, low response rate. A lot of inactive profiles I think. I had 6 interesting conversations, but nothing serious. My 2 cents - if you want a partner do a bunch of thoughtful outreach. Write it yourself and be genuine (read their blog). Have as many meetings as possible to craft your pitch and get feedback. People want to help mostly if you aren't trying to sell them. I was shocked by how generous people were with their time. The person I found was amazing, but it was a lot of work and rejection to find them. Working solo was burning me out much quicker and my ideas were degrading. I now have new energy with them involved, highly recommend for those where this resonates.