YC Cofounder Matching Bot

This repo hosts a Selenium bot that can help you find, save and contact potential cofounders on YC Cofounder Matching.

• Automatically change your profile location and search for cofounders in different cities
• Filter potential cofounders depending on your shared interests
• Save founder profiles and contact them using your own template messages
• Use ChatGPT to filter profiles, depending on your cofounder criteria
• Receive reports on your email and see how many founder profiles were skipped, saved and contacted
• Run the bot with or without Docker

Caveats

This bot works best if you set up your Cofounder Matching profile in such a way that it already filters for the right candidates. For example, the bot doesn't check (by default) if a founder is technical or not. You can specify that requirement on your profile or use the ChatGPT integration to filter for tech cofounders.

Moreover, the current version of the bot doesn't check whether a founder has a specific idea, has the same timing as you or if they fall within a specific age range. If you'd like any of these features to be added, let me know by creating an Issue.

Requirements

Install Python and Docker before you test the bot.

Setup

Clone this repository and cd into it. Then, set up your virtual environment:

pip<version> install virtualenv
python<version> -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate

You should now be inside your virtual environment. You can install all the bot dependencies using:

pip<version> install -r requirements.txt

Environment Variables

You'll need to create a .env file and place it at the root of the directory. In it, you need to put the following variables:

• TARGET_TIME_UTC: the UTC timestamp when the bot is supposed to execute
• TARGET_TIME_WIGGLE_ROOM: the wiggle room (number of minutes) before and after the TARGET_TIME_UTC during which the bot can execute
• USE_PROXY: whether to use a proxy or not. Totally optional. Values are true or false
• PROXY_USERNAME, PROXY_PASSWORD, PROXY_ENDPOINT, PROXY_PORT: you get all these params once you create a proxy account with an compatible service (SmartProxy, BrightData, NetNut etc)
• YC_USERNAME and YC_PASSWORD: the username and password you use to log into YC Cofounder Matching
• YC_CITIES: a list of cities separated by semicolons. These are all the cities that the bot will loop through, from left to right, and search for cofounders. Make sure to write each city name exactly like you see it on your Cofounder Matching profile section. You can search for cities under My Profile > Basics > Location. Also, pro tip: you can omit this environment var and the bot will only search for founders in the current Location you set for your profile
• CITY_TO_RETURN_TO: this is the city your profile will be set to after the bot finishes searching for cofounders
• BOT_MAX_RUN_TIME: this is the max amount of time (in seconds) that the bot will search for. Set this to a value anywhere between 600 (10 minutes) and 3600 (1 hour)
• SEARCH_WHEN_LIMIT_REACHED: true or false. Whether the bot should continue to search for cofounders and save their profiles after you've hit your weekly quota to contact people
• CONTACT_COFOUNDERS: true or false. Determines whether the bot will send messages to cofounders that it deems as a good fit. If this is set to false, the bot will save promising profiles under Revisit Profiles > Saved Profiles so you can check them out later
• MAX_PROFILES_TO_CONTACT: this is the max number of promising cofounders that the bot will contact in a single run. You can set this to a more conservative value (less than 20) in case you want to double-check profiles before you reach out. NOTE that if the bot finds a promising profile and it cannot contact founders anymore, it will save the profile under Revisit Profiles > Saved Profiles
• SKIP_YC_ALUMNI: true or false. A flag that tells the bot whether it should skip founders who already went through YC
• IMPORTANT_SHARED_INTERESTS: groups of interests that a potential cofounder must share with you. Each group must be separated by semicolons. Each element in a group must be separated by commas. Example: Marketplace,Travel / Tourism;Gaming has two groups: Marketplace + Travel / Tourism is the first one and Gaming is the second
• ANALYZE_PROFILES_WITH_GPT: true or false. Whether the bot will use GPT to analyze founder profiles and determine if they are a fit or not
• OPENAI_API_KEY: your OpenAI API key, in case you want to use GPT for your cofounder search
• CHAT_GPT_ORGANIZATION and CHAT_GPT_PROJECT_ID: your GPT org and project IDs
• CHAT_GPT_QUESTIONS: questions that you want GPT to answer about a profile in order to determine if the bot should save or contact a founder. GPT must be be able to answer each question with a simple yes or no. An example of a good question is "Does this person have less than 3 years of coding/programming experience?". An example of a bad question is: "How many years of experience does this person have?". If GPT answers at least one question with Yes, it will save the founder's profile. If, instead, GPT answers all questions with No (and if you allow the bot to contact founders), it will contact the founder.
• EMAIL_FROM, EMAIL_FROM_PASSWORD, EMAIL_TO: sender and receiver data used by the bot to send reports to your email after it's done searching
• SENDGRID_API_KEY: the bot uses SendGrid to send you emails. Sign up for a free SendGrid API key here

For more details about environment variables, check the example file.

Founder Messages

Before you run the bot and start to contact founders, check this comment from example_founder_messages.py. The position of each message inside founder_messages is linked to the position of each shared interest group from IMPORTANT_SHARED_INTERESTS. Make sure to match messages and interest groups properly.

If you want the bot to message founders, create a file called founder_messages.py at the root of the project and place your messages in it, similar to how it's done in example_founder_messages.py. Otherwise, put the following code in founder_messages.py:

founder_messages = []

Chrome Versions

You might need to adjust the Chrome version used by the undetected_chromedriver, depending on whether you run the bot locally or you update the Docker image you use. You can change Chrome versions by changing the values for MACOS_CHROME_VERSION, WINDOWS_CHROME_VERSION or LINUX_CHROME_VERSION inside constants.py.

Founder Profile Data

The bot always checks the Our shared interests section to determine if a cofounder is a potential fit. If you set ANALYZE_PROFILES_WITH_GPT to true, the bot will also use information from Intro, Life Story, Free Time, Other, Impressive accomplishment, Equity expectations and Potential ideas to check for cofounder compatibility.

Run the Bot

The simplest way to run the bot is to execute the following:

python<version> get_cofounder.py

If you want to see the bot interact with the browser, comment the following line from get_cofounder.py:

chrome_options.add_argument('--headless=new')

In order to run the bot with Docker, execute the following:

docker build -t yc-cofounder-matching-bot .
docker run -it yc-cofounder-matching-bot

If you want to go a step forward and deploy to production, you can do this easily with Heroku. Install the Heroku CLI and execute the following:

# Step 1: Login to Heroku
heroku login

# Step 2: Login to Heroku Container Registry
heroku container:login

# Step 3: Navigate to your project directory (replace with your actual directory)
cd path/to/your/project

# Step 4: Build your Docker image with the name yc-cofounder-matching-bot
docker build -t registry.heroku.com/yc-cofounder-matching-bot/web .

# Step 5: Push the Docker image to Heroku
docker push registry.heroku.com/yc-cofounder-matching-bot/web

# Step 6: Release the image
heroku container:release web -a yc-cofounder-matching-bot