You built the MVP, now you need someone to sell it: finding a business or sales cofounder in Finland

You wrote the code. Something works. A few people have used it, maybe one has paid. And every evening you open the analytics instead of the sales pipeline, because there is no sales pipeline, because building it is the one thing you have never done. This is the single most common situation described by technical founders in the Finnish directory, and it is the mirror image of the non-technical founder who needs a builder. Both sides exist. They mostly fail to find each other. This post is about fixing that from your side of the table.

Who is actually available in Finland right now?

More than you would guess from your own network, which is the point: your network is engineers. On Trusted Cofounder there are 70 cofounders listed today who have said in their own words that they want to join something rather than start it, and operations, marketing and sales are three of the five most common skills across the whole directory. A good share of those people are the commercial half you are missing. Most of them are in Oulu and Helsinki, with a smaller group in Tampere and Espoo.

The ones who name business as their specialization are listed at /talent?role=cofounder&specialization=business, and the wider list of everyone open to joining a team is one filter away, with what each one is looking for written on the profile. The directory is free, public and permanent: nobody's profile expires, and you write to a person directly rather than waiting for an algorithm to introduce you. If this is your first time here, the guide to finding a cofounder in Finland covers every channel; this post stays on the one problem.

What does a business cofounder actually do?

The term is vague enough to be dangerous, so define it before you search for it. A business cofounder owns everything between the product and the money:

• Sales. Finding the first ten paying customers, then the next hundred. Discovery calls, demos, proposals, follow-ups, contracts. In B2B this is most of the job for the first two years.
• Go-to-market. Deciding which segment to sell to first, what the offer is, what it costs, and through which channel it reaches people. Pricing is included. Most technical founders price too low and never revisit it.
• Fundraising, if you raise. Investor conversations, the deck, the data room, the negotiation. Even a company that never takes venture money still needs someone who can talk to a bank and a Business Finland officer.
• Operations and administration. Contracts, invoicing, accounting relationship, the shareholders' agreement, hiring paperwork, the things that eat a week of a developer's time every quarter and get done badly.
• Partnerships and distribution. The channel deals, the integration partners, the reseller who sells into an industry you cannot reach alone.

What a business cofounder is not: the person who had the idea, the person who "does the pitch", the person who makes slides while you work. If someone offers to join you on those terms, you are being offered a part-time marketing intern with a cofounder's equity stake. The test is simple. Ask what they will personally do in the first ninety days that produces a signed customer or a signed cheque. A real commercial cofounder can answer without hesitating.

Here is what technical founders consistently underestimate about this work. Sales is a skill with a learning curve as long as programming's. Discovery is not "asking people if they like the product". A pricing page is a strategy document. Closing a Finnish mid-sized company takes months of patient follow-up and someone who enjoys the phone. Fundraising is a full-time job for the founder doing it, for three to six months, during which nothing else gets built by that person. None of this can be done well at 20% attention from the person who is also the only engineer.

Do you need one yet, or do you need to sell it yourself first?

Honest answer: probably both, in that order.

Before you bring in a cofounder, you should have done the first sales yourself. Not because you will be good at it, but because you cannot evaluate a salesperson for a product you have never tried to sell. You will not know which objections are real, what the buyer actually compares you to, or whether the price is defensible. The first ten customer conversations teach you more about your own product than the last ten features did. A commercial cofounder who joins after that has a founder who understands what they are asking for.

There is a second reason. A cofounder who joins a company with zero customers is joining an idea with code attached. A cofounder who joins a company with eight paying users and a waiting list is joining a business. The second attracts much stronger people, and the equity conversation is easier because there is something to point at.

The signs that it is time:

• You have customers and you cannot keep up with the follow-up, so leads go cold while you fix bugs.
• You have tried to raise or apply for public funding and the paperwork has stalled for a month.
• You have been "about to launch pricing" for a quarter.
• The product is ahead of the company. People want it, nobody is selling it.
• You have run out of your own network, and the next customers are strangers who need to be found and convinced.

The signs that it is not time yet: you have no users at all, you cannot describe who the buyer is, or you are hoping a business person will validate the idea for you. Nobody can sell a product that has not been shown to solve a problem. Validate first; the guide on validating an idea before committing to a cofounder covers the sequence.

Who are the commercial cofounders in Finland, and where are they?

Reading through the commercial profiles in the directory, three archetypes come up again and again, paraphrased here without names:

The experienced operator leaving a corporate role. Fifteen or twenty years in sales leadership, business development or general management at a larger Finnish or Nordic company. They have a network, they have closed real deals, and they are done climbing. What they want is a product worth building a company around and a technical partner who can actually build. They tend to present themselves as builders on the commercial side and say they are open to several industries. They tend to be in Helsinki and Oulu and to want a meaningful stake rather than a salary.

The sales lead who wants equity instead of quota. Five to ten years in B2B sales or account management, usually in software. They have hit numbers for other people and know exactly how a pipeline works. They are looking for a founder with a product they believe in, and they will ask hard questions about the product before they ask about the equity.

The marketer who builds. Growth, content, partnerships, sometimes with enough no-code or AI tooling to prototype. Often younger, often with a specific consumer or education angle, sometimes coming out of a university programme. Right for a consumer product with a clear channel, wrong for enterprise sales.

Where you find them in person, by city:

• Oulu. Business Kitchen, the entrepreneurship hub shared by the University of Oulu, Oamk and the city, runs workshops and programmes and is where most of the region's early founders pass through. The guide to Business Kitchen covers how to use it for a cofounder search. Oulu also has an unusually deep pool of commercially experienced people from the Nokia era and the companies that followed.
• Helsinki. Maria 01, the startup campus in the old hospital at Lapinlahdenkatu, holds around 1,500 members across six buildings and is the largest concentration of startup people in the country; the Maria 01 guide explains how to approach it without a resident's badge. Founders House opened in Kalasatama in 2026 as a selective community for resident teams, with Slush and Nordic VCs involved. The Helsinki business cofounder page lists what the Helsinki pool looks like today.
• Tampere. Platform6 in the Tulli district has been the city's startup house since 2020, home to dozens of early teams. The Platform6 guide covers the local scene.

And where you find them online without leaving your desk: the directory itself. The people above signed up because their own network did not have a technical founder with a product. Yours did not have them. That is the whole reason a public list exists.

How do you evaluate someone with no GitHub?

This is the part technical founders find hardest, because the evidence looks different from what you are used to. You cannot read a sales leader's commit history. You can read the equivalent, if you know what to ask for.

Ask for the pipeline, not the résumé. Anyone who has sold can describe a specific deal: who the buyer was, what the objection was, how long it took, what closed it. Ask for three. Vague answers about "driving revenue growth" mean they were near sales, not doing it.

Ask for customer conversations they have already had about your product. Give them a week and access to the product. A serious commercial cofounder will come back with notes from five conversations with real potential buyers, unprompted. Someone who comes back with a slide deck about positioning has told you what they will do with the next two years.

Check the network. Finland is small. If they say they can open doors in an industry, they can name the doors. Ask for two introductions, then see whether the introductions happen within a fortnight.

Look for past quota or past revenue, in numbers they will say out loud. Not to compare against a benchmark, but because someone who has carried a number knows their number.

Ask what they will do in the first ninety days. The answer should be a list of actions with your product in it, not a framework.

Do the work together before signing anything. Two to four weeks of a real project: a pricing experiment, a batch of outbound, a funding application. You will learn more from one shared deadline than from six coffee meetings. The cofounder red flags post covers what to watch for during that trial in both directions, because they are evaluating you too.

One more thing. A commercial cofounder will ask you uncomfortable questions: why is the price this, who exactly is the buyer, what happens when a competitor copies it, how long is your runway. Those questions are the job. If you find yourself defensive, notice that the alternative is nobody asking them.

What is a fair equity split when the product already exists?

The instinct is "I built it, so I keep 80%". That instinct has ended a great many founding teams before any competitor got the chance.

The reasoning goes: the code exists, it took me a year, the newcomer is starting from nothing. The problem is that the code is worth very little without customers, and the person who brings the customers is not a contractor you are paying with a small slice. They are taking the same risk you are, for years, and you are asking them to treat your business as their business. A person on 10% treats it as your business. On the day it gets hard, and it will, that difference is the whole company.

Two things make this workable without giving away half of a year's work:

Vesting. Every cofounder's shares, yours included, vest over time, typically four years with a one-year cliff. If the new cofounder leaves after eight months, the unvested shares come back. This is what protects your sweat equity, not a small percentage. A lopsided split with no vesting is far more dangerous than a fair split with it.

Recognising the head start without pricing the future. A common shape is for the founding engineer to hold a somewhat larger share to reflect the year already invested, with both sides vesting from the same date, and the split still close enough that both people are unmistakably owners. The Finnish equity split guide walks through the actual numbers, the arguments for and against equal splits, and how Finnish founders usually resolve it.

Then write it down. Since 2019 a Finnish Oy can be registered with zero share capital, so the company itself is cheap to form; what is not cheap is forming it without a shareholders' agreement. The osakassopimus guide explains what goes in it, and the Finnish startup community publishes a free template through seriesseed.fi that most lawyers here recognise. Vesting, the IP assignment from you to the company, and what happens when one founder leaves are the three clauses that matter most in your situation.

How do you write the ask?

Two pieces of text decide whether a commercial cofounder replies: the "looking for" section on your public profile and the first message you send. Both should be specific enough that the right person recognises themselves and the wrong person self-selects out. Here is a worked version of each, written for a technical founder with a B2B product and early customers. Adapt the facts; keep the structure.

The profile's "looking for" text:

I am a backend engineer in Oulu and I have built a scheduling tool for small physiotherapy clinics. Six clinics pay for it today, all found through my own contacts, and I have run out of contacts. I am looking for a cofounder to own sales and go-to-market: pick the next segment, set the pricing, build an outbound process and close the first fifty clinics across Finland, then decide with me whether we go Nordic. You have sold software to small businesses before and can show me the deals. You are in Finland, ideally Oulu or Helsinki, and you want a real ownership stake with vesting rather than a salary for the first year. I will keep building; I will also join every customer call you want me on. If that sounds like you, tell me about one deal you closed and what it took.

The first message:

Hi, I read your profile and the line about wanting to build the commercial side of something from scratch rather than run someone else's pipeline is exactly the gap I have. I have a paid scheduling product for physiotherapy clinics with six customers in Oulu and a product that is ahead of the company. I do not need a pitch deck; I need someone who can take a demo and a price list and turn them into a repeatable process. Would you take a thirty-minute call this week? I will show you the product and the numbers, and I would like to hear how you would approach the next twenty clinics, including what you think is wrong with my pricing. If we both like it, I would suggest two weeks of working on one real thing before either of us decides anything.

Notice what both texts do. They name the product, the customers, the city, the exact job, and the terms. They give the reader a concrete way to reply. They do not say "passionate", "rockstar" or "equity to be discussed". On the directory, people you write to see when you were last active and can tell whether your message has been seen, so send messages when you have time to answer in the same week, and write to people whose profile shows they were active recently.

Frequently asked questions

Should I look for a business cofounder or just hire a salesperson? If you can afford a salary and you know exactly what you are selling to whom, hire. If you cannot pay, do not yet know the segment or the price, or need someone who will stay through the years where nothing works, you need a cofounder. Most founders with an MVP and no revenue are in the second group.

Do they need to be in the same city as me? Not necessarily, but early sales in Finland is often done in person, and so is trust between cofounders. Oulu and Helsinki have the deepest pools; if you are elsewhere, be explicit on your profile about remote working and how often you would meet.

What if they want a salary from day one? Then they are asking to be an employee, which is a fair thing to want and not what you are offering. Say so plainly and move on. A commercial cofounder expects to share the risk for a while in exchange for the stake.

How much equity should a business cofounder joining after the MVP get? Enough that they behave like an owner, with vesting protecting both of you. The equity split guide has the detail; an agreement without vesting is the mistake, not a particular percentage.

Can I find someone through the directory if my profile says I am a founder? Yes. Set your role to founder, write the "looking for" text as above, and browse the cofounders who list business or marketing as their specialization. They can also find you, and many of them are browsing for exactly a technical founder with a product.

How long does it take? Weeks to months, mostly depending on how specific your ask is and how many people you actually write to. Founders who send one careful message a day for a month do far better than founders who post once and wait.