"I mean a startup with a team that is working on something innovative together"

I am a bootstrapped SAAS founder in our 7th year. It took me a while to build a real team especially bootstrapped (2+ years). So I will share my experience and thoughts.

Don't aim so high right away. You will be disappointed. You want a team right away AND innovative stuff ? That's like having your cake and eat it too. Forget about that. Start low. Forget the team. Build something yourself first. You are a programmer with decade of experience. List down your ideas on paper. Then choose 1 and run with it. Try to find product market fit. If you already know your competitors, the idea is most likely validated and you just have to focus on execution.

"How would I get to a point where I could get initial funding to start something? "

Do you really need initial funding ? Is that really the goal or do you think you can start it bootstrapped and go from there ? I am obviously biased as a bootstrapped founder but this is also something to think about. Ok some concrete steps :

1. List down your top 10 ideas on paper. Do competitor search on those ideas [0]. If you cannot find competition, i would say forget about that idea for now. No need to change the world yet.

2. Every 24 hours, cross one idea out that you can out of the list. Repeat for next 7-10 days. Whatever you are left with, go with that idea. Yea that's it. What's the alternative ? You are going to analyze and paralyze ?

3. Build a prototype alone. Forget partners. Forget freelancers. Figure shit out. You are a programmer with decade of experience. Get it done. There are tons of tutorials out there for your favorite language or framework of choice.

4. Marketing. Marketing. Marketing. While building the prototype, setup a Landing Page (use CMS like WordPress if you have to). Use the fastest an d most tested way. Don't look at shiny tools that increase time to market even if they are technically cooler.

5. Get access to tools like moz [1] or ahrefs and learn how to do SEO, content Marketing etc. Yourself first. Forget about partners.

6. Once steps 1-5 are in motion, only then even think about getting help because unless you have done steps 1-5, no serious person worth their time would want to talk to you unless you can convince a buddy or you are famous already.

7. Use your own money initially if you can. Programmer with decade of experience. I assume you can spend a few hundred bucks ? Sorry if I am assuming too much but forget about funding.

8. More marketing. SEO, Content Creation, Backlinks [2], keyword research [3]. Yes they are required. Doesn't matter if you think it is scummy. Work on it. Create good content. It works.

9. At this stage, try to find experts/freelancers who can help you. Still hard to convince someone just with equity unless you are well known. Ideally, you want someone who is really good at Marketing. Yes Marketing.

10. All the best. If you put time and effort, you may see results. But you could totally fail. Don't give up too quickly. I would say 12-18 months before you call it quits. If you fail earlier, you wouldn't learn much. My 2 cents.

[0] https://ahrefs.com/blog/competitive-analysis/

[1] https://moz.com

[2] https://ahrefs.com/blog/link-building/

[3] https://ahrefs.com/blog/keyword-research/