Where It Gets Hardest

startup

Written on and off as the mood took me. Not necessarily right, and not necessarily wrong.

Setting aside all the things I am bad at — socialising, moving investors, and so on — the strongest feeling I have at the moment, and one of the hardest parts of building a company for someone like me, is how to restrain my own scattering ideas and keep the product’s scope inside something reasonable. Concretely, it comes down to the following, and I would very much like to discuss them.

1. Choosing a direction. This is the first thing and the most important thing. Talk to different people and you get different feedback. Is it SaaS, CRO, R&D, or a platform? Is it technology-driven, PR-driven, or is traffic king? Different users want different things: painstaking deep analysis, a comprehensive integrated solution, vertically targeted technical support, a general-purpose platform service. So what should we build, how, and on what schedule?

My effort here so far has gone into one question: who is the core user? My own definition of a core user is one you can reach quickly, who gives you a base to iterate and expand from, and who fits the technical character of the team. The first part means the technology you are researching cannot sit too far from the market — which requires understanding precisely what this group needs, and in what form they need it. The second means the market is large enough, and that your early users are the critical node in a complex network, the one hair that moves the whole body, or the entry point into the system. The last means the first two are things the team is good at and actually wants to do — otherwise you may as well go and find a good job. Once those are settled, features follow from needs, plans follow from the logic of the market, and everything else can wait.

2. Building the team. Given a fixed objective and the core team you already have, how do you expand and arrange people for the highest efficiency? Do you find partners with strong fundamentals and grow them, or bring in experienced people to survey the ground for you? Possibly neither is the best framing of the question. My answer now is that all of it rests on the analysis in point 1. Under the market and business plan that point 1 fixes: what kind of person do we need right now, what do we need in reserve for the next year, and for three years, and for five? Which colleagues are decisive in that process — people who can hold a whole area on their own, or who can open the door to future talent, whether by developing it or by recruiting it? Hire fast for what is urgent, and for the long-term core positions build a regular screening process so that the right people surface.

My own mistake before was this: whenever I met someone impressive, I wanted to find a way to work with them. I now understand more clearly that a startup has to be built around point 1. If an impressive person does not match the objective, they are not only a financial burden — they can pull the whole direction off course. Being friends is perfectly good too. This, I suppose, is what is meant by a thousand soldiers are easy to find; one general is not.

Of course, however NP-hard the problem is, there are excellent co-founders and there are friends holding all of this up, so every day is painful and happy at once.

Probably unfinished. I may write more.