A startup has to get many things right to be successful.
One of the most important ingredients in this recipe for success is hiring.
However, the kind of talent that your startup requires varies as you scale.
Because this means putting your own money into the business and being extremely smart and judicious about it.
Sharpening your idea
Each startup begins with a vague concept of what one wants to build.
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Involvement of any hired individuals hampers the achievement of this objective and is a waste of resources.
Finding product-market fit
A plan on a piece of paper has been made.
This is a period of pure toil.
Remember to lead from the front by being the most disciplined soldier yourself.
Increasing pace of customer acquisition
Achieving product-market fit is not a sudden event.
Having established this critical step, your primary focus shifts to improving the speed of customer acquisition.
This immediately exposes many functions which worked at a miniature scale but start to fracture now.
Such areas could be across product development, customer relations, streamlining internal processes, among others.
Spot the critical bottlenecks and hire to fix them.
The idea is to continue doing what you did earlier but better and in a more structured fashion.
Finally, identify points of differentiation that you like to clearly establish and start sowing the seeds for future.
This could begin with a hire for the most promising area.
This would be a long-term investment setting the platform for the next phase, hence hire accordingly.
Scaling indefinitely
Hopefully, you have started making money now.
Dont focus on making a profit for a year a break-even is all that you need.
Rather, invest entirely into building a team.
Build as many capabilities in-house as possible.
Hire individuals who are smart, passionate, and eager to learn no compromises.
This would mean that you have to pay higher than you have paid before.
If your budget doesnt allow you to do so, consider candidates with lesser experience in the industry.
However, the aforementioned three parameters are non-negotiable.
Find your own
Of course, these suggestions cant be applied blindly to any startup.
Getting this right is important, as a startup journey does throw many curve balls.
In a year and a half, he has bootstrapped Flexiple to $370,000 in revenues.
A big believer in remote working, he is building Remote Tools for the remote community.
