Where can I get a team for a startup?

After the publication of the previous post about new investment conditions for Glavstarta, we continue to receive letters with ideas of new projects. But many letters, along with a description of the idea, contain questions about the team: “I have an idea, but no team — what to do?”, “I have such people — is this the right team or not?”.

I want to draw attention to a few basic principles for selecting a team for a startup.

The most basic principles - only three. Plus, one practical conclusion that you may find useful.

1. Find the right co-founders
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The most successful startups are made by teams of 2-3 people. Founders of a startup are people with core competencies necessary for the project to work. They should be passionate about the idea itself and should be able, as a result, to endure all the hardships and hardships of start-up labor. I repeat - they should be passionate about the idea, they should be ready to work for the sake of the idea. They should be able to receive in the startup only the money they need to minimally maintain their pants, and be prepared for the fact that project staff can and should earn more than they do.

The competences of these people should not be repeated, but should complement each other, covering all key areas: development, sales and marketing. Warning: development is not the only key area. Without an understanding of how its audience will be attracted and how sales will be carried out, you cannot go far on one working website or mobile application.

Attracting co-founders can and should be done even before you started raising investor money. The only way to work is to tell your friends, semi-acquaintances and strangers as often as possible about what great thing you are going to do. If in the process of this you don’t succeed in captivating the right people with your idea, then a natural question may arise - is it really a cool thing that you have conceived? If you couldn’t entice even a few people personally, would millions of other people use this wonderful thing?

The task of finding co-founders is the first stage, which you, as the author of the project, must go through on your own. This is the first test for the viability of your idea and the first test for your viability as a team leader.

2. Do not invent posts for friends

There are times when friends or buddies become founders of startups. The main problem with this is the painful invention of what tasks you can assign to one or another good person in general. "Able to impose - it means it will be the main interface." "Once placed advertising in Direct - it means it will be the main marketing." "Keeping a blog - it means it will be mainly on SMM." “The only one of us who is able to express our thoughts coherently means it will be the main sales person.” "Nothing really knows how - it means it will be the CEO."

But the “good man”, unfortunately, is not a profession. In the overwhelming majority of cases, such an approach leads to only one result - after a while it becomes absolutely clear that a person “does not pull”. As a result, it is necessary either to some of the founders to take on other people's tasks, or to hire another person with duplicate functionality. And God forbid, by this moment the project is already running and is beginning to gain momentum - at this moment it becomes quite a difficult task to get rid of the superfluous in essence of a person.

Come very carefully to the choice of co-founders. Do not make a decision based on whether you have any friendly or, God forbid, personal relationships. It is better to establish and strengthen friendship with a person with whom you can do effective business than to destroy a business, and at the same time a relationship.

3. Find the right performers

Do not build illusions - if you yourself, as the founders and ideologists of the project, do not imagine at a general level how this or that problem can be solved, then practically no employee you take, who received the task from the series “go there - I don’t know where”, cannot solve it . Most often, such illusions are suffered by developers who know how to program a service, but who believe that attracting an audience and organizing sales is a purely technical task that almost any non-programmer can handle.

Cheapness is not the only criterion for choosing an employee. If you are not capable and not ready to take on the hard work of educating the right employee from scratch, then you should not expect that a person without work experience will be able to achieve the results set for him in a short time and with the right quality.

Deliver clear and well-developed tasks to outsourcing. If you have a clear understanding and TZ for developing a service, it is often much more efficient to order these works on the side, rather than hemorrhoids with recruiting and managing an entire development team. Yes, of course, nobody has canceled the task of choosing a reliable contractor - but this task is of the same level of complexity as recruiting reliable employees. But in the latter case, the complexity of the task is multiplied by the number of required employees.

All initial development of the project should be done by the founding team. The recruitment of contractors usually begins after the founders received the first investment, allowing to calculate the project budget, which should include real expenses for the internal team of performers and outsourcing.

4. Practical conclusion

The first practical conclusion is to start any project with the search for co-founders, and this is entirely your task as the author of the idea and the leader of the project.

The second practical conclusion is rather a proposal, not a statement of fact: sometimes we get questions of this type: “Can you confirm that my idea interested you? If I refer to you, it will be easier for me to convince potential co-founders of the advisability of my idea. ”

I answer: yes, we are ready to confirm that we were interested in a particular idea. If this is claimed, then we can even publish lists of such ideas and coordinates of the authors - naturally with their permission - so that the authors and potential partners find it easier to find each other. We still accept all ideas to the address idea@glavstart.ru . If you do not have enough partners with certain competencies and you are ready to share this information with the public, then indicate this in your letters.

Moreover, we are ready to accept applications from people who would like to participate in the birth of a new project, but who have not yet born a worthy idea. We can give your coordinates to the authors of projects that are looking for partners. If you want to become a partner in one of the new projects, then send us a letter to star@glavstart.ru describing your abilities and your work experience, and we will try to bring you together with the right people.