The dangers of startup BS đ«đŠ
Why founders mess up hiring for senior roles, a defining product lesson for those on the open source path, and the obligation of presenting a balanced view to fellow founders.
Hi there,
Welcome to the twenty-fifth edition of The Baton. A fortnightly newsletter that brings you three, hand-curated pieces of advice drawn from the thoughtful founder-to-founder exchanges and interviews taking place on Relay and the interwebz. So, stay tuned!Â
In this edition, youâll find instructive and inspiring pickings from the brains of Mixmaxâs Olof MathĂ©, Ghostâs Hannah Wolfe, and Geckoboardâs Paul Joyce.
#1: Confronting the unknown unknowns of bringing in senior hires â Mixmaxâ co-founder and CEO, Olof MathĂ©, frames the hesitations and denials that impact how founders recruit for leadership positions. (Source: 20VC)
I think the first thing you say as a founder is, âhey, I donât think we need this role right nowâŠâ And then once you realize that you actually do need that senior role, you tell yourself, âI can find the right person on my own. Iâm used to doing things on my own, I donât need help to find the role.â
And, of course, once you realize that you canât or that youâre hiring for the wrong level, or that you know, youâve obviously put people in stretch roles, then you kind of tell yourself, âwhoever I hire, theyâre going to grow into the role.â And in many cases they canât. Those are the three stages of denial.
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Once you have product-market fit, assuming you do, itâs probably too late already. And you should have hired them yesterday. I think as founders we have a couple of hesitations around itâŠ
Typically, what we as founders do is, we hesitate to hire senior roles because either we think itâs too expensive or we think itâs too early. And so when we say itâs too early what do we really mean as founders and I think itâs a couple of things.
One is, weâre actually insecure about whether we have product-market fit, weâre not sure whether the senior hire will even have headcount to build out a team, so weâre nervous about that. Or insecure about proving out, thing x or thing y, marketing or sales, or whatever the function might be and we think itâs too early to bring them on.
And perhaps you worry even if you have product-market fit, youâre not sure what the right go-to-market strategy is and so youâre worried about hiring the wrong person.
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For founder CEOs, thatâs perhaps the most difficult one because itâs really hard for a CEO to let go. So figure out what area you want to own, own it for perhaps tops six months, and then find someone else out to do it.
I think as founders particularly in areas where we have domain expertise, we are very susceptible to postponing this hire. Think about what happens when you bring a domain expert hire who has 10x the knowledge of the field than you do.
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One of the challenges of hiring senior talent and building out a function that you know very little of is, of course, you know nothing about the function. There are hosts of unknown unknowns. They are unknown unknowns to you but wonât be to someone with more experience in the function.
I see itâs really helpful, whatever function it might be, to have a very senior consultant come in and work with you for a good couple of months. The main advantage there is you get to know what itâs like to work with a senior leader in this function before you even commit fully to building out the function and in some cases the person, the consultant, might even join your company full-time. So itâs a great way to ease the transition.
If it doesnât work out, itâs really easy to let them go after a month, because you havenât communicated to the entire team that you have a brand new VP of marketing. The other thing is this consultant can help you find a senior leader.
You very likely donât even know how to interview someone in that function. So, you can pay them and they can help you find the right senior leader for that function.
#2: âCentralised wins on simplicity, Open source wins on flexibilityâ â Ghostâs co-founder and CTO, Hannah Wolfe, registers the biggest product lesson theyâve learned (the hard, gruelling way, of course). (Source: Ghost)
When we started out, we tried to make everything as simple and user-focused as possible. Our intent was to make the app as easy to use as any closed source platform, but with the added bonus of actually being open source with a socially positive business model.
Most open source software has terrible UI design, so we would have great UI design and it would be the best of both worlds!
This falls apart almost immediately. For example: if you build a centralised service - you can solve authentication, search and image optimisation pretty easily with OAuth, Algolia and imgix. It costs you minimal engineering time and a few dollars to set up so your users have a wonderful experience with absolutely no overhead.
Try to build the same thing as a decentralised product and every one of your users has to set up their own Twitter developer apps, Algolia API keys and imgix accounts + configurations. Each service has to be set up, connected and paid for. A significantly high level of technical expertise is required to even get it all slightly working. The average non-technical user doesnât have a single hope in hell of getting it working let alone having a good experience.
We spent several years trying to engineer our way out of this in increasingly complex ways, so that people could set up a publication on Ghost with the same level of ease as they do on Medium. In part, because thatâs what people were demanding. We never even got close. Itâs just not how modern web technology works.
Decentralised platforms fundamentally cannot compete on ease of setup. Nothing beats the UX of signing up for a centralised application.
But.
Centralised platforms fundamentally cannot compete on power and flexibility. In the long run, nothing beats owning your technology and controlling your destiny.
Yes, setting up a Squarespace site or a Medium blog is easy. You can get the basics up and running in a matter of minutes. However, you are also explicitly limited to what those platforms allow you to do. The second you want to step outside the confines of their design, or functionality, or do anything outside the little box which they let you play in: Youâre stuck.
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We spent a very long time trying to compete on convenience and simplicity. This was our biggest mistake and the hardest lesson to learn - because user feedback told us that this was what was most important. We deliberately limited flexibility in the product to try and make it more simple. But it ended up being still not simple enough for the average user, and not powerful or flexible enough for the professional user â the worst of both worlds.
So the biggest takeaway after 5 years is that we have been moving, and will continue to move up market, toward professional users who value power and flexibility over ease of signup. This is where we can win compared to the competition. This is where Ghost comes into its own.
#3: The dangers of startup BS â Geckoboardâs founder and CEO, Paul Joyce, implores founders to exchange sincere realities, the feats and foibles of their respective journeys. (Source: Relay)
As founders our job is to manifest something that exists only as an idea, into something real
This is no mean feat and can be incredibly challenging
Part of this is necessarily convincing yourself that it is possibleâŠ
That requires inspiration, research and just a sprinkle of delusional thinking :)
The problem comes when we do this without sensitivity and project it outward
In particular, when we layer in lies of omission (crowing about the good stuff but leaving out the stuff that makes us feel like crap)
This is damaging to ourselves and our business when itâs an internal dialogue
But has collateral damage on other founders who hear that one-sided story from their peers and are left feeling like theyâre the only ones suffering
Thatâs why communities like this, be they virtual or face-to-face, that allow founders to drop the filter and talk about some of the pain are really important
One simple thing that we can all do when asked about how weâre doing by another founder is to present a balanced view
Instead of saying: âWeâre doing great! Just launched a new feature and closed a Series A with investors x.â You could try: âWe just closed a large series A which Iâm delighted about. But Iâm struggling with how Iâm going to meet the expectations of our team and investors.â Or: âWe landed marquee client y but lost a couple of valuable customers that has caused me some concern.â
Iâve found this opens up conversations, is a great way of building mutual trust which can even lead you to a discussion that can help with those pressing concerns (there are always pressing concerns)
Recently on Relay:
Heuristics and Hunches: The Truths of Building a Must-Have SaaS, as Observed by Userlistâs co-founder, Jane Portman. Pursuing must-haves (or pain-killers) is advice thatâs doled out with untiring consistency, but what does it really take to do so, today? Read on to learn from Janeâs thoughtful accounting of their particular path.
Until next time,